HTML5 has been in the news a lot this summer!
When Windows 8 was announced by Microsoft in May 2011, there was a very strong reaction from the developer community. The reason was that the announcement talked about using HTML5 and JavaScript to create applications for Windows 8. Many developers saw their world crumble. And predictions of doom were everywhere. They said Microsoft was going to abandon .NET and no legacy Win32 applications would be able to run on Windows 8, everything would have to be re-learned and re-written. What was missed was that while HTML5 and JavaScript can be used to develop new applications for Windows 8 - they are not necessarily a requirement!
I was a bit skeptical about the overwhelming visions of doom! I found it very unlikely that Microsoft would throw away millions of man-years of work invested in the .NET platform and support for Win32 applications. It simply didn't sound like a good business move. While Microsoft has certainly developed technology in the past that didn't last long and was soon overtaken by something else they invented, a lot of their stuff has stuck around for a long time. In the Clarion world we have come to love and hate DDE, which dates all the way back to Windows 2 which was released in 1987! It is still used in parts of the Windows Shell - I believe also in Windows 7, not sure about Windows 8. ODBC is another old technology that Microsoft used and while they were not the developers of it, without Windows supporting it, there wouldn't have been much ODBC going around for us:)
As Windows 8 progresses, it is getting clear that HTML5 and JavaScript are the new kids on the block - if you can call JavaScript new as it was developed by Netscape in 1995, then called LiveScript. You will still be able to create applications using your trusty development tools and they will still run on Windows 8. But if you want to get into the new Metro look and all the new fancy stuff in Windows 8, you need to take a good look at the development tools that Microsoft is already putting out.
Two days ago I blogged about Windows 8. There I included a link to the Windows 8 download page where you can download the latest Windows Developer Preview, which includes Visual Studio 11 Express. Visual Studio 11 is designed to create Windows 8 applications. Couple of days ago, Microsoft put up a page with First look at Visual Studio 11 Express. This page includes links to various other places, but for clarity I'm going to duplicate them here:
Tour of the IDE for JavaScript developers
Tour of the IDE for C#/C++/Visual Basic developers
Using the JavaScript project and item templates
What's New in Visual Studio 11
Getting started with Windows Metro style app development
One of the nice things about VS11 is that projects and solutions are backward compatible with VS2010. What I find interesting is that VS11 has quite a number of new features for C++. My personal guess is that C++ is still very much the core of Windows and some of those changes, such as AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism) was a feature added to help make touch as smooth as possible. It seems to be designed to speed up the data transfers between the CPU and the GPU using parallel data transfers.
But I'm getting sidetracked! I was talking about HTML5. You can now download Internet Explorer 10 with the Developer Preview and start playing with it. I suggest you check out Microsoft's Internet Explorer Blog as it has all sorts of information about Internet Explorer.
IE10 looks quite different from IE9. It doesn't even have an address bar! This allows the browser to become more of a website reader than a website navigator as we are used to in earlier IE versions.
I haven't had a chance to play with Windows 8, VS11 or IE10 yet. Had to work on a top-priority report for a Clarion client so I haven't had a chance to take a look but I plan on taking some time this week and load a virtual machine in VirtualBox and see how it works. I'm excited about all this new stuff, to see how we can help our customers move forward. Clarion will be our primary development tool for a long time to come, but if you have any questions or suggestions about our products and Windows 8, please let me know!
Arnor Baldvinsson
