Windows 8 Apps: Developers Pass The Judgment!

PCQuest recently covered the 18-hour coding marathon for Windows 8 held by Microsoft in Bangalore. We managed to have a chat with some developers to get their take on building Apps for Microsoft’s latest platform release...

The excitement was palpable as 3,500 developers started on building their apps during the non-stop 18hour hackathon conducted by Microsoft. While they were working on their Windows 8 apps, we had a chat with some developers on their thoughts on Windows 8 style app development.

One of the participants, Nikhil, pointed out that the biggest plus point was that the “UI is easy to make, just drag and drop, while everything else is loaded internally”. However, another added that the Visual Studio 2012 “tools should be more flexible”, as “they keep changing the base code from version to version, and many things get deprecated” as “2-3 library APIs had been removed from the consumer preview till the RTM preview ”.

I also talked to Gaurav, whose team of five was building 3 apps over the period of the entire marathon . Gaurav said that “with IntelliSense, it does half the work for you, and it is much faster than previous versions” and added that “Microsoft has increased their 5 million audience to 640 million on the apps front, and this is a big inspiration for developers.”

With the release of Windows 8, developers have a huge opportunity to capture the market of users shifting from older versions of Windows. With around 690 million devices running Windows 7, which is directly upgradeable to Windows 8, Windows 8 apps have the potential to achieve an unprecedented level of reach to general audiences.

*Note: Participant names have been changed to preserve anonymity.