This is imho the best news ever from microsoft. Now I can target serverside, frontend, windows8 devices and windowsphone all with one language (javascript for me). Not bad at all<p>update: I have to add other news just announced. With winJS now we can target also xboxone, ios and android device
And also the full framework is opensource under apache license<p>update2: winJS on github <a href="https://github.com/winjs/winjs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/winjs/winjs</a>
The amazing thing is that you can potentially write all your code in C# and have backend/frontend logic for the web (ASP.NET), Windows, Windows Phone, and even iOS/Android (via Xamarin). Wow.
I'm still trying to figure out how/why this makes sense as a goal. Building an application that runs across multiple platforms in congruent spaces makes sense: iOS and Android and Windows Phone. When you move to running the same application across Laptop vs. Phone style platforms, even on modern hardware, you're looking at capabilities and resources that are radically different. I can see wanting to share certain common code, but a library system ala npm, bundler, cpan, etc., would handle that better than sharing a common code base/project. What am I missing?
I think the most significant part of this announcement is how they are dogfooding, Office for 'metro' and for the windows phone are using this Universal targeting.
Interesting move in the right direction. I wonder if they'll take it further and let you write iOS and Android apps using Xamarin / Mono?<p>This would actually provide an easy path for developers to get into the Windows ecosystem while ignoring the whole market share issue. Combine first class integration with an awesome IDE (Visual Studio), and frankly way better tooling than Eclipse this would be a pretty compelling reason for me to use Xamarin, and by extension have a Windows run target for my app.
Looking at twitter it seems like XAML is getting a ton of love from MS. Go back 2 years and many were predicting that HTML was going to win the war on Windows; what gives/what's changed?<p>Disclosure: written more XAML than I'd care too.
One thing I don't see mentioned, do universal apps support C++11? I can understand why it's not as easy to support native code across platforms (i.e. need to do some kind of fat binary thing), but think it's a little sad to see all the work done to support modern C++ app development kind of abandoned. Really annoying if you have to choose between an app being universal or written in modern C++.
I am wondering whether they can make Windows Runtime's GUI avaliable for existing desktop appliacations. There are many professional applications needs a brand new API for user interface.
Haven't looked at the APIs, but are the APIs going to scale between phone, tablet and 30" 4K monitors? It's relatively easy to make the same app to be adaptable between phone and tablet, or even laptop, but to make it look good on 30" 4K monitor is a completely different UX, if full screen. Or in high resolutions the apps run in windowed mode?
This seems similar to Google's tablet/phone strategy taken to it's natural extreme. This makes me wonder if google will soon do something similar with the (currently separate) Chrome/Android ecosystem.
They really need to go both ways with their cross platform offerings.<p>I can use their technology to develop apps for other platforms, but I cannot use their technology to run those apps. That requires having the other platform.<p>It would be nice if I could not only develop cross platform apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, but I could also run them on their Windows Phone platform. I would buy a windows phone if it could do that.
Exciting! This is getting progressively closer to an ideal I call PAO (Personal Application Omnipresence [1]), wherein I use a single set of applications on all my devices. I am very happy to see progress in this direction, but there is still much more to be done in the future.<p>[1] <a href="http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao" rel="nofollow">http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao</a>
I see this as equivalent to writing one application that targets both iPhone and iPad and even Android with one app targeting tablets and phones. The only really new thing is support for a single application but the design and UI work still needs to be addressed for each screen size.
Some people here have mentioned this already but I am quite surprised with all the happiness and it's nice but... I have been writing apps on my Mac targetting asp.net, ios, android, wp8 and win8 with a lot of reuse and perfect frontends for two years. I love f#/c# and it works like a charm. Business wise it is nice that you have to pay only once but outside that what in god's name is so nice or special about this? I was hoping this would include a build system on Azure and a unified system using Xamarin all from VS. This is nothing at all. Wow I can target those 3 wp8 users from my win8 codebase app. Pfff. So it's just fanboys or almost nothing changes or I am missing some significant thing even though I am quite deep in this ecosystems for years now?
I'm shocked this didn't happen sooner. If you ever wanted to point to a problem with MS vision you can ask yourself why this didn't happen in 2005.