Build Windows Day 1–and a peek a what’s to come

If you haven’t caught the news already, yesterday at Microsoft’s Build Windows conference Steven Sinofsky announced a preview of Windows 8 and a bunch of developer tools, including Visual Studio 11. You can download it here.

As predicted, Windows 8 comes with an all new development framework, the Windows Runtime (WinRT). I’ve not read enough myself to begin explaining. But here’s a picture, snapped during Steven Sinofsky’s keynote:

WinRT is an object-oriented API, consisting of 1800 objects, accessible to managed, unmanaged and JavaScript code alike. Sinofsky emphasised that this WinRT is a peer to Win32, not another abstraction layer built on top of it. As this diagram clearly shows, and Sinofsky stressed in his talk, Win32, .Net and Silverlight developers have nothing to fear, all current frameworks continue to work in Windows 8.

I’m sure to have more to say about WinRT in the coming days. In the meantime, InfoQ has a couple of articles summarising what we learned in the keynote. If you’re wanting a sneak peak at the API’s themselves, check out the preview documentation on MSDN.

The videos are the first few sessions of the conference are already up on the web:

• The Day 1 Keynote
• Jensen Harris: 8 traits of great Metro style apps
• Aleš Holeček and John Sheehan: Platform for Metro style apps

What’s next?

In other news, the session list is now up for the rest of the week. Here are a few that grab my attention.

• Anders Hejlsberg on Future directions for C# and Visual Basic. Doesn’t look like “Roslyn” (compiler-as-a-service) will make it into Visual Studio 11. But he might announce some new language features for C# 5.0.
• Mark Miller and Pracheeti Nagarkar give a Deep dive into the kernel of the .Net Framework. Sounds like they’ve done yet more work to improve code-generation and garbage collection.
• Stephen Toub, one of my favourite speakers from previous years, is doing two sessions: The zen of async: Best practices for performance (vital know-how, given that many of the new WinRT API’s will be asynchronous) and Building parallelized apps with .Net and Visual Studio (look for some announcements about new parallelization libraries).
• Harry Pierson and Jesse Kaplan are doing a talk on Using the Windows Runtime from C# and Visual Basic
• Out of curiosity, I make take a look at Daniel Moth’s Taming GPU compute with C++ AMP where he’s going to introduce new tools and language features for using the GPU within C++ solutions.
• Boris Jabes talk A lap around DirectX game development tools also piques my interest, as it promises the “most significant set of improvements for developing graphics-intensive apps in over a decade”.

And now, on with the show!