Category Archives: microsoft

microsoft, mobile, windows

Blogging with Surface

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I generally post to this site using Windows Live Writer. Unfortunately this does not run on Microsoft’s new Surface tablet, since it is a desktop executable and Windows RT only allows Windows Store apps to be installed. So how to blog?

This site runs WordPress, and of course you can post using the browser. However I prefer to use an offline editor, and the only choice in this respect that I know of is Microsoft Word. I looked at this years ago and decided it was poor; but needs must.

One of the issues with using Word is that while it can connect successfully to the WordPress api for posting, it cannot apparently post images using the WordPress upload API – though if you know a way of configuring Word for this, please let me know. It does support FTP, so I set up an FTP server for this purpose. I did all this on the surface, though in order to make an SSH connection to the web server to sort out the DNS I resorted to VPN and Remote Desktop so I could use Putty, another Windows utility that does not work on Surface RT.

If you can see the image above, then it worked.

hardware, microsoft, mobile, software development

Windows 8 launches: key questions remain, but Surface shines

I am in New York for the launch of Windows 8. This morning was the general launch; the Surface RT launch is to follow this afternoon. Windows chief Steven Sinofsky introduced the event. I was intrigued by how dismissive he was about a key Windows 8 issue: the learning challenge it presents to new users. He gave the impression that a few minutes experimenting will be enough, though he also referred to a guide that may be new; yesterday I picked up a small booklet which I had not seen before, introducing Windows 8.

Next Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green and Michael Angiulo came on to show off a few details about the Windows 8 user interface, followed by Ballmer who gave what is for him a muted address about how great Windows 8 is going to be. Solid facts were few, but Microsoft did mention that over 1000 devices are certified for Windows 8.

So what is Windows 8 all about? It’s a tablet, it’s a laptop, it’s a PC we were told, in other words, everything. But everything is also nothing, and my sense is that even Microsoft is struggling to articulate its message, or at least, struggling to do so in ways that would not offend key partners.

Personally I like Windows 8, I find it perfectly usable and appreciate the convenience of the tablet format. That said, I look at all these hybrid devices and my heart sinks: these are devices that are neither one thing nor another, and pay for it with complexity and expense. Will they win over users who might otherwise have bought a MacBook? I am doubtful.

Windows RT and Intel Atom devices are more interesting. If Microsoft and its partners can push out Windows 8 devices that inexpensive and work well on tablets without keyboard clutter, that is what has potential to disrupt the market.

That brings me on to Surface. It is all in the body language: the conviction that was missing from the Windows 8 keynote in the morning was present in the Surface keynote in the afternoon. Even the room was better, with stylish Surface fake pavement art in the corridor and smart white seating.

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General Manager Panos Panay showed off little details, like the way the rear camera angles so that it is level when the Surface is set on its kickstand. He talked about Microsoft’s drop tests, claiming that they had tested 72 different ways to drop a Surface and designed it not to break. He demonstrated this by dropping it onto a carpet, which was not too challenging, but the fact that Sinofsky successfully used it as a skateboard was more impressive.

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No doubt then: Microsoft has more enthusiasm for Surface, described by Panay as “the perfect expression of Windows”, than it does for the 1000 certified devices from its partners, though the company would never admit that directly.

What is the significance of Surface? It goes beyond the device itself. It will impact Microsoft’s relationship with its hardware partners. It embodies an Apple-like principle that design excellence means hardware designed for software designed for hardware. It shows that the “OK but nothing special” approach of most Windows hardware vendors is no longer good enough. If Surface is popular, it will also introduce demand for more of the same: a 7” Surface, a Surface phone, and more.

Despite its quality, the success of Surface is not assured. The biggest problem with Windows 8 now is with the lack of outstanding apps. That is not surprising given that the platform is new, and you would think that users would make allowance for that. On the other hand, they may lack patience and opt for better supported platforms instead, in which case building app momentum will be a challenge.

adobe, apple, cloud computing, development, microsoft, mobile, software development

Telerik Icenium: new desktop and cloud IDE for mobile development

When I heard that Telerik is bringing out a new IDE for mobile app development, I could contain my excitement, especially after learning that it is another PhoneGap/Cordova based approach, wrapping JavaScript and HTML as a native app. While speaking to Telerik’s Doug Seven though, I found myself increasingly impressed.

If that name sounds familiar, it might be because Seven was a director of Product Management in the Visual Studio team at Microsoft, and you can see that influence in the new IDE, which is called Icenium. Spot the Metro-style buttons at top left of the IDE!

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Icenium has several components. There is a Windows IDE called Graphite, illustrated above. Those on other platforms, or in distributed teams, can use Mist, which is a browser-based IDE which replicates many of the features of Graphite. There is also a set of cloud-based services to handle building apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. This means you do not need to install all the necessary SDKs on your own machine. Icenium also lets developers build signed iOS packages without needing to have a Mac.

The Icenium Device Simulator lets you test applications quickly on your own machine.

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The tools look good, though I have not tried them yet, but the unique feature of Icenium is the ability to deploy and test quickly on multiple devices. Code is kept synchronized between Graphite and Mist, and also pushed out though LiveSync to multiple devices. Here is a snap of the view from Doug Seven’s desk, grabbed from his online presentation. He showed me how a code change ripples almost instantly to all these devices for testing.

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An intriguing part of this is an iOS app called Ion which is a sort of runtime shell for Icenium apps. This means you can load apps for testing onto iOS devices that are not unlocked for developer use. You can also demonstrate apps on a client’s device using Ion. Apple’s attitude to runtimes in the App Store must be softening.

Icenium supports version control using either a Git repository hosted on the service, or your own choice of URL-based Git repositories.

Pricing will be per-developer at $16.00 per month if you sign up for a year, or $19.00 per month without a contract. Once you sign up, you can use all the tools on all your machines. You can also use Telerik’s Kendo UI Mobile framework. It is free until May 1 2013.

Isn’t Icenium’s cloud build feature similar to what Adobe’s PhoneGap Build already does?

“It’s a great comparison,” says Seven. “Adobe has the technology to make this [seamless development experience] possible, they just chose not to do it … [PhoneGap Build] is not integrated into the workflow. It’s a very manual process, I have to zip up my files, submit them to the PhoneGap Build process, then I get back these application packages that I have to manually deploy to my devices to see if it works.”

There is no support yet for mobile web apps, as opposed to apps packaged with Cordova, but this is a possibility for the future.

Like Adobe, Telerik has found WebKit and Google Chrome irresistible, despite Seven’s Microsoft background. WebKit is embedded in the Graphite IDE. You can use Mist with any modern browser, though “the one limitation is that the browser-based device simulator does require Chrome,” though he add that in general, “I use Mist on my iPad all the time.”

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, mobile, open source, professional, software, software development

ThoughtWorks bemoans excessive software complexity, advocates small, focused services

ThoughtWorks has released its latest Technology Radar, an opinionated analysis of software development trends.

Things the folk at ThoughtWorks like include automated build and deployment, essential for Continuous delivery; NOSQL database managers especially Neo4j; mobile-first development; the AppCode IDE for Apple’s Objective-C; the Graphite realtime graphing tool for creating dashboards; Clojure and Scala for programming.

I meet some of the ThoughtWorks team at developer conferences from time to time, and generally find them smart and though-provoking to talk to. They must be the despair of the big enterprise software vendors, with a liking for open source and an aversion to heavyweight high-maintenance systems.

This remark particularly caught my eye:

Simple architectures—Simple continues to gain traction, including both techniques for building and composing applications, as well as infrastructure-based techniques to enable simple deployment, failover and recovery. This theme is a recurring one for us, but we have not yet seen the usage shifts we believe are necessary.

I asked consultant James Lewis and practice lead Sam Newman to expand on that. Why do we continue to choose complexity over simplicity?

“A lot of people like to stay inside their big box, and don’t understand the complexities that then creates,” said Newman. “There’s a lack of critical thought given to how services talk to each other. A lot of them are driven by whatever the vendor says you do. Java makes RMI very easy. [Microsoft] .NET makes binding to WSDL [SOAP] schemas very easy. All these tools make bad things very easy to do.

“When you start talking to organisations about smaller services that are focused on doing one thing well, they have the horror associated with now having more than one box to manage and operate. So it’s hard to talk about moving from one big monolithic complicated box that is hard to change, to lots of little boxes, without also having conversations with those clients about how they get better at managing multiple services.

“Netflix has 300 services. Each service runs on at least six machines. They are very good at deploying those services. Yet they are not an overly complicated domain compared to some of our clients.”

“Amazon were talking about this in 2004,” adds Lewis, “the idea that you join up development of these small, simple applications with the operational control, so the same people who build them are also the people who run them. Now that we’re seeing both private and public clouds, and the ability to spin up machines becoming more and more prevalent, its starting to become more attractive.”

This is a consistent theme from ThoughtWorks. Break up complex solutions into many small services, think about how they talk to each other (with REST and HTTP favoured), and think about the infrastructure and how to automate it as well as the software itself.

“In many organisations these conversations are happening,” Newman told me. “I go to clients now, and they talk about the Enterprise Service Bus as being something they’d love to get rid of if they only knew how. Five to ten years ago, to even mention the Enterprise Service Bus as being a problem, they’d look at you with daggers in their eyes.”

“It’s almost like we’re now able to fulfil the promise of service orientation,” says Lewis. “It needed these additional practices, around things like automated deployment, automated rollback, and an understanding that people and process are tied intrinsically with it.”

Another issue, claims Lewis, is that software architects simply get out of touch with best practice.

“Most architects who build big systems are quite a long way from their codebases. They sit in rooms talking to other architects. They might have last written a line of code five or ten years ago. What they do is to design systems as they would have done ten years ago. People do get divorced from the latest trends and perpetuate less effective ways of doing things.”

Finally, here’s something for the Microsoft platform people who read this site. ThoughtWorks is not altogether averse to Microsoft and mentions the Azure cloud platform as something which is becoming interesting. But Windows Phone:

Despite a promising start to Windows Phone, a well thought-out user interface, and probably the best development experience of any mobile platform, we have seen several stumbles in the execution of the platform strategy by Microsoft and its partners. This makes us less optimistic about the future of the platform than we were in the last radar.

Translation: nice mobile platform, but nobody’s buying it. Then again, on Monday next week Windows Phone 8 will be properly unveiled. Still hope?

microsoft, mobile, windows

Microsoft posts decline in revenue and profits on the eve of Windows 8 launch

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Microsoft has announced its results for the first quarter of its financial year. The quote from Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein sums it up pretty well:

While enterprise revenue continued to grow and we managed our expenses, the slowdown in PC demand ahead of the Windows 8 launch resulted in a decline in operating income

Except that is for one thing. Klein implies that the PC slowdown is something to be expected ahead of the launch of a new edition of Windows, but I suggest there is more to it than that. First though, here are the figures, in the summary form that I have used before:

Quarter ending September 30th 2012 vs quarter ending September 30th 2011, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Profit Change
Client (Windows + Live) 3244 -1630 1646 -1624
Server and Tools 4552 +336 1748 +183
Online 697 +56 -364 150
Business (Office) 5502 -133 3646 -71
Entertainment and devices 1946 -15 19 -321

What is notable here is a significant reduction in revenue from the Windows client, while the enterprise-focused server and tools continue to grow. The Office products are bumping along fine, despite a small reduction in revenue, and despite the fact that we are on the eve of a new edition of Office as well as Windows.

Note that I am not a financial analyst, so take the following observations in that light.

I suggest that falling revenue from the Windows client is not just because Windows 8 is on the way, but because of a shift in the market towards mobile and tablets – Apple iPad and Google Android devices. See this post for an example of that in the consumer market.

Will Windows 8 deliver the hoped-for boost in PC and Windows sales? I am sceptical, especially in the short term (in other words, the next quarter). I discussed some of the issues here. Microsoft is making radical changes both to Windows and to its business model. It is doing the right thing, bringing Windows into the tablet era, and venturing into Windows device manufacture in order to pull quality of hardware design into its own hands rather than trusting entirely to OEM partners.

That transition may or may not work long-term, but in the short term it is likely to be costly. In Windows 8 Microsoft has concentrated on establishing a new ecosystem around the new tablet-friendly Windows Runtime platform. The consequence is that it does not deliver much benefit to users of desktop applications – in other words, all Windows applications other than those in the new Windows app store. Further, moving to Windows 8 is difficult at first for those familiar with Windows, so much so that many users react against it.

This means that Windows 8 will not deliver the upgrade rush that Windows 7 enjoyed, following on from the unpopular Vista. Rather, its success rests on the new elements in Windows: tablet use and Windows 8 apps.

Right now though, there is very little in the Windows Store that is good enough to drive sales. Developers are waiting to see if the platform succeeds before diving in.

The Windows 8 platform does have plenty of potential; and Microsoft is putting a huge promotional push behind it. Against that, there are powerful forces that will tend to suppress demand. It is going to be a battle, and one for which the outcome is hard to predict.

hp, microsoft, windows

Will Windows 8 save the PC? Gartner reports 8% year on year sales decline

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Gartner has reported on third quarter worldwide PC sales and they do not look good:

  • At 87.5 million units, they have declined 8.3% compared with the same quarter in 2011
  • HP is down 16.4%, Dell is down 13.7%. Lenovo managed 9.8% growth and is now number one with 15.7% of the market

Key quote: “The third quarter has historically been driven by back-to-school sales, but U.S. PC shipments did not increase, not even sequentially, from the second quarter of 2012. Channels were conservative in placing orders” said Gartner’s Mikako Kitagawa.

Gartner researchers add that ultrabooks have failed to turn round sales because they are not competitively priced. Worth noting when you look at the expensive hybrid docking tablets and convertibles vendors have come up with for Windows 8.

Gartner’s figures exclude “media tablets” such as the Apple iPad or Android tablets.

Of course you would expect a decline on the eve of the launch of Windows 8, as retailers clear their shelves, though Kitagawa says “On the professional side, there was minimum impact from Windows 8 in the quarter because the professional market will not adopt Windows 8 PCs immediately after the release.”

But will consumers rush to buy Windows 8 machines and make the next quarter boom? Let me throw out a few predictions:

  • Kitagawa is right about the professional market. We may see a few Windows 8 tablets show up among execs, but most companies will go the easy route and stick with Windows 7 for the time being.
  • The Windows 8 launch will be fascinating with cries of agony from some while others say it is rather good.
  • Time will be good for Windows 8 as the shock wears off and people learn how to use it.
  • Microsoft’s Surface will be a success and show Windows 8 at its best, though there will be confusion over lack of compatibility with desktop applications.

I am not sure though that this means a strong fourth quarter. Confusion over the new UI and vendors with over-complicated hybrid products will probably prevent sales from taking off immediately. Further, Windows 8 has to compete with Windows 7, which is already pretty good.

Broadly I reckon Microsoft is doing the right thing with Windows 8: reinventing the platform as a tablet OS while keeping faith with the past, on x86 at least.

I have doubts about some aspects of the Metro user interface and expect it will improve in later versions with some softening of the “immersive UI” religion that hides menus and toolbars so effectively that users think apps are broken, or have to click or tap twice when once should be enough – eg the back button in Metro-style Internet Explorer.

Even so, there are a few excellent new-style apps, more will come, and I expect the platform to succeed eventually.

.net, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio, web authoring, windows

Visual Studio 2012 hits and misses

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A few quick reflections after writing a rather large review of Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft’s development tool for everything Windows.

Several things impressed me. The Graphics Diagnostics Tools for Direct3D, for example, is amazing; you can capture a frame, select a pixel, and drill down into why it is the colour it is. See Amit Mohindra’s blog post here. Though admittedly I got “Unable to start the experiment session” on my first go with this; make sure the Debugger Type is set to Native Only.

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Graphics is not really my area; but web development is more like it, and I continue to be impressed by what Microsoft has done with Windows Azure. You can go from hitting New Project in Visual Studio to an ASP.NET MVC 4.0 web site up and running on Windows Azure in moments. Even if you add an Azure SQL database into the mix it is not much harder. The experience is slightly spoiled by the fact that the new Azure portal for web sites etc is still in preview and seems to be a bit unreliable; I sometimes get an error when logging in and have to refresh before it works. That is a minor detail though; the actual deployed web sites and applications seem to work fine.

That said, it was also apparent to me that Microsoft’s Azure story has become a little confusing. Want an ASP.NET web app on Azure? Choose between a Web Role, a stateful VM, or a web site. Both web roles and web sites can be scaled quite effectively, thanks to the built in load balancer for web sites. Still, choice is good, as long as the differences are understood. It appears that Microsoft is still backing the web role approach as the most architecturally sound; but web sites are so easy to use and understand that it would not surprise me if they are more successful.

Another hit with me is the SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), once I understood the difference between DACPACs and BACPACs – a DACPAC encapsulates the schema and logins etc for a database in a single file that you can import elsewhere, whereas a BACPAC also stores the data. The approach in SSDT is that a database schema is just a bunch of SQL scripts, and that if you manage it that way it makes a lot of sense in terms of version control, schema comparisons, deployment and maintenance.

On the ALM side I am impressed with Team Foundation Server Express, which is genuinely easy to install and lights up most of the key features of Microsoft’s ALM platform, though it does not handle the full SharePoint team portal or all the reporting features. Cloud hosting is also an option for TFS and that also worked OK for me, though with occasional delays as my code crossed the internet.

I hesitate slightly with TFS though. It feels like a heavyweight solution, whereas most developers like lightweight solutions. I know that open source tools like git and subversion only do a fraction of what you can do with TFS; but they also never keep me waiting.

I also wonder whether TFS simply creates too many artefacts. Work items seem to multiply rapidly as you use the system, which is good for traceability but could also become a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare if you have team members who make every action into a thing that needs comments and deadlines and links to source code and so on.

I guess it is like any other tool; it will work well for a team that already works well, but will not solve problems for a team that is already a bit dysfunctional.

I had not looked at Microsoft’s modelling featurs for a while; I was interested to discover new code generation features in the UML diagramming tools.

I am slowly beginning to understand what Microsoft is doing with apps for SharePoint. Get this: Microsoft is moving SharePoint 2013 towards being more of a service than a platform; you do not build apps on SharePoint; you build apps that use SharePoint services. This means you can at last develop SharePoint apps without having SharePoint installed on the same box as Visual Studio (thank goodness). And you can build SharePoint apps with PHP or Java as well as ASP.NET, because they are calling SharePoint, not running on it. Makes sense.

So what is not to like? There are a few puzzles, like the way Visual C++ has fallen behind in standards compliance despite the presence of Herb Sutter at Microsoft.

I also still find the whole XAML/Visual Studio/Blend thing a bit of a struggle. One day I will open up Blend, Microsoft’s XAML designer, and it will all fall into place as a natural and quick way to build a user interface, but it has not happened yet. I have also heard that developers should find the designer in Visual Studio enough; but at best it is rather slow and a little unpredictable.

Otherwise the tools for Windows Store apps seem decent to me, though I have heard that advanced developers are finding some issues; not surprising considering how new a platform it is. It is a distinctive platform, and my sense it that while there is a lot to like, developers need time to get the best from it, and there is also scope for Microsoft to improve it, maybe a few refinements in Windows 8 SP1?

Considering its scope, Visual Studio was relatively stable in my tests, though I did once get it into a state where it froze every time I tried to debug an application; fixed by a reboot (sigh).

I do not mind the monochrome user interface; I do not like it especially but it is something you get used to and do not notice after a short time.

Overall? Few people will use everything that is in Visual Studio and of course I have missed out most of it in the above, but it is a mighty achievement and still an asset to Microsoft’s platform.

.net, microsoft, software development

Windows 8 discoverability: users searching for search

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I have been poking around in the Windows Store as the public launch of Windows 8 approaches, and was intrigued by the reviews for the Wikipedia app, which is nicely done. Several users complain about the lack of a search function:

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In fact the Wikipedia app has excellent fast search, on the Charms bar:

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The problem: when you open the Wikipedia app there is no visual clue of where to find Search. Even if you have figured out that you need to right-click, or swipe up, to show the menu bar, it does not show a Search option.

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The Wikipedia app developers have done the design correctly, in terms of Microsoft’s guidelines. This is the “Immersive user interface” which shows content rather than distracting UI furniture.

Another advantage of having Search on the Charms bar is that you are just a tap away from performing the same search in other apps, such as Internet Explorer.

The concept fails though if users simply do not discover key functions. What is the use of an encyclopaedia without search?

It does not help that the Charms bar, which is where Search lives, is hard to summon with the mouse. It is OK on a tablet (swipe from the right) or with the keyboard (Windows Key + Q). With the mouse, you have to position the pointer vaguely in the top or bottom corner and wait for Charms to fade into view if you have done it correctly. It is a vague movement with no feedback that you have initiated an action, like a button that does not click.

I presume though that as users live with Windows 8, Windows Key + Q will become natural when looking for a Search function (hah!). It is fair to say though that the UI does not score highly for discoverability.

microsoft, mobile, software development, windows

Appcelerator mobile developer survey shows Windows 8 progress, uncertainty

Cross-platform mobile tools vendor Appcelerator has released its latest mobile developer survey (in conjunction with IDC) representing the views of around 5,500 developers using its tools.

It is worth a read this time around. I was particularly interested to see what Appcelerator developers think of Windows 8, launching later this month. There is a chart showing the percentage of developers who are “very interested” in developing for various mobile platforms, and which shows Apple iOS leading at 85%/83% for iPhone and iPad, Android next, then HTML5, and then Windows 8 Tablets at 33% – already ahead of Windows Phone as well as Amazon and RIM devices (RIM has declined from 40% in January 2011).

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The report says that potential Windows 8 developers are most interested in the “shared development capabilities between desktop and tablet promised by Microsoft with the launch of Windows 8.” I am not sure exactly what this means, and of course surveys like this are broad-brush and different developers will have meant different things. It could be about code sharing between desktop applications and Windows Runtime (WinRT) apps. It could be about the ability to run WinRT apps on the desktop as well as the tablet. It could be about Visual Studio and its ability to target multiple Windows platforms. However, the the survey goes on to talk about a “single paradigm for both desktop and tablet/smartphone applications” which seems to look forward to a future Windows where desktop applications really are legacy.

There is also a note that there were as many developers convinced that they will not be building apps for Windows 8 or Windows phone, as those who were.

What really counts is in the next paragraph in the report:

A large installed base of devices was the #1 criterion for 53% of developers when asked about why they choose to develop on a platform

This is the simple truth, which is why Microsoft has chosen a strategy which puts WinRT on every Windows 8 box whether or not it is really wanted.

The report also states that developers are dissatisfied with HTML5 for mobile applications, in terms of monetization, security, fragmentation, performance, and more. I suggest not taking too much account of this since Appcelerator’s Titanium tool is an alternative to HTML for mobile apps, so will have attracted those who do not want to use HTML5.

Finally, there is a fun section on what devices developers think they will be targeting in 2015. Televisions head the list, followed by connected cars. Most intriguing though are the final two: foldable screens and Google Glass. Apparently 67.1% believe Google Glass is in their future. Surveys, always entertaining but given the volatility of the results, not something you can rely on as a predictor.

.net, javascript, microsoft, professional

Here comes TypeScript: Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript

Microsoft’s Anders Hejlsberg has introduced TypeScript, a programming language which is a superset of JavaScript and which compiles to JavaScript code.

The thinking behind TypeScript is that JavaScript is unsuitable for large projects.

“JavaScript was never designed to be a programming language for big applications,” says Microsoft’s Anders Hejlsberg, inventor of C#. “It’s a scripting language.”

The ubiquity of JavaScript makes it remarkably useful though, with that now extending to the server thanks to projects like node.js. Microsoft is using node.js for its Azure Mobile Services.

TypeScript therefore lets you use features including type annotations, classes, modules and interfaces to make large projects more robust and maintainable.

Variable names are preserved when TypeScript is compiled. Further, since TypeScript is a superset, any JavaScript code can be pasted into a TypeScript project. The compiler is open source and you can download an early version here.

Microsoft is also trying to stay close to the specification for Ecmascript 6, the proposed next iteration of the official JavaScript standard, where relevant.

There is tooling for Visual Studio including a language service to provide code hinting, syntax highlighting and the like.

TypeScript differs from projects like Google Web Toolkit or Script#, both of which also emit JavaScript, in that it does not compile from one language into another; rather, it compiles into a reduced version of itself.

Why is Microsoft doing this? That is the interesting question. I would conjecture that it is partly self-interest. Microsoft itself has to write increasing amounts of JavaScript, for things like Office Web Apps (apparently written in Script#) and the new Azure portals. Azure Mobile Services uses JavaScript as mentioned above. JavaScript is also one of the options for coding apps for Windows 8. Better tools will help Microsoft itself to be more productive.

That said, the arrival of TypeScript will re-ignite the debate about whether Microsoft, while not anywhere close to abandoning .NET, is nevertheless drifting away from it, towards both native code in Windows and now JavaScript in the managed code space.

More information from Microsoft’s S Somasegar here.