Last week at the 2011 BUILD conference Microsoft unveiled their grand strategy for Windows 8. In the process they really set the direction for all Microsoft-based client technologies for the next decade. It is worth acknowledging the magnitude of this occasion. We should also note the difficult position from which the Redmond-based software giant had to make its move. There is immense pressure from all of the modern, touch-centric tablet devices – most notably Apple’s iPad – that represent the fastest-growing segment in the industry and are actually starting to chip away from the PC market share. At the same time, Microsoft **must** support millions of applications already written for Windows that their legions of customers expect to work flawlessly in the next version of Windows. To remain relevant, Microsoft had to come up with an answer that somehow satisfies both extremes of the app spectrum.
As it turns out, Microsoft came up with something quite compelling:
Windows 8 will provide two UI operation modes or “shells”:
- “Metro Style”. This is the new “immersive experience” mode, optimized for touch input and designed to compete with all modern tablet devices. Metro style applications can be built in HTML5 and JavaScript or XAML and C, C++, C#, or VB. Note that the Metro version of IE doesn’t allow plug-ins, so Silverlight or Flash are not supported in the Metro browser. Reasons cited for this are: battery life, security, reliability and privacy.
- “Classic Desktop”. This mode will be very familiar to anyone using Windows 7. The classic mode will continue to be appropriate for “work at your desk” scenarios and all applications that run on Windows 7 will run happily in this mode. Silverlight and other browser plugins will continue to be supported the way they work today. Interestingly, when a user in Metro mode encounters a web page that requires a Silverlight plugin, they can instantly switch to desktop mode and run the Silverlight app.
To make things even more interesting, Microsoft is extending the Metro application model to Windows Phone and Xbox – making a truly unified development platform for all client devices. It is great to see that Microsoft is willing to make bold moves like this and declare a “multi-front war”, as our friend David Wihl from SoftArtisans put it.
What makes us at ComponentArt excited about Microsoft’s new direction is the fact that our technology perfectly fits into this model. In fact:
ComponentArt is the only vendor that provides the tools today to target both “Metro” and “Classic” Windows 8 experience through a single XAML code base, thanks to our new Dashboard Server product that converts XAML dashboards to HTML5 in real time without the need to write a single line of JavaScript code.
Anything you build with our XAML-based Data Visualization tools today will run on Windows 8, either as a native XAML application or HTML5 app – your choice! The key point is that you develop your dashboard only once in XAML and deploy either as XAML or HTML5 through ComponentArt Dashboard Server.
The best way to experience this XAML-HTML5 rendering parity delivered by our new Dashboard Server product is to try our live mobile dashboard demos in a desktop browser and switch between Silverlight and HTML5 outputs. As you will see, the product features pixel-identical rendering between XAML and HTML5 and near feature parity.
We hope that you will enjoy our new technology and are looking forward to your feedback!