The Windows 8, HTML 5, and Silverlight Rumor Circus

In this blog post an overview of the recent wave of fear and anger across the internet concerning the future of .Net in Windows 8 (could be released Autumn 2012), and why it is all a storm in a teacup.

Where and when it started

It all started with the demo of Windows 8 on the AllThingsD Conference (June 1)by Julie Larson-Green and Steven Sinofsky who mentioned that the applications presented were, and further applications could written in Html5 and JavaScript (version 1.8.5, together with CSS 3.0 called the HTML technology stack). Throughout the demo there was no mention of Silverlight or WPF. “This, What Has Not Been Said” tapped into already slumbering fears that HTML5 will compete out Silverlight. Heated reactions followed in discussion groups. See e.g. this one, where the thread was closed by the moderator. Some people, clearly driven by a distinct dislike of the Microsoft company stirred up the fire, as did a journalist of a respected medium.

What it is about

The fear mentioned above is the fear of many developers that costly investments of time and effort will become useless with the release of Windows 8. Of course, if there is only the risk that .Net software would be legacy at the release of Windows 8, investments in .Net and Silverlight software would stop immediately. Not only is there fear, but also dislike. Some developers express the opinion that the HTML5 tech(nology) stack is inferior to Silverlight, and also tedious to work with.

Does it seem justified?

I myself doubt this fear and uproar is justified. The HTML5 tech stack consists of ‘standards’ that are not finished, and have implementations that diverge across browsers, thus forcing web application developers to provide multiple implementations of the same functionality – who would like to pay for that? I know people that sell over the web and implement their web shop in HTML version Long.Ago to guarantee broad accessibility; this is what the Browser Wars have accomplished – people do not like to invest in new versions of the Html tech stack. Microsoft will not make itself dependent on these ‘standards’ it does not control.

Furthermore, Silverlight can do things that the HTML5 tech stack in itself cannot, or never will be allowed to do, if only for security reasons, see e.g. Microsoft’s refusal to support WebGL). Would Microsoft suddenly turn around, embrace this technology and replace its own? Unlikely.

However, Microsoft also didn’t move to take away the fears; they have the Build Conference in September 2011 at which they will tell more. Nevertheless, one might expect some indirect damage control, and it came quickly.

Damage control – differing opinions

First there was the blog post by David Burela referring to analysis of a leaked early Windows 8 build. The conclusion seems to be that software that will be built on top of Windows 8, will be built with .Net and Xaml. A particular group of applications, called ‘immersive’ applications (running within the Windows Shell) can be build using Html5 and JavaScript, much like some types of applications for Vista.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet goes further and publishes parts of correspondence with developers who have actually analyzed the early Windows 8 build. The picture that arises from that article is that an improved version of the .Net runtime (referred to as the Windows Runtime) will be central in Windows 8, and is programmable by Xaml in concert with a wide variety of programming languages, i.e. it is like Silverlight / WPF. Within Windows 8, XNA can be used for 3D graphics. Windows 8 apps built using ‘.Net’ should be easy to port to other devices – phones, tablets, etc. say by recompiling and compensating for the form factor. The Html5 apps might depend on the Windows Runtime as well (MD: this would explain the little understood remarks from Microsoft about native support of Html5). WPF and Silverlight may cease to exist as such in Windows 8, but the constituent technologies will be there.

In conclusion, it seems as if Microsoft is creating the facilities to build apps in Windows 8 using the HYML5 tech stack, as an addition to the .Net framework, rather than as a replacement. The motivation to do so, by the way, is to attract more, new developers to the platform. It does not seem to be the case that ‘immersive’ application can be build only in Html5. It seems that ‘Immersive’ is just a namespace, defining an API that is required to build applications which run within the Windows 8 shell.

C++

OK, so software can be built using a variety of .Net languages, among which C++, and the runtime seems to be closer to the metal, thus providing higher performance, because immediate OS layers have been removed.

But there is more. C++ seems to be in what is called a ‘renaissance’. More developers use it in order to gain higher performance, a new specification (C++0x) is on its way, and C++ is recently declared by Google to be the best high performance programming language.

For the next version of Visual Studio (also to be released in 2012) Microsoft announced the AMP Accelerated Massive Parallelism library at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit. AMP promises to provide full C++ access to a heterogeneous set of processors and their memory models. That is to say: you write one program that executes both on a computer with GPU, as well as one without it. Note that GPU’s are not considered to be restricted to rendering graphics. These people consider a GPU a broadly applicable parallel processor (and indeed, there exist Graphics cards without a monitor connector). The demos shown by Sutter and Moth reflect awesome performance; over 1000GFlops.

AMP aims at extreme scalability of single executables, from very simple hardware architectures of a single core processor with dedicated RAM, up to extreme scaling out in Cloud configurations. Sutter showed the aimed for heterogeneity in running an executable on a pc with a multi core CPU with onboard GPU, and also a double separate GPU installed.

My guess is that all this nice stuff also will reflect on the ways software can be build with the evolution of .Net and Xaml on Windows 8.