Windows Runtime – Dial in the right expectations before reading up

Three days on from the announcement of the Windows Runtime at Microsoft’s Build conference the marketing dust is settling and the full picture emerging. As you begin to read up what the Windows Runtime actually is you’ll need to set your expectations to the right level or you run the risk of being disappointed. But set them appropriately and I think you’ll see that an exciting developer journey lies ahead.

Leading up to the conference I was hoping for a new lean-and-mean User Interface platform for writing any kind of Windows application. But that isn’t what Windows Runtime is about. As things stand this week, Windows Runtime is about producing Metro-style applications (think Windows Phone 7) optimised for running on Tablet devices. Windows Runtime is aimed squarely at the solar plexus of iOS and Android 3.0.

Miguel de Icaza and Tim Anderson have already done a good job of writing up what has been announced so far about Windows Runtime (or WinRT). But here are the two key points to notice:

• Metro-style apps run in a sandboxed environment. As with Windows Phone 7, apps have to declare upfront, through a manifest built in at compilation time, which capabilities of your PC they intend to use. Access to APIs is monitored at runtime by the Runtime Broker, which prevents your app from doing anything naughty. Only certain parts of the .Net Base Class Libraries can be used, and even native developers are limited as to which Win32 or COM objects they call. Apps can only talk to each other through the WinRT-endorsed Contracts, which allow for Sharing, File-picking etc.

  To a developer all this sounds like a horrible restriction. But it is wonderful for users, who can have much more confidence that applications they install from the new App Store will not get up to mischief.

• Metro-style apps are always full screen and immersive. Windows Runtime does not provide a general-purpose windowing system. Several presenters at the conference mentioned that support for overlapping windows have been intentionally left out. And for one simple reason: they don’t work well in a touch-centric environment.

Windows Runtime is not (at the moment) a general purpose runtime. It may get there eventually, but for the time being it is focused on building the kinds of apps and games that today you might run on the iPad, the Xoom, or (once the lawyers have finished their fisticuffs) the Galaxy Tab. Think of it as Silverlight-on-Steroids-With-Native-Extensions for Tablets and you won’t go far wrong.

As speakers at Build conceded, there are many kinds of application that would not fit the Metro-style. Visual Studio is one. Photoshop is another. Microsoft Office is (possibly) a third. For these kinds of apps, keyboard, mouse, menus, toolbars, ribbons and dialog boxes still works best.

This means Win32 and WPF are still very much alive. Though there are no sessions about it at the conference, WPF 4.5 has been announced with a number of not-insignificant new features, including the promised fix for the Win32 airspace restrictions (though nothing has been said about hosting Silverlight controls in WPF apps).

I’m no prophet, but I don’t believe this is the last we’ll hear about WPF.

Build Windows Day 1–and a peek a what’s to come

If you haven’t caught the news already, yesterday at Microsoft’s Build Windows conference Steven Sinofsky announced a preview of Windows 8 and a bunch of developer tools, including Visual Studio 11. You can download it here.

As predicted, Windows 8 comes with an all new development framework, the Windows Runtime (WinRT). I’ve not read enough myself to begin explaining. But here’s a picture, snapped during Steven Sinofsky’s keynote:

WinRT is an object-oriented API, consisting of 1800 objects, accessible to managed, unmanaged and JavaScript code alike. Sinofsky emphasised that this WinRT is a peer to Win32, not another abstraction layer built on top of it. As this diagram clearly shows, and Sinofsky stressed in his talk, Win32, .Net and Silverlight developers have nothing to fear, all current frameworks continue to work in Windows 8.

I’m sure to have more to say about WinRT in the coming days. In the meantime, InfoQ has a couple of articles summarising what we learned in the keynote. If you’re wanting a sneak peak at the API’s themselves, check out the preview documentation on MSDN.

The videos are the first few sessions of the conference are already up on the web:

• The Day 1 Keynote
• Jensen Harris: 8 traits of great Metro style apps
• Aleš Holeček and John Sheehan: Platform for Metro style apps

What’s next?

In other news, the session list is now up for the rest of the week. Here are a few that grab my attention.

• Anders Hejlsberg on Future directions for C# and Visual Basic. Doesn’t look like “Roslyn” (compiler-as-a-service) will make it into Visual Studio 11. But he might announce some new language features for C# 5.0.
• Mark Miller and Pracheeti Nagarkar give a Deep dive into the kernel of the .Net Framework. Sounds like they’ve done yet more work to improve code-generation and garbage collection.
• Stephen Toub, one of my favourite speakers from previous years, is doing two sessions: The zen of async: Best practices for performance (vital know-how, given that many of the new WinRT API’s will be asynchronous) and Building parallelized apps with .Net and Visual Studio (look for some announcements about new parallelization libraries).
• Harry Pierson and Jesse Kaplan are doing a talk on Using the Windows Runtime from C# and Visual Basic
• Out of curiosity, I make take a look at Daniel Moth’s Taming GPU compute with C++ AMP where he’s going to introduce new tools and language features for using the GPU within C++ solutions.
• Boris Jabes talk A lap around DirectX game development tools also piques my interest, as it promises the “most significant set of improvements for developing graphics-intensive apps in over a decade”.

And now, on with the show!

Microsoft’s Build Windows Conference is Next Week – What’s in Store?

It’s less than a week to go until Microsoft’s Build conference. According to tradition, about now I should be speculating on what the future holds for us faithful Microsoft developers. But there’s still no official session list. Fortunately, we do have a few official hints, and a couple of very unofficial leaks to whet our appetites for what’s in store.

Windows 8

Read the Build homepage, and you’ll see that the conference is focused very clearly on Windows 8. We’ve already had a preview of the new touch-centric, Windows Phone 7-like UI. And over on the Building 8 blog, Steven Sinofsky and others on the Windows team have started announcing some of the to-be-expected features like USB 3.0 support.

Here are some of the other things that we know already:

• Windows 8 will support ARM processors, and System on a Chip architectures. Look out for a slew of Windows 8 based tablets to compete with the iPad and Galaxy Tab. Indeed, there is a rumour doing the rounds that Microsoft will be giving away a Windows 8 tablet to all Build attendees.
• The Windows Desktop is being demoted to just another application, that some users (think Tablet users) may never see. Instead they’ll live in the new immersive Metro environment.
• Windows Explorer is being Ribbonified, and the File Copy/Move experience given an overhaul.
• It’s goodbye to Virtual CloneDrive and friends, as Windows 8 gains the ability to mount ISO files, and also simplifies mounting of VHD files.
• Windows 8 will be getting its own App Store.

And now comes the controversial part. Those of you who have not entirely delegated their memories to Google will recall that when Microsoft first showed the new Metro desktop for Windows 8, they announced that developers would be able to use HTML5 and JavaScript for building these new-fangled immersive apps. But they said nothing about the presence of .Net, WPF or Silverlight in this brave new world, stirring up an instant furore in the blogosphere.

But there’s no need to panic. It’s all under control. I think.

Direct UI

This is where we turn to the leaks. Leaked Windows 8 builds, that is.

According to Peter Bright over on Ars Technica, Microsoft are creating a new Windows Runtime (or WinRT), which is intended to be the successor to the Win32 API. It will be a native-code API, but shaped in a way that is pleasing to the eye of a managed-code developer, and what is more, said .Net developers will be able to access WinRT through a new (hopefully painless) version of COM for which support is being built into .Net 4.5.

Included in WinRT is a new UI framework called Direct UI which appears to be a lean-and-mean version of WPF/Silverlight (and also uses XAML – remember how part of the XAML team got moved to the Windows division!). With the official details coming out in less than a week, there’s little point on me elaborating further here, but you can get a taster of the new APIs by reading these two forum threads which dissect some of the leaked Windows 8 builds.

What I look forward to hearing is where WPF fits into the picture. One thing we know with a high degree of confidence, given Microsoft’s backwards-compatibility track record: current WPF applications will continue to work. The question is: will there be further development to WPF? As I reported last year, we know there are some new features coming, including fixing the airspace issues when hosting Hwnds inside WPF controls, and enabling hosting of Silverlight controls. But will there be anything beyond that? And will there be interop between WPF and Direct UI? Watch this space.

Silverlight

Remember that Microsoft stirred up another firestorm at PDC 2010 by staying mum about Silverlight? They put that right a few weeks later by announcing Silverlight 5, which was quite distinctly not a maintenance release, since it included a whole raft of new features like a 3d API, vector printing support, and P/Invoke for Trusted Applications. They’ve now made good on that, with the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate coming out just last week. It will be interesting to learn Microsoft’s vision for how Silverlight, WPF and Direct UI align.

C# 5.0

We already know the headline feature for C# 5: asynchronous methods. We’ve had a CTP. Here’s hoping for a beta release during the conference. One thing Anders did say at his talk last year is that async won’t be the only new feature in C# 5.0. So I wonder what else he has up his sleeves? It would be nice if it was the Roslyn project (Compiler as a Service).

Visual Studio

It sounds like Microsoft are preparing to release a new preview build of Visual Studio at Build. Many of the features that were previously released as PowerToys for VS 2010 are going to part of vNext. But the more interesting news to me is that Microsoft have been taking note of data coming back from PerfWatson to make some big performance improvements. Visual Studio vNext is going to make more use of multi-core machines, and will reduce memory usage in some cases by doing builds out-of-process for C# projects.

Stay Tuned

My new boss has kindly given me some time next week to follow the Build conference from the comfort of my office. And as in previous years, I’ll be reporting back the choicest titbits as I find them. Follow me on twitter to hear it as it happens.

Now, over to you. What are you looking forward to? Have you heard any rumours that I’ve not picked up on?