After the first announcement of Windows
8 in June last year, every
programming geek in this planet was tempted to have a look at it. While demonstrating
a completely different market strategy from what we have seen from Microsoft,
this time the software giant released 3 preview versions of Windows 8 to get
the customer feedback before letting out the RTM product. Anyhow it is official,
Windows 8 will be released on October 26, 2012. So whats the real deal?, Why
Microsoft changed strategies?, What is so special about
Windows 8? In the words of the Windows Design Team, Windows 8 has been "Reimagined from
the chipset to the user experience”.
So what is the reimagination?
Apart from all the other changes, I think it
is appropriate, I speak only about the changes we are most interested in, which
is mainly the all new user interface based on Microsoft’s Metro design
language. The new interface is designed to better suit touch screen input, along
with traditional mouse and keyboard input. Assuming that all of you have a brief understanding about the Metro – Style environment, I will straight away
move to the point. Being 1st class citizens in the Windows 8 environment,
Metro Style apps have great potential than the other types of applications in
terms of user experience and portability over a wide range of devices. So in
future, developers who targets writing applications to Windows 8 may force to
develop them as Metro - Style apps in order to get that added value and fashion. More
over any developer who wishes to see their existing win forms application in
the Metro – Style platform, there won’t be any option than to a complete
rewrite from the scratch.
What is the impact on the daily developer?
We see two major aspects in this whole design
change of the Windows Eco system.
1. The learning curve
Even though Microsoft says that you can use
your existing skills of .NET and the other supported language in developing
Metro Style apps, there are a number of technical aspects you need to know
before starting on Metro Style. So for the average developer it will take some
time to adapt to the new platform. From a commercial perspective we are looking
at a considerable amount of man hours dedicated for training which is direct
cost for a company.
2. Existing .NET applications
If you want to see your existing win forms application
as a Metro Style app the only way of doing that would be to completely rewrite the whole
application. There is no conversion tool or any other supportive tool to ease
the process. So again in a commercial perspective this is high cost of
development.
Our Solution
Standard Windows forms to Windows Metro
Style porting Tool” is a project which focuses on developing a porting tool
which provides the facility to efficiently convert existing C#/.NET 4.0 based applications to Windows 8 Metro Style C# applications. The tool focuses on converting the GUI, code
behind and the configuration files. Apart from that we have integrated the facility to add new features of Metro – Style to the existing application through our tool which we do not see in win forms applications.
For an example life cycle mapping and application manifest creation. The
objective of this project would be to build a bridge between these two technologies
and ease the learning curve of Metro Style development. More over to save time and
money for commercial organizations who wish to convert their existing .NET
applications with less effort.
About us
This project is undertaken by four undergraduates as our research project of the final year at Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology(SLIIT). Due to the time
constraint and resources, we have scoped the project only in to the
conversion of C# based Windows Forms applications.
Please feel fee to add your comments and suggestions as they are
the most valuable asset for us now.
We will be posting more technical/functional details
of the project in the coming days.
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