Am I the only one that is not that excited about Win8?  I haven’t had time yet to play around with it (waiting for VMWare to upgrade me to Workstation 8) so I might be missing something but I’m just not seeing anything worth looking at.  Let me elaborate.  Firstly note that I always like to stay with the latest stuff so Win8 and VS11 will be on my machine as soon as they are released.  I’m more interested in the general public’s interest in the products.

OS History

First there was XP (ignoring anything prior to that) which is a decade old and still popular.  It doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles of modern OSes but it is solid and heavily used.  Many companies still have no intention of upgrading from XP.  MS even extended the support cycle longer than normal to give people time.

Vista came out and lasted a year.  It was a horrible disappointment in most areas but it introduced some radical UI changes that are popular.  Jumplists, task dialog, restart manager, etc.  Unforunately nobody wanted to upgrade so applications that want to use these new features either can’t or have to write bridge code to hide the differences.  If you’ve ever written such bridge code you’ll realize that MS should have done it before release.  Even worse is that .NET (which MS said is their platform of choice going forward) doesn’t even support most of the new UI stuff.  Instead MS released a code pack that adds in the functionality that should be in the framework.  Still worse is that you can’t even use that code unless you’re running under Vista+ because it’ll blow up.  The code pack was the perfect opportunity to write the bridge code once so we didn’t have to but alas no. 

Quickly on the heels of Vista is Win7, the current OS.  Win7 didn’t have any radical changes but it did fix the issues with Vista.  Win7 is, overall, a success and generally recommended as a required upgrade.  Companies are moving to it as they get new computers but there is certainly no big rush.  Win7 is the spiritual successor to XP and worth the effort.  With Win7 came VS2010 and .NET v4.  Alas still no support for the Vista+ features.  So MS wants us writing Win7 apps but we can’t because: a) XP is still popular, b) there is no bridge code to hide the details and c) none of the new features are in .NET anyway.  So while Win7 is nice, we’re still using the XP subset.

 Windows 8

Here’s where things get really frustrating.  Win8 doesn’t offer anything that anybody has been asking for as far as I can tell.  MS is pushing the Windows Phone 7 (WP7) UI with tiles and touchscreens (touch).  How many people are using touch today?  How many people are even talking about buying touch?  I know no one.  There simply isn’t a demand for them on the desktop yet.  Why would there be?  Unlike a phone or similar device we have a mouse that gives us everything we need.  Yes touch may one day become a commonplace item but not today.  Certainly MS should add support for touch in Windows but it shouldn’t be at the cost of deprecating everything else.  Touch works well for small lists of items but as you add more it gets harder to work with.  Have you ever tried using touch for a list of states?  It takes a while to get to the bottom.  That’s why scrollbars were invented.  I think it is a bad idea for MS to build the Win8 UI around touch and tiles.  There simply isn’t a demand or support for this technology yet.

Win8 is also introducing a brand new application type – Metro.  When I think of metro I think of the various subway systems I’ve ridden.  How awful they are.  How dirty.  Where does MS come up with these names?  But I digress – Metro is a new way of developing apps that (seems) to forgo existing technologies in lieu of HTML5 and XAML.  Potentially a good idea but let’s look at what is wrong with this approach. 

Firstly only Win8 supports Metro.  Therefore if you want to build your app using Metro you have to build 2 – one for Win8 and one for everybody else.  Since Metro looks so vastly different I don’t know how much code sharing is possible at this point.  It’s like telling developers that they need WPF for Win7 and WinForms for everybody else.  What developer in their right mind would do that?  Developers will just stick with the universal application until everybody gets upgraded.  So I think Metro, while highly touted by MS, is going to see little commercial success until post-Win8.

Secondly MS has been pushing SL and WPF for several years now.  Suddenly they’re saying these technologies are deprecated in lieu of Metro.  Really?  Why should I learn yet another technology when it can be deprecated itself in a handful of years?  One of the things that is important for developer buy in is longevity of the technology.  Yes technology needs to evolve but to effectively pull the switch on one set while pushing another just seems wrong.

Will Metro be all that MS is hyping it up to be?  Will developers jump on the bandwagon?  Will we really have to learn a whole new set of technology just to be Win8-friendly?  We’ll know as Win8 gets closer but right now it certainly seems like a very risky bet on MS’es part.

Overall I currently see Win8 as an upgrade only if you are running XP, buy a new machine or just want to be on the leading edge.  There is nothing that has been announced that even remotely sounds interesting as a consumer.  On the developer front I’m not going to be writing Metro apps because I need to support non-Win8 as well.  Maybe when Win.Next.Next comes out and everybody is running Win8 I’ll look into it but not until then.  I think pushing Metro and touchscreen is just going to alienate more people, both developers and consumers.  WPF and related technologies aren’t going away just because MS might want them to.

Visual Studio 11

Here’s where things get more interesting.  VS11 will have a lot of cool new features.  .NET v4.5 is introducing some really nice new features for parallel development and ASP.NET.  WPF, WCF and WinForms are not really getting any major enhancements that I see.  VS11 itself though will be a recommended upgrade.  Here’s a few of the high points for me.

• Project Compatibility – This is a major feature and I’m glad it was finally announced.  It will allow teams to upgrade piecemeal rather than requiring everyone to upgrade at once.  The only cost is that the solution/project must already be in VS2010 SP1.  Still it’ll be nice to have mixed teams.  I’m curious to know how it’ll impact replication of bugs and whatnot though.  Time will tell.
• Model Binding – MVC already has this feature so it is nice to see it in ASP.NET.  Model binding will greatly reduce the likelihood of bad binding causing runtime errors while making development easier.  Intellisense enhancements are also nice.
• Solution Navigator – I’m really not a big fan of this but a lot of people are.  The ability to browse code from Solution Explorer will certainly make some windows like ClassView obsolete.
• Find and replace with regular expressions – It is about time.  I never used the FR regular expression search because it used a bizarre syntax.  Now that it uses the .NET implementation it’ll make finding things easier.
• Find window – Available in VS2010 today with the appropriate extras installed, this is actually pretty handy.  It makes finding things easier.  Once it is integrated into VS11 it’ll be better.
• C++/CLI Intellisense – C++/CLI folks have been screaming for it for years.  It’s finally hear.  Hopefully C++/CLI isn’t needed too much anymore but it’s nice to have when you need it.
• Async – For VB and C# the addition of async will mean we have to write less anonymous methods and/or functions to accomplish the same thing.  This alone is worth the price.
• Standalone Intellitrace – In VS2010 (from what I can remember) you had to do a lot of work to get IT running on a machine without VS.  You might have had to even install VS, I can’t remember.  In VS11 you’ll be able to drop IT on a machine that is having problems and then view the log on your dev machine.  This will make IT far more useful.
• LocalDB – SQL Express is dead.  Long live LocalDB.  Finally a dev version of SQL that doesn’t require all the extras of SQLX while still giving us the same features.  Unfortunately I think this may impact project compatibility with VS2010 so beware.
• IIS Express – WebDev is dead.  Long live IISX.  Actually IISX has been out for a while and available as an option in VS2010 SP1 but it’ll now be integrated into VS11.  All the features of IIS without the overhead.

So, in summary, I think Win8 is going to be the next Windows Millenium Edition.  It’s going to be a lackluster releas from the consumer’s point of few.  At this point it doesn’t seem to have any features that anybody is going to care about and yet a lot of emphasis is being given to Win8-specific functionality.  I don’t think there is going to be a great migration to Win8 except for new computers.  VS11 on the other hand is going to be a recommended update but just for its new features and .NET v4.5.  Maybe MS can get the Win7 features that are missing in .NET into v4.5 but I won’t hold my breathe.  Instead we’ll be stuck with a couple of Win8-specific features that nobody will use for the foreseeable future.  As both releases get closer we’ll get a better idea of what impact they’ll have but this is my opinion for now.