In this thread you'll see much more clearly what MS is planning. It's not just HTML/JS for these immersive apps. Rather it appears that the CLR will become a first class part of Windows. If you are a Windows dev or are interested in Windows dev, this is a must read thread. In fact I'm shocked that no major publications have noticed it.
There are lots of really interesting nuggets in there. In many regards I think they're finally delivering on a lot of the promises of Longhorn.
I must say I'm excited about it, and looking forward to September now. MS screwed up on the PR, but I think they may have gotten the technological direction right.
Is this what the "IE is native" PR claims are about? That HTML DOM and CSS are going to map directly onto the window system instead of a virtual window (or whatever it is called) in the browser engine?
Er, no, they didn't. They mean fully (or significantly more fully) hardware accelerated, and they've said that many times - hence all the benchmarks of 2D canvas in IE9 vs Chrome.
Personally I think IE9 is a shitty browser - no 3D context for canvasses, gradients, history, or 3D transforms. But you don't need to represent MS to prove that.
Looks to me that it's not so much that "the CLR will become first class" as they've broken down the CLR and .NET into little pieces (GC = SLR/Redhawk, type system/metadata = WinRT/WinTypes.dll, XAML = Jupiter/DirectUI, C# = the new AOT compiler, if it exists), and are using each one individually where appropriate.
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...
In this thread you'll see much more clearly what MS is planning. It's not just HTML/JS for these immersive apps. Rather it appears that the CLR will become a first class part of Windows. If you are a Windows dev or are interested in Windows dev, this is a must read thread. In fact I'm shocked that no major publications have noticed it.
There are lots of really interesting nuggets in there. In many regards I think they're finally delivering on a lot of the promises of Longhorn.
I must say I'm excited about it, and looking forward to September now. MS screwed up on the PR, but I think they may have gotten the technological direction right.