I'm a long term Windows developer with several years of WPF/Silverlight experience. I just took a look at the "Programming Windows 8 Apps w/ HTML, CSS/ and JS" book and I'm very discouraged and somewhat confused the direction I want to take my development
efforts.
I created a Silverlight Win 8 app, nice and sweet. I love XAML.
I created a JavaScript Win 8 app, what a mess. I hate HTML/CSS.
But, I have to learn the new stuff, right? Wait.....why in the world would I want to create a native JS Win8 app? I want my tablet apps to be cross platform (iOS/Android/Win8). Shouldn't I use something like Telerik ICE instead, assuming
they will some day add Win 8 support? There's also Telerik Kendo to take a close look at.
Don't get me wrong. When Windows Phone 7 launched I dove in head first, released a fee app (which cost me nearly $3000 to produce). It did very well, but I stopped updating it because I decided I didn't want to pay another $100 to continue my
membership at create.msdn.com for something I was giving away for free and only helping the growth of WP for MS.
Now Windows Phone is dying, even the new release of WP 8 might get, what, 5% of the market share? Silverlight is dying, and MS is asking that I learn a new method of building what I already know how to build in SL and MVC.
Can a MVC4/HTML5/CSS3 app run as a native WinRT app? NO? Why? Back the app with Azure services, the same way Telerik is building ICE. Have a "Install Local" option similar to SL that simply launches IE in some sort of local app mode
pointing to a url to retrieve its first page giving the impression of a locally installed application.
Maybe that will be my first WinRT app. An app that simply renders a MVC4/HTML5 web app as though it was a local WinRT app. Interesting. Then all future WinRT apps I write will simply be a MVC app that is also accessible from oh say,
iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, WP8, IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera........
Mike
