Build Keynote Odds 'N Ends -- Visual Studio Magazine

Onward and UpwardKeith Ward, Editor in Chief, Visual Studio Magazine

Build Keynote Odds 'N Ends

Anaheim, Calif. -- Here are some interesting tidbits that came out of this morning's Build keynote presentation that caught my attention.

I was very impressed by Windows 8's limited resource usability. One demo had a three-year-old netbook loaded with both Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8. According to Task Manager, Windows 7 used 404 MB RAM and 32 processes; Windows 8 used 281 MB RAM and 29 processes. Microsoft has learned that bigger isn't always better.
The boot times for Windows 8 are staggering. The OS loaded in under 10 seconds on both a laptop and tablet. Wowzer.
As with all demos, take these numbers with a grain of salt. They'll likely be highly optimized, to make people like me go "oooh" and "aaahhh". Which I did.
I really liked Metro's ability to dock apps at the side of the UI. My iPhone and iPad can't do that type of multitasking. Would love it if they could.
One company is holding a "Recruitment Party" tomorrow night at the show. Unemployment may be more than 9 percent nationally, but not for developers.
Not much talk of Silverlight. At all. Hope there's more coming. It wasn't ignored completely, but not highlighted either. It looks like it'll be easy to port it to Windows 8 -- one demo showed a Silverlight app being converted to Windows 8 with the addition of something like 20 lines of code -- but from what I saw, they didn't announce much to move it forward as a technology. That may change over the week, though, so stay tuned.
XAML will be easy to convert as well. According to the speaker during the demo, "It's mostly namespace changes" and different "using" statements. Really easy -- at least for the demoed apps. Again, see the previous point about optimized demos.
Once again, I point out with no bitterness, journalists ARE NOT eligible for the free tablet giveaway. Oh, well, guess I'll have to struggle through with my iPad 2.

More Windows 8/Build coverage from VisualStudioMagazine.com:

Posted by Keith Ward on 09/13/2011

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