http://www.ebay.com/itm/260921667223

I should probably declare up front that I’m not a desktop dev. WinRT will not have any significant impact on my work, at least for now. So perhaps I care about that less than someone whose bread and butter is on the desktop. And believe me, I’m not uncritical of Microsoft; far from it. But the ‘everyone’s doing it’ argument is a valid one if not doing it is likely to lead to market failure for Microsoft’s products going forward. I think everyone would agree that they’ve been on a bit of a slide in recent years. Given the choice between a locked-down but rock-solid platform and one that (whether justified or not – and I know to a large extent it’s not) has a reputation for being flaky, which will an average user pick? We’re at the point now where many people can do without a PC altogether and just use a tablet plus a phone. I’d rather MS were the leading provider of tablet OSes than Apple, for sure.

To be clear – I’m not saying it’s a great thing for developers. It isn’t. I have avoided the temptation to even consider developing for iOS precisely because I didn’t want to be dictated to and forced to use MacOS and (shudder) XCode. But I am saying that it’s looking inevitable.

For this generation, at least, you should still be able to get everything you want out of Windows 8 on Intel desktops (or meaty tablets). Stick with Win32 and leave WinRT and Metro for those that want it. I’ll no doubt have Win8 on my desktop from the Consumer Preview onwards, but I’ll still be spending my day in Visual Studio and ASP.NET.

Like you, I guess, I’ve been a career-long MS developer and user. I’ve been through all the great upheavals of the last 20 years – COM, DCOM, Windows DNA, ASP, .NET. I’ve focused on .NET for the last decade, so I guess I’m used to working in a more ‘managed’ environment. I was hopping up and down with the rest of them when it briefly seemed possible that they were going to ditch .NET in favour of HTML5 + Javascript exclusively.

Come the day that I can no longer make a living writing Web stuff in .NET, I’ll jump ship to wherever I need to go. If that is Java on Linux, or Ruby on Rails, so be it. Though I hope it won’t be

So, once again, apologies for the over-reaction. I see your point, and it’s a valid one. I don’t feel the same, yet, but I suppose I can afford to. For now.

I don’t hate Microsoft, I hated Apple when the Mac was top dog because it was so closed!

Microsoft and IBM came along and freed the people with a much more open platform!

Your argument that “Everyone else is doing it” reeks of a teenager trying to cave into peer pressure, it’s childish!

I’m not renting hardware, and I want to access my hard disk in any way I want, and I don’t want my OS deciding what I can and can’t do except within reason.

Granted, we MS developers have little choice right now, MS is still better than Apple from this developers perspective(although the difference is shrinking). I’m also in total love with Windows 8 server, and we haven’t even been intimate yet, lol.

All I’m saying is that none of this will be forgotten, and the risk MS has embraced is that we will never be blindly loyal again. The love affair is over, and it’s strictly a business relationship where if we get the chance, we’ll drop them in a NY minute and never look back.

In short, they’ve betrayed their founding principles AND their developers. I can say that and still develop for Metro, own a Windows Phone(yeah, I’m one of the 5), and develop backend apps on Windows Server… I’m just not as happy as I used to be.

It will be fascinating to see, you compare with Windows 7 phone, it marvells me that it doesn’t sell better, but the problem lies with the local store more than anything. they don’t put the phone up on display, or if they do they are either out of battery or not properly tended to so that people can actually play with them.

Also WOA will have most apps that will exist for Windows 8 x86, which will give it some momentum by itself.

But I agree, there is no reason or either Windows 8 x86 or WOA to succeed on tablets, it would have been a sure win if the windows 8 tablets would be like a normal Windows 8 desktop, but with the battery Life and convience of an iPad. But I don’t Think they combination can be made to work in the consumer jungle.

On the other hand, it seems fairly simple to port most of the LoB apps from SL to C#+XAML on metro. I guess I will soon know as I plan to try just that on the CTP.

If that works fairly painless then losing SL won’t matter much, SL was never used for the broad reach, it was used for its productivity.