Ok, so the first day of the TT has passed, and I guess it is time to sum it all up… Well, my impressions of the first day is that I feel that both VS11 and Windows 8 has matured a lot between the releases. It feels a lot more solid, and I am actually going to switch my private laptop, and maybe even my work one over to Windows 8 as soon as I get back.
It is hard to pinpoint what exactly make me say this, but it just feels a lot more solid. It seems to have a lot less “quirks” and the errors you get while coding against it seems a WHOLE lot better. Having that said, we haven’t actually coded a whole lot today. It has mostly been walkthroughs of features and design and so on. Basically covering the same thing that was covered during BUILD last year…
So unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot to sum up. Nothing really new at all…
One thing that annoys me as a “real” developer, and by that I mean that I focus on C# and “real” coding and not scripts and HTML, is that the labs that are provided for the platform are HTML+JS only. I know that Microsoft is focusing a lot on those developers to try to win over some web developers over as well some non Microsoft devs. Unfortunately, haven’t focused on Microsoft for the last 10 years, it feels a bit crappy being left out now that the new platform is rolling out. Most talks are either about HTML+JS or XAML+C++, which kind of makes sense at is the new stuff. XAML+C# is just the same old as we have had before, but it still feels a bit lite being left out in the cold after having supported there .NET platform for so long…
Having that said, the little coding I did today actually made me change my mind a bit about the HTML+JS side of things. The tooling is actually quite good, and the debugging and IntelliSense is working nicely. So it isn’t quite as bad as I had thought, but I wouldn’t consider switching just yet…
I have one little take away from today, or actually 2, but I am not sure I am allowed to talk about the second one at the moment… So here it is… Imagine that you build a popular application that manages to reach 0,5% of all Windows 8 machines in the world. That seems almost doable right? 0,5% isn’t that much…is it…? Then imagine that you charge say $4,99 for your app. Once again, not entirely impossible. Apps are priced between $1,49 and $999,99. Ok…so what happens in that case Chris? Well, if we say that Windows 8 becomes as popular as Windows 7 in a couple of years, that would mean that you $4,99 app has just made you 10 million dollars…after Microsoft has taken their share of the money…That is 10 MILLION dollars… Ok, might not happen to most of us, but it is still possible.
The numbers? Well, Windows 7 has over 450 million sold licenses to day. And yes, that might include a whole bunch of licenses that aren’t actually in use, but on the other hand, it doesn’t either include all of the hacked installs out there… So 0,5% of 450 million is 2,25 million. 2,25 million times $4,99 minus Microsoft’s share is approximately $10 million. That is pretty cool!
One last thing from today is that there has been a sneaky, little change that you notice while setting up your Win8 machine. You are required to enter a Microsoft ID…not a Live ID, but a Microsoft ID. It is still the same thing, but I really hope that they are about to introduce some new authentication stuff soon. Live ID has very limited support and feels very much like an amateur thing that secures Hotmail, which I know that it used to be. But today it is much more, and we really need something better… So let’s hope the move to Microsoft ID brings some good news with it… Having heard some whispers, I would say that we will probably be seeing some things in the authentication/authorization area within Microsoft’s on-line platform in the future…
Hopefully I will have more coding stuff to talk about after tomorrow as we are doing a full day of labs.