email: ceberhardt@scottlogic.co.uk
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My blog post from yesterday “A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8″ sparked a bit of furious debate on Twitter. I think it is fair to say that I was not the only one who was quite concerned about the impact of aligning the developer experience of Windows Phone 8 with Windows 8. To quote Shaw Wildermuth “As a developer who’s ported Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8 (WinRT), I can tell you it isn’t a trivial task”.
During the debate there were one or two that pointed out that the assumptions I, and many others, were making about WP8 being aligned to WinRT were incorrect. However, I think they were under NDA so could not say much more.
Shortly afterwards Cliff Simpkins, a Product Manager for WP7 at Microsoft, had this to say:
I also received a very nice email from Claus Jørgensen who said of migrating from WP7 to WP8 “Migration of your codebase will involve zero issues. The major hurdle will be to change old controls into new, better performing, controls. ”
I am much happier about this all than I was yesterday. Whilst I am not entirely convinced, finding it hard to reconcile the information that moving code from Win8 to WP8 will be easy, whilst also moving code from WP7 to WP8 will involve zero issues, it does look like the process of transitioning from WP7 development to WP8 will not be too painful.
My point still stands that the developer community doesn’t appear to be embracing WinRT in the same way it did WPF and Silverlight, however, time will tell. The recently announced Microsoft Surface does look like a pretty cool device to develop for, and might kick some life into the developer community.
Also, I do feel that Microsoft needs to provide developers with a much clearer picture of what the future holds for them. I don’t doubt that the skills we have fostered from WPF, to Silverlight, through to WinRT will serve us well for WP8 development. But skills are only one part of the story, much more important to me is our assets, the code that we have written. For my part, I have written around 80 blog posts (that’s around 200,000 words!) on XAML technologies, and this was all just for fun! For clients, we have developed so much more. Any migration path has to consider this.
Anyhow, I’m going to stop worrying about WP8 and get back to blogging about what I enjoy most. Writing code. And yes, I am still developing for WP7.
Regards, Colin E.
[...] A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8 – An Update (Colin Eberhardt) [...]
Having written database interfaces for may years we have had dao, ado, linq, etc etc etc. Each one has been better in some ways than the previous. Each one has had different issues to learn and overcome. We live in an apparently ever more rapidly evolving world or development. Its something we are going to have to put up with, iOS, Android, Ms or Blackbury (if they survive). Personally I try to skip one interation each time.
It’s a bit different with the database world where you typically have a choice. If I started a project now, I could use ADO, Linq-to-SQL, Entity Framework or even nHibernate without making any significant compromises. I could deliver the same product regardless of which I selected. I am also willing to bet that your code will still work in ten years time, because servers will always be servers (at least for a few more years).
The trouble with client / UI technologies is these pesky tablets and mobile devices
My concern is that a couple of years down the line MS will change yet again if they find that their strategy isn’t working and IMHO a lot of devs are wondering the same thing which could be why, seemingly, there isn’t a lot of interest in WinRT.
The lack of interest in WinRT is a big concern, just look at how little WinRT activity there is on Stackoverflow right now. I am sure that when the WP7 tools were in beta, the developer community was all over it. I know I was!
Could say lot of things about the developer acceptance.
To make the long story short:
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Meanwhile embracing HTML5 / JS…
I like the way you put that
Me too. Former .NET developer but i was working on a WP7 app in my spare time. I’m going to abandon it. Windows Phone is going nowhere if Microsoft keeps creating incompatible platforms and leaving users behind. And it seems that WP8 will not even have the real WinRT but yet another semi-compatible version.
Hi Felix, I would not be too hasty about abandoning it. The latest news is that porting WP7 to WP8 should be quite straightforward. Your statement that “WP8 will not even have the real WinRT” does appear to be correct. I just wish someone would give a straight answer so that we can plan for it!
Nice word! I was using harsher words when they announced windows phone 7.8
Heh – I have a feeling WP7.8 is not going to be very popular when it arrives
Great update Colin
Surprised about the comment about WP7 -> WP8 XAML compatibility, saw nothing about that in the Summit event apart from statements about recompiling WP7 apps for WP8 and that code reuse will be high. But I (as most people) read that still as a XAML -> WinRT C#/XAML move and from my experiences (same as Shawn) it is not trivial.
So it still begs the question as to what is going on under the covers with WP8.
The XNA answer is still not there yet even with their promise that XNA apps on WP7 will work on WP8 (even with the heave C++ push) as they will also be “recompiled” for WP8 (which raises it’s own questions). But with the statements above from the MS teams it does not make sense at all yet.
I guess all will only be revealed when the WP 2012 toolkit is released and we can finally play (please god let there be a Beta again). The statement that you can still build WP7 apps in VS2012 is also still incomplete as nothing is said if it is just Silverlight / backwards compatible WinRT XAML and will that include XNA?
Time and Tide will tell.
I am amazed how much effort it took to extract even just the few snippets in this article above!
Anyhow, at least the message appears a bit more positive than before (at least for WP7 Silverlight/XAML developers!)
I don’t believe why they make the same mistakes over and over again. WP7 was a stop-gap solution to begin with. On WP7 and Wp7.5, it is impossible to make a App, that has the same kind of responsiveness as the native apps. Take for comparison iOS, where the iOS team uses the same SDK as anybody else (with small additons) but in WP7/7.5, the Windows Phone team uses a completly seperate UI stack (Native code) while devs have to use Silverlight and a managed runtime. Not bringing native code for 2 years was bad enough, but they still don’t get it. The Windows Phone team will still use the native tools, WP8 devs have to use C#/XAML (based on Silverlight?). The annyoing part is that they have WinRT running on ARM, they have C++/XAML, the tools (VS) but they still make a different version. WOW!
I think it is fair to ask if WP8 is another stop-gap for the “real” strategy? Will they screw WP8 customers because they will limit the upgrade path artifically again? As a Dev, what am I supposed to do? Create 7.5 apps that don’t have all the improvements or make WP8 and get a user base of 0 customers? Sure, I can make two versions. Oh, and a seperate version for WinRT and a seperate for the desktop. This is a well though out strategy.
Also, people like this http://yfrog.com/khbmdxdp make me sick. When will this Native devs vs Managed devs get solved within MSFT!
Hi Dennis,
Yep – it is all one big mess isn’t it?
Regarding responsiveness, I know what you mean. See my tweet yesterday.
We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place here. If the have made WP8 use WP7 Silveright compatible I am happy on the one hand that we do not have a horrible Silverlght-to-WinRT migration on our hands. However, if WP8 dumped Silverlight in favour of WinRT, native code, and the performance issues were fixed, I would be kind-of happy then too.
I totally agree about iOS. I created my first app (using MonoTouch) just a few weeks back. The list scrolled as smooth as silk, the header transitions were perfect.
Win8 and WP8 have their work cut out to catch up. I sincerely hope they do, because I very much enjoy the XAML programming experience and all that comes with it (MVVM, behaviours etc …)
Colin E.