Windows 8 Hackathon

A week ago I had the opportunity to attend a hackathon run out of the Auckland Microsoft office. The idea was to spend the weekend building a Windows 8 Metro application either as a one off experiment or for the longer term goal of having something ready for the launch of Windows 8. When developing with new platforms such as Metro and WinRT searches on Bing or Google won’t help you so having some Microsoft experts and a lot of other developers around really helps smooth the rough edges you’ll invariably encounter. It also provided the chance to sit down and use Windows 8 in anger, I think it’s only after this sort of use that you can really judge a new operating system.

In terms of development I chose to keep working with C# and Xaml and found that almost all my skills from Windows Phone transferred across which was incredibly gratifying. There were obviously some new API’s to learn around Tiles, the Charms and the new async / await syntax (which is awesome BTW), but this was expected and the API’s I worked with held little surprises. I’ll be sharing bits and pieces of what I learnt through the blog over the next few weeks. I found the new Visual Studio very good, although I missed Resharper and found myself mashing a lot of useless key combinations. This missing of old favorites was probably more keenly felt in that libraries and packages I’m used to developing with such as Caliburn Micro don’t yet have ports to WinRT. I’m hoping these libraries will eventually make their way over.

After a weekend of solid use I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with Windows 8, initially I was having reservations about the Metro / Desktop split but now it’s not jarring or distracting and I feel is fine. I do think there will need to be some sort of introduction tutorial for new users as I don’t think a lot of the gestures / key combinations aren’t intuitive. Even though this is a Consumer Preview / Beta not having more of an introductory experience is a misstep that may have put a lot of people off.

In the end the weekend was a great experience meeting some really talented individuals building some fantastic applications. I was also honored to have my app “Hubble” a GitHub issue management client voted by the other attendees as one of the top three apps winning me a new Nokia Lumia 800! I plan to continue development of the app and will put more details up as I go. A big thanks to all the people organizing the event, it was a great weekend.