Is Windows 8 Going to Leave Developers Scrambling?

When Microsoft showed off the first real glimpse of Windows 8 at the D9 conference a couple of weeks ago, I doubt there was a single person on earth who didn’t have to think about what they were seeing for a couple of minutes. For end users, imagining using the UI we were shown as a primary desktop environment seems a little hard to settle on, but for developers, things might be even worse.

The reason is that the main interface for Windows 8 is built using HTML5 and JavaScript technologies. If developers are fluent with .NET or similar languages, but not HTML5 or JS, then that’s a major problem. Some apps might not be best-suited for HTML5 or JS given their complexity, but if developers want to build for the Windows 8 specific interface but don’t know how, what’s the solution?

At this point it’s unclear. Microsoft isn’t about to leave its millions of .NET, C and other developers in the dark, but how it plans to enable them to create applications and applets for the Windows 8 interface remains an unknown. Currently, MIcrosoft doesn’t offer robust software development packages for HTML5 or JS, but it likely will in the future, if Windows 8 is in fact going to demand the usage of those languages. I’m personally hoping we see tools like that soon, because they’re going to be needed, and we sure don’t want “language translation” tools, since they are messy Nor might they even be possible.

For Windows developers hoping to design applications around the Windows 8 interface, it might not be a bad idea to learn a bit of HTML5 and JS (or Silverlight), although that’s far from being an ideal solution. JavaScript isn’t exactly the most liked language around, and compared to .NET and other solutions, is limited in what it can allow developers to do. This is a tough situation to surmise.

For both developers and end-users alike, Microsoft is taking a huge risk with its changes to Windows 8.