Microsoft Releases Windows 10 SDK 133
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today launched developer tools for the Windows 10 Technical Preview, including a software development kit (SDK). Developers can use the new tools, currently in preview, to start building universal Windows apps for Microsoft's upcoming operating system. A universal Windows app is Microsoft's verbiage for an app that can run across different form factors, including PCs, tablets, and phones. Developers can publish these apps in the Windows Store, which will be available across all types of Windows 10 devices.
Last week I tried to write a Win8.1 universal app (Score:2, Interesting)
It turns out I had to write the UI twice: once for tablets/desktops, and once again for "Windows Phone".
IDK about you, but if I were advertising a "Universal" SDK, it would mean that one app would be able to write without any code changes between platforms - with the optional ability to change UI layout according to form factor, but graceful degradation otherwise.
God fucking dammit.
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Why would you even do anything for the windows phone platform? It was a stillbirth.
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Your own subject title refers to 8.1 while TFA is about 10.
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It's just another example of poor naming.
For 8.1 there were Universal Apps which are the one project, multiple heads, common core code.
For 10 there is UAP which is one project, one set of code with an adaptive UI if desired.
See windows-10-developer-tooling-preview-now-available-to-windows-insiders [windows.com] for more info on Adaptive UX and UAP.
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But how long until they kill it?
Well, I think the internal code name is Bertha, so give it a few years of failure before they kill it.
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This is Microsoft, not Google. So it's going to last either a few months or a few decades.
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You mean like silverlight?
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It's true that Microsoft have dropped some products quickly (and their support for APIs can be faddish), but they have also supported a lot of products for very long times. In fact, some of your examples seem a bit out of place with Flight Simulator lasting 24 years and Encarta lasting 16 years.
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Well, we're really discussing dropping platforms, not specific products. It doesn't inconvenience many developers that they've stopped working on Encarta or the Flight Simulator series.
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PlaysForSure was the worst. Not only because their actions contradicted the name, but because it took away things that people had already paid for. It's different from discontinuing Zune; sure they weren't making any more of them, but the Zune you already owned still worked.
Flight Simulator had a good run. So did Encarta, until the internet and Wikipedia made it obsolete.
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See, you tried 8.1 and then to get it working under 10.
You should have coded for 8.1, recompiled under Win 9, and then pushed the Win 10 build.
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well what it leads to is just apps being first developed on 7.0, then having stuff fixed for 7.5, then being rewritten for 8.0 and then again the project reworked for 8.1 and then a total rewrite for 10.
so fucking universal!
and yes, the thing is, this is the _exact_ same marketing stuff they were hyping out with wp8 and windows 8. they were showing slides of how it's all unified and you get the same app running on everything and all that. they made such a big deal about it, despite you never going to be ab
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"well what it leads to is just apps being first developed on 7.0, then having stuff fixed for 7.5, then being rewritten for 8.0 and then again the project reworked for 8.1 and then a total rewrite for 10."
There was a Windows 7.5 ?
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Pretty much this.
One of the best things about CSS is you can create rules that will target various hardware types, resolutions, bit-depths and so on.
Sadly so very few people actually use it because so many don't even know it exists, or the developers in question are those awful kinds that create bandwidth-wasting desktop websites instead of creating actual good websites in the first place that dynamically allocate resources based on hardware type, a thing that has existed for years now.
Visual presentation s
Re:Last week I tried to write a Win8.1 universal a (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 10 has an adaptive UX framework [neowin.net] to get around using css hacks
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Microsoft is their own worst enemy. They're trying to break into mobile apps and this is now their THIRD set of APIs for doing it. This amount of churn is extremely annoying and frustrating for devs. At least when Google produces new Android APIs th
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Really? It has some kind of mechanism that converts between a touch-based app and a mouse/keyboard based app?
Because they are fundamentally different. Not that you can't use the same UI for both, but one or both REALLY sucks unless the UI is rather specific to the input methods.
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For several versions Android required that too, until they came up with fragments in (if I am not mistaken) Android 4.0 which works well enough for touch (and touch only) devices.
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I've got several apps in the store. Most of the UI code is fully shared, and moderately adoptive to screen size. In a few places, I needed something special for one or the other.
My trick is that the 8.1 universal apps have two mainpage.xaml files (one for desktop, one for phone). I just make a shared UserControl. Each MainPage just has one object, which is the shared control
(BTW: I work at Microsoft, but not in the group that does XAML; my way works but that doesn't mean there isn't a better way)
So does this mean.... (Score:5, Funny)
Even "desktop" applications are going to have over-sized text and clunky controls now?
Re:So does this mean.... (Score:5, Funny)
"desktop" applications are going to have over-sized text now?
MS devs get older, you insensitive clod.
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I've moved on to a Mac for home use.
And I bet you're one of the hundreds of people who log on to online forums every day bitching because X or Y program doesn't work properly for your Mac and how do you get it to work or when is the Mac patch due, right?
Re: So does this mean.... (Score:1)
So nothing that you'd use in an office. You know, those places where grown ups work.
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But the offices you mention are all running windows 7 (with a fair few running XP).
None but a very few will be running Windows 10 for about 5 years.
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Windows 10 has an adaptive UX and user control api [neowin.net] to get around this problem.
Haven't used it yet but plan to fire a vm tonight and play with it.
VS 2015 supports android and linux development with cordova. No really you did not miss read that. I like this newer Microsoft
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VS 2015 supports android and linux development with cordova. No really you did not miss read that. I like this newer Microsoft
The all new Microsoft that, as expected, is conspiring to lock Linux out of people's computers by means of the so-called SecureBoot? [arstechnica.com]
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They are removing from users the choice of installing an operating system other than Windows on their hardware of choice.
If by "they" you mean the OEMs (not Microsoft) and you have an example of an OEM who has actually done that then yes perhaps you may have a point. But if your hardware "of choice" doesn't have the ability to choose what operating system you put on it then obviously you chose wrong.
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Yeah, right "do this or you can't sell machines with our stuff".
That's not really a "choice".
Once again, Microsoft abuses it's position in the market, and everyone acts like it's the OEMs who chose to do this.
Sorry, but no ... the position this was a choice of the OEM is crap.
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Yeah, right "do this or you can't sell machines with our stuff".
[citation needed]
According to the image in the Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] article that started the whole conversation:
Win10 Desktop: It's OEM option whether to allow end user to turn off Secure Boot
(emphasis mine)
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And the OEMs provide a switch to turn it off.
That's not true any more. That's the news. People will install Linux on their laptops, find out that hibernation isn't working because of the so-called Secure Boot restrictions, get angry, and just give up Linux and go back to Windows and its world of post-boot malware.
That is the OEMs choice, just like is their choice whether to even give you access to the BIOS.
Impossible, no machine could ever be sold without the capability to boot from an external device, as this would prevent installing Microsoft Windows on it.
We've seen the same thing with default BIOS passwords before too, the hysterical idiots crying "what if the OEMs dont tell us the passwords?!".
Actually, what we have seen is that people saw the so-called Secure Boot as the unusefu
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Microsoft supporter: "SecureBoot is useful and gives no problem to the user"
Me: "No, it's unuseful and here's how it harms the user"
Microsoft supporter: "Eh, but you can always turn it off"
Me: "Not anymore."
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Absolute, 100% rubbish! Show me an OEM that does not provide the ability to turn secure boot off.
I don't know if you're the same Microsoft supporter as before, but in case you aren't, I'll repeat that we are talking about "designed for Windows 10" machines which aren't for sale yet.
Impossible, no machine could ever be sold without the capability to boot from an external device, as this would prevent installing Microsoft Windows on it.
Wrong again, they can easily install it and then lock you out of the BIOS.
No, because that would prevent the user from buying copies of future versions of Microsoft Windows.
Bullshit. The OEMs should be held accountable if they make the choice to produce a product that doesn't allow secureboot to be turned off. Why are you so desperate to defend the OEMs as some blameless, unaccountable entity?
Because the OEMs are known not to care about letting the users fiddle with advanced boot options. They are also known to make firmware that, for example, will crash the machine from SMM when running a non-Windows OS: I've owned
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Wrong. It does prevent the kinds of malware and rootkits that operate by modifying the bootloader.
1) Whatever it does, it can be nullified by malware that gains root-level access AFTER the OS has booted (which is the norm). And if the malware managed to modify the bootloader, of course it has already gained that access, hence no effective protection is added, UNLESS you are running a machine that doesn't allow unsigned software to run (EXEs, batch scripts, stuff written by the user) that could have been installed or patched by the malware. But clearly this is not Windows as we know it today.
Moreover, l
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That's fine until MS gives them a break on the Windows license if the SecuteBoot can't be disabled. OEMs will lock out alternate OSs at the drop of a hat if that happens.
But, hey, it's all about choice.
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Call me a luddite if you want but I think that the desktop oriented and touch oriented interfaces in Windows 8 and 10 should have been kept separated. In the Windows 10 preview some applicatio
Why? (Score:2)
Windows phones and Tablets are less than 3% of the market. Why even develop for such a small market share?
Android (Which is linux) has 51% of the phone market and 61% of the tablet market.
It's not the year of the Windows Phone or Tablet, just like it is not the year of the linux desktop. :P
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... because 3% of a huge market is still a big number...
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Because if this doesn't flop it means you write one app that also runs on tablets and mobile devices in addition to desktops.
MS screwed up 8 big time with this as you needed to make a different app targeting mobile. Since on the desktop your app marketshare was small it made little sense.
10 will be like macosx with annual .1 updates with no windows,11. In time it will be Microsofts universal platform with the marketshare
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I'll give you my alternate theory:
Judging by the sheer amount of crap which needed to be disabled in my new Windows 8.1 box, Microsoft is going to double down on bad design, and give people a shitty user interface on both portable and desktop machines.
The out of the box interface of Windows 8.1 on my 23" non-touch monitor tells me the people in charge are idiots, and aren't paying attention to what people do with computers, and are focused on something else.
Seriously, if you have a keyboard and a mouse, and
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried 3 times Windows 8.1 on a new build I did last summer. I am typing this on Windows 7. I agree Windows 8.1 is crap.
Windows 10 is still a work in progress. I can tell you from the 1st preview on VMware Workstation it is improved. Cortana search was annoying but the start men is back. The notification center is actually more desktop friendly and an improvement over 7. Windows Explorer now has cmd prompt here and powershell here which is nice. command prompt is translucent and supports cut and paste and looks like a Linux terminal :-)
Time will tell. Many die hards such as myself will need a reason to upgrade. I think a bigger crises than XP awaits MS by 2020.
But in time yes Windows 10 will have this marketshare for developers to target.
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'Agent ransack' is a good replacement for windows search - I haven't used Windows search since I installed windows 7, it is an abomination.
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Actually, that's not what I was saying. I think Metro is complete crap.
Once you remove the romper-room interface, make it run with a classic Windows look, and generally disregard what Microsoft thinks was "innovative", the OS itself is just fine.
But the entirety of that start screen, the second set of apps which do the same job as the desktop apps (but badly) ... that I think is complete
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Many die hards need an incentive to stay on MS platforms.
Ditching studio with C# for Xcode & Objective-C is no longer desperate, HTML5 is the universal platform supported by all the major vendors.
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He's the ultimate true believer. So far Win10 TP (build 10041) is far, FAR worse than Win 8.x. That metro garbage (call it modern or universal if you want to) is always gonna be crap. Windows is making itself into a giant turd, in hopes of selling phones no one wants of, and their overpriced surface stuff which is barely selling... Time to invest in Apple!
Take it off. You do know you can unpin from the start menu. FYI build 10041 switched from the Windows 95 API to XAML so some features still need to be re-added back
FYI I HATE FLAT & UGLY. But it is here to stay. Look at MacOSX Yosemite and web sites? Look at your newest Android? Windows 10 is at least adding color back and some shadows and some build screenshots show aero in the taskbar and start menu too.
So it is modern light so to speak but I do not mind tiles if they are not 8 closed door syndrome IN
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desktop Linux had a far smaller share of the market when everyone on Slashdot was screaming that developers should be supporting it. MS are targeting write for a single platform for them. they may only be 3% of phone market and 5-10% of tablet but they are still 90%+ of the desktop market. An app that with little or no effort runs on all 3 is a win win for developers.
app store only = fail (Score:2)
app store only = fail
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8.1 I know for a fact supports sideways deployment which I've used for business development. 10.0 most certainly will have this covered.
Slightly off topic, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
.... don't you think it's about time to retire the stained glass window in favor of the real Windows logo?
The gag was never particularly original, clever or funny --- and what passes for geek humor isn't known for aging well.
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A broken window is a broken window. What's is exactly your problem?
The low road. (Score:2)
A broken window is a broken window. What's is exactly your problem?
The problem I have is that it encourages unusually stupid and frivolous posts, even by Slashdot standards.
New APIs introduced (Score:3, Funny)
New APIs introduced, from
#if(WINVER >= 0x0600)
WINBASEAPI
BOOL
WINAPI
SwitchToMetro(
);
#define SwitchToDesktop()
#define IsUserAPirate() (false)
#ifndef _NTOS_ // #define LinuxIsStupid() (true) // issue 872354,
#if defined(_M_IA64) && !defined(RC_INVOKED)
caution, Kurt got fired for this.
#endif
#endif
LONG
__cdecl
MakeTheUserAcceptMetro (
__inout LONG volatile *Penor
);
#endif
How quaint, a new Windows SDk (Score:2, Troll)
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Yup, the motto of Microsoft truly is:
We take yesterday's technology one step closer to today!
The problem is that betting against Microsoft has generally be a bad thing, especially in the operating system software realm. I've been trying hard to avoid using Windows, but it keeps coming back from the dead each time I try to kill it and switch to Linux due to various kinds of issues. This might be the final nail in the coffin for me though as I may just weld shut any attempt to use Windows in the future.
Good luck for Windows 10 SDK (Score:1)
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It wouldn't make much sense to have an adaptive runtime for 32bit since tablets and phones are all 64bit.
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But it is a very pertinent question - of all the things released, a huge amount of them are written with a win32 API and then wrapped with the WinRT API (or at least, it used to be that way).
For example, I'm looking at code to search through Word documents in .NET, and it appears Microsoft has catered for my needs - there's an IFilter API that is designed for exactly this, and yet its a native COM interface (and no .NET wrapper!!). I found the same for the transcription APIs and a few others. It seems the W
Write once... (Score:2)
Windows (Score:1)
Write once, run everywhere (Score:1)
Now we can have ransomware for our phones.
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That's some funny stuff! Recent stats like these [usa.gov] show that Windows isn't just popular, it's still the dominant OS, even when considering the millions upon millions of non-Windows mobile devices out there.
Of those 1.37 billion web requests, over 58% came from a Windows system. Even Windows 8.1 alone has more users than OS X does in total, and that's one of the most despised versions of Windows!
The desktop is still king. Windows is still king. Everything else is a joke compared to them.
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You had me till that last sentence.
"Everything else is a joke compared to them."
Keep telling yourself this. Your future looks great from here!
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"Of those 1.37 billion web requests, over 58% came from a Windows system. Even Windows 8.1 alone has more users than OS X does in total, and that's one of the most despised versions of Windows!"
Lets think back to 2000 or so when around 99% of web requests were coming from Windows and think about just how far Windows has fallen in that time. While I agree that Mac OS X isn't really setting the world on fire (and I say that as a Mac user) I do see an awful lot of Macs out there and far more than there were in