How Microsoft Is Wooing College Kids To Write Apps For Windows 8

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.'"

Quantity over quality?

[Roobles]

When I look back at the code I created in college, compared to what I was capable of after a few years of real world development experience... The difference is pretty stark. I understand the get-em-while-they're-young approach, to influence development decisions later in life. But if they're betting the success of their platform on the output of students with limited-to-no real world experience, I fear for the quality of the apps in their store.

Re:Visual Studio

[Anonymous Coward]

He's just a shill. Any story even halfway related to MS these days is hit by a marketer immediately, with the first comment invariably singing the praises of Visual Studio.

the apps in the store suck

[pointyhat]

Literally all of the apps in the windows 8 store suck terribly. I've tried a good portion of them. I don't see how wooing 200k apps out of people who've never built something significant is going to change this fact. I think this is a way of desensitizing future developers with respect to a walled garden app store and closed platform with proprietary tools. nothing good can come of this. For ref i sit in front of visual studio for 5 hours a day at the moment so I'm not some crazy zealot. Crazy perhaps.

Legacy of NeXT's InterfaceBuilder.app?

[WillAdams]

How much of Apple's App Store success is brought about by the development tools and niceness of Object-oriented programming / interface design?

I'm biased, since for a long while a NeXT Cube was my primary machine (and for a while, I had access to machines running Windows, Mac OS and NeXTstep all w/ similar processor and memory specs), but some of the nicest applications I've ever used began on NeXTstep, and pretty much all the apps I have a real fondness for were heavily influenced by OO-environments (FutureWave Smartsketch which became Flash, but started on Go Corp.'s PenPoint):

  - Altsys Virtusoso (which became FreeHand v4)
  - TeXview.app (TeXshop.app was inspired by it)
  - Lotus Improv
  - Mail.app
  - TouchType.app
  - a bunch of other apps / utilities which no longer exist / are remembered
  - Doom (okay, I'm reaching, but it was initially developed on NeXTstep)

Would there be as many IOS apps if XCode didn't benefit from decades of NeXT/OPENSTEP development and user-interface design work?

William

Re:Visual Studio

[GameboyRMH]

Only to grow up locked into an MS language which could be dumped as quickly as Silverlight.

Nice try shill.

Maybe not such a good Idea

[Vince6791]

If you read the Microsoft metro app store policy you will start laughing, especially at "3.2 Your app must not stop responding, end unexpectedly, or contain programming errors", I mean look who's freaking talking here. Windows 1 to Windows 7, office 1 to office 2010, all had and have freaking issues(freezing, crashes, bugs, glitches) xbox 360 hardware failure, and yet they got the balls to tell you not to fuck it up. Shit, how many freaking times my windows 7 kept freezing because i did not set the storage(both winodws & amd SB drivers sucked) configuration from ide compatibility to ahci in the bios while the linux distros had no issues with this.

Microsoft also has the right to cancel your account and wipe all your apps off from the store any time if they think you are not conforming to their policy. For students, learning c & c++ would make it easier for them to adapt other languages much quicker. Writing efficient and inventive Algorithm's is the most important aspect of any programming language.

Re:Technet + Dreamspark

[spire3661]

If your statemnet = true, then a mac can write software for any platform (that ever existed) and iOS too! Using your logic, mac computer is best computer.