How Microsoft Is Wooing College Kids To Write Apps For Windows 8 187
SquarePixel writes "Bloomberg has an interesting story about Microsoft's efforts to simultaneously woo younger workers and to get more apps into its Windows Store. Quoting: 'Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, designed Windows 8 for touch-screen technology included in the company's first tablet, Surface, and other devices coming this year. To gain share in tablets, a market expected by DisplaySearch to reach $66.4 billion in 2012, Microsoft needs enough apps to challenge the more than 200,000 available for iPad. Using student recruits is one way Microsoft can woo app developers who are used to building programs for mobile phones and tablets, where the company has little and no share, respectively. Luring programmers before graduation is particularly critical for recruitment in the U.S., which lags behind countries such as India and China in its ability to crank out qualified engineers.'"
How about not screwing your App Store Customers? (Score:4, Informative)
I loved losing apps I paid for on Windows Mobile Marketplace.
NEVER AGAIN.
Re:Visual Studio (Score:4, Informative)
The product is free and lacks a lot of very useful/needed things for a full-fledged development environment. Here's the list:
* No profiler support
* No 64-bit compiler (32-bit only)
* No resource editor (important for GUI-based bits)
* No MFC support (some may consider this a good thing, but MFC is still in use today, like it or not)
* No ATL support (less of a concern)
To me, the first 3 are absolute deal-breakers. So effectively what Microsoft has given the world for free is something that barely gets the job done -- and given that model, I would say it would definitely appeal to the same demographic they're advertising Windows 8 development to: college students.
MS did this when I was in College (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Visual Studio (Score:5, Informative)
Your last 3 points are irrelevant for Win8 apps - you don't write them in MFC/ATL, and you don't use Win32 resource files for them. 64-bit is also not needed.
Also, IIRC, there's a basic profiler in 2012 Express.
Re:Technet + Dreamspark (Score:5, Informative)
Again, all of our software is either on a central server that can be SSH'd to with X access (and thus any machine can be used to get to it), it's cross platform, or it's OS/X or Linux. I can only think of maybe one specific class that you *must* have a windows machine for (and it's like a C# class or something) and even then, I think they meet in a computer lab of Windows machines.
Any mac can be setup for development trivially quickly and easily. I'm not at all a mac fanboy (quite the opposite) but Apple did figure out how to treat their developers well. It wouldn't surprise me if a great amount of Universities are pretty Windows leaning, but it's not the de facto standard by any shot. OS X has a good hold on the Universities (and most programmers) and I strongly suspect it will continue grow. (Personally, they can have my Arch laptop when they can pry it out of my cold dead hands).
Re:Stop reinventing the turnign machine! (Score:5, Informative)
Why can't I just import the Win8 libraries into Python? Or Java, or .NET (C#)? HTML5 is not a save-all
Technically, since Win8 libraries - if you mean Windows Runtime (WinRT) - have a well-defined ABI, it's certainly possible to project them to Java or Python. They are already projected to C# and C++, you're not restricted to HTML5/JS (for some reason it seems to be an oft-recurring misunderstanding that you can only write Win8 apps in that - it's completely wrong).
As for Qt, it's a library that does its own widgets down to drawing and input handling. If they want to port it to Win8, they can.
Why for that matter won't WP7 apps run on WP8?
They will. What made you believe otherwise?
Re:Visual Studio (Score:5, Informative)
It should be noted that students have access to the full Visual Studio suite, alongside the Expression suite and Windows Server (I think it goes back to 2003 up to 2012) through DreamSpark [dreamspark.com]. I've used it in the past and I have to say this is one of the nice things Microsoft does in comparison to, say, Adobe. Autodesk also provides free educational software, but theirs is branded as such whereas Microsoft's stuff seems like the full Professional versions with no strings attached.
Re:Visual Studio (Score:2, Informative)
The stupid - it is strong in you...
Re:Visual Studio (Score:2, Informative)
Why did someone mark the AC flamebait? Did anybody click on the guy's user ID? Personally I hate how the word shill is just thrown at frankly everyone that doesn't drink the koolaid around here but...damn, just damn. Every single post the guy has made has been pumping Visual Studio, Silverlight, and Windows mobile. It reads like somebody working at an Indian support center just going off one of those scripts.
Because it's NOT a shill, it's the newest FRIST POST troll. It's as predictable as a GNAA post on anything having to do with genetics, and occurs with much more repeatability compared to army of Michael Knoppel ids (forgot how to spell it) and his "you're completely pathetic" routine.
These particular trolls, when they appear for anything MS, are really fucking effective, though. Everyone gets riled up for it. Including myself at one point.