http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/no-cos t-desktop-software-development-is-dead-on-windows-8/



Computers. Aren't. Smartphones.

Sorry if it's too OT, but WTF Microsoft? The whole article is pretty horrifying. Microsoft and Google are moving to the Apple model of giving developers and users as little control as possible, for the sake of minimalism, control, and easiness. I guess hobby developers will just have to stick to Windows 7, XP, and Unix if Metro is going to be this pervasive. I'm personally hoping and expecting that Windows 8 will be a flop, but this is still really alarming.



Sure there are other IDEs and compilers, but who knows how far Microsoft will take this? They obviously don't respect free development and I wouldn't be surprised to see more crackdowns on it.

Yeah, Windows 8 Metro also has no MIDI support, and no 3rd party plugin support. So no VST plugins. No external MIDI keyboards.

Well that isn't likely to matter as it's extremely unlikely anyone would be doing a DAW application for Metro anyway. (Old style desktop apps done with win32 etc will still work on Windows 8.)

But the Visual Studio 2011/compilers stuff...Sigh...Extremely disappointing and has made me think about a future without Windows...A likely scenario is that I will keep on using Windows 7 as long as possible and then switch to using and developing for OS-X. (Though I don't especially like OS-X and Apple either...)

edit : People have of course mentioned elsewhere that Visual Studio and it's compiler are not the only way to program on Windows. While technically true, I've found mingw as a toolchain extremely frustrating and that's the only viable toolchain (ie, compiler, linker etc) alternative to the Visual Studio/Microsoft provided ones. For my IDE needs, I've already been using Qt Creator almost exclusively for the past 3 years or so.
Last edited by Xenakios on Sat May 26, 2012 1:19 am; edited 2 times in total

I'm looking forward to the optimization improvements mentioned in the article. Downloading the beta right now to check that, hopefully it can be tested

Let's not forget Intel charges much more for its tools, and per-platform, so if MS ships proper compilers now, this is good news & could save us money.

Richard

Nice to hear you have a business that can amortize the cost of the Visual Studio Professional (or better) purchase

I use the VS standard edition, which I think was $99. Pro edition seems pointless since it generates the same slow code. On OS X the differences aren't that huge between the free Apple stuff and IC++, but still significant.

Anyhow I tested the VS 11 beta briefly and now it seems the MS compiler finally generates faster code, closer to IC.

Richard

What's is a "METRO style" app? How is it different from a "desktop" app and how come there are now 2 separate types of app for Windows?

--msvs
++mingw

It dresses like a gay app, even though it's straight.

aMUSED was talking about METRO, not POLY-ANA

Poly-Ana is definitely a girl. People catch me calling her "she" all the time.

I'll make a boy-synth someday. (It'll be stinkier.)

In Russian the word "polyana" means "a clearing in the woods" and has a feminine grammatical gender

Yes, I've discovered this since naming her. (When I google for Admiral and Poly-Ana I get a few stories of various military figures growing up in communities named after glades. )

It's also apparently what they call large open holes in ice floes. (Spelled "polynyas").

But of course, it's a combination of a play on words, POLY(phonic)-ANA(log) synthesizer, as well as a reference to a literary character known for being excessively optimistic (which reminds me of Poly-Ana's can-do-anything voice architecture). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna#Influence

Although the spelling of the latter word using latin letters may look similar, in cyrillic it's not that close anymore, neither does it sound close, whereas the spelling of the former word is exact. But we are getting too much off topic, I wonder whether we should start a new thread for this discussion

Metro is the result of Microsoft trying to turn your computer into a smartphone. It's what they've replaced the Start menu with in Windows 8, but it's really a completely separate application environment. The design philosophy seems to be this:
- Make all applications run fullscreen, windowing is for geeks.
- Make any buttons or control areas unnecessarily big and square
- Make all of the apps work as if you have a touch screen, not a mouse
- Make advanced controls like "close program" annoyingly difficult to reach
- Make developers pay to make Metro software

The design might be good for tablets or phones, but not for desktops. It will probably be a mild annoyance for most users and hell for power users and developers.

Fortunately, you can still make normal applications for the desktop mode, but you still can't opt out of using Metro if you have Windows 8, the system is built around Metro.