Category Archives: software development

development, mobile, salesforce.com, software development

Making sense of Salesforce 1 (it’s all about mobile)

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At its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce has been hyping up its newly announced Salesforce 1. The keynote left us in do doubt: it is fantastic, it does mobile, it does cloud, it does “internet of things”.

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Co-founder Parker Harris describes Salesforce 1 at Dreamforce

But what is Salesforce 1? For those of us who like fluff-free facts, it has been difficult to discern. The APIs that make up the Salesforce 1 platform seemed on the face of it to be the same ones Salesforce has always had; yet the company says it has multiplied the number of APIs by 10 to create Salesforce 1 (a figure I still find hard to understand).

It is beginning to make sense to me. Salesforce 1 is a brand, a platform and an app.

As a brand, Salesforce 1 encompasses all the APIs that form the Salesforce platform. The best place to understand the current state of Salesforce 1 is here, where you can see links to all the APIs, including Force.com, Heroku, ExactTarget, Radian6 (social media listening), Pardot (sales automation), Desk.com (service cloud) and GoInstant (build real-time multi-user apps). Those individual APIs still exist in their own right, but Salesforce 1 is a new brand that encompasses all of them.

There is also a Salesforce 1 app for iOS and Android. This is mainly an HTML5 app, which makes it odd that it is iOS and Android only. As I understand it, you can also use a mobile browser and get a similar experience, so it might not be too bad for Windows Phone users after all.

The Salesforce 1 app is actually an evolution of the Chatter mobile app. As I understand it, it is built with the Aura framework, for creating a responsive user interface, with strong support for touch control. The Chatter app was renamed Salesforce 1 at the start of Dreamforce.

The Salesforce 1 app is built around a feed, and Salesforce describes it as a feed-first approach. Chatter has support for Publisher Actions, which now in Salesforce 1 have a more prominent role, making the feed capable of initiating tasks and being a mobile-friendly centre of operations. Some vendors I have spoken to, such as FinancialForce (wholly owned by Salesforce), see this feed-first approach as being the core of what Salesforce 1 is about. 

When Salesforce talks about creating Salesforce 1 apps, that might refer to either of two things.

One is to create custom apps for your Salesforce users, which you can do without needing much code in some cases, which will be viewed through the Salesforce 1 app.

The other is to use the Mobile SDK for iOS or Android to create a native app. This does not have to be an HTML5 app, but could be if you want the quickest route to something that works.

According to CEO Marc Benioff, speaking to the press, much of the effort behind Salesforce 1 was in making the Salesforce browser UI properly mobile-friendly. He said that this includes mobile client libraries as well as the server APIs. Salesforce has an rapid visual builder for browser apps running on its platform, called VisualForce, and apparently getting these apps working nicely on mobile took huge effort.

Benioff gave the impression that VisualForce now works perfectly on mobile, but the booklet given to developers expresses reservations:

Only VisualForce pages enabled for Salesforce Mobile Apps and attached to a tab can be added to the Salesforce 1 navigation menu. Note that you may have to optimize these pages to work and/or display correctly on a mobile device.

Nevertheless, you can see the intent here, that anything running on Salesforce will work well on a mobile device. Benioff says that he only takes a smartphone with him when travelling, no laptop or even tablet, and he expects to be able to do all his work through it.

You could therefore call Salesforce 1 the optimisation of the Salesforce platform for mobile, subject to the iOS/Android limitation.

According to Salesforce then, the new mobile-enabled platform is more productive than other app-building tools. The idea is that many corporate apps can be implemented to run in the existing Salesforce 1 app, which perhaps more correctly should be called a client, while apps that need to be deployed more broadly, such as to consumers, can be built using the Mobile SDK and deployed to the App Store or Google Play.

Developers of course are used to these kinds of claims and will be sceptical. Still, if you have adopted Salesforce to the extent that all your users are on the system, then it might make sense to build apps with Salesforce 1 and have a lot done for you, including user management and authentication.

There is talk at Dreamforce of the “app gap”, the fact that typical enterprises currently have most of their apps designed for the desktop, but are planning for most of their apps to be mobile. That gap is an opportunity for Salesforce 1.

Against that, note that apps built with Salesforce 1 are not portable to other platform, and there are the usual questions about the extent to which businesses are willing to entrust their business to a third-party cloud platform, and if so, which cloud platform is the best choice.

Is Salesforce 1 the same old stuff repackaged, or something new? It is a bit of each.

As an aside, the focus here on iOS and Android will not be helpful to Microsoft/Nokia trying to sell Windows Phone in the enterprise. You can also understand why Microsoft is partnering with Xamarin to enable its .NET, C# libraries to work on iOS/Android. If enterprises are going mobile and largely not using Windows Phone to do so, Microsoft has no choice but to give full support to those rival mobile platforms.

development, microsoft, mono, software development

What does Xamarin’s success say about open source versus proprietary? Miguel de Icaza says he has never been happier

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Yesterday Xamarin, which offers tools for targeting iOS, Android and Mac with C#, announced a partnership with Microsoft, an announcement which I wrote up on The Register. It drew a few comments, several complaining about the cost:

So it cost more then Visual Studio Pro.

And that is for 1 target platform?

or

Not so useful for little indie developers at those prices.

or

From open source to $999 per developer per year. Monetising Mono seems to have worked, so perhaps PCL being open sourced won’t be such a bargain either.

If you check Xamarin’s pricing you will see that the tools are not cheap for casual users; of course, if you are selling thousands of apps or developing corporate apps at normal rates the tools soon pay for themselves.

Xamarin is doing well as far as I am aware; CEO Nat Friedman told me of rapid growth in the number of customers and I have seen for myself the high interest in the tools at events like Microsoft BUILD earlier this year in San Francisco.

This gives me pause for reflection. What does the success of Xamarin, and the relative lack of success of Mono (the open source C# compiler and .NET Framework on which Xamarin is based) say about how well the open source business model works in the real world?

I was reminded of a conversation I had with Miguel de Icaza, creator of Mono and co-founder of Xamarin, Friedman back in February of this year, when Xamarin 2.0 was launched. I asked de Icaza if the new company publishes the source code for all its products?

“No. Our company does proprietary tools for iOS and Android apps. The entire iOS and Android support is proprietary as well as our commercial Mac support. All those three pieces are proprietary while the IDE and the Mono runtime are open source. Whether the code is open source or not depends on whether it is part of core Mono or core MonoDevelop. Otherwise it tends to end up as proprietary.”

Friedman added: “Mono has a thriving open source community around it, and Xamarin has a thriving community of developers who are building commercial mobile apps. We have 12,000 customers, many of them have never heard of Mono. They came to us because they had a problem to solve, they were C# developers and they wanted to get an iOS or Android app built. We solved that problem and that was worth money to them. The reason we have a business is that Microsoft developers do pay for tools, unlike Web developers for example. It’s been a great market for us. It allows us to invest.”

I asked de Icaza if he gets any grief from the open source community for having proprietary code in his company.

“Actually no. We started doing the proprietary bit at Novell. In fact we’ve been doing proprietary for a long time, even before we were acquired by Novell, at Ximian. We didn’t get a lot of grief from people. I can tell you though that when I was working in the Linux world, they were very stressful days for me, because people constantly complain about a “secret conspiracy” and that thing just went out of control. There are some advocates in the Linux world that don’t like anything that has the label Microsoft on.

“Ever since we did Xamarin which meant we focused on Mac and Windows, all that stress is gone, I don’t think I have ever been happier. In the past I was enduring this constant barrage of senseless attacks, and now I never hear about this.

“One thing that happened in the Linux world is that I was very proud of the four or five big apps that were built with Mono. F-spot that we built, Banshee, and a couple of others. Now with Xamarin I can’t keep track of them any more because they are measured in the thousands. There are thousands of very large apps, over a millions lines of code, that people send us. It’s a very different world, it’s just so much larger than all the work we did in Linux days back then.”

microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Visual Studio goes online, kind-of

Microsoft held its official launch for Visual Studio 2013 today, at an event in New York, although the product itself has been available since mid-October. VP Soma Somasegar nevertheless made some new announcements, in particular the availability in preview of an online Visual Studio editor, codenamed Monaco. “Developers will now be able to edit their sites directly from the web, from any modern browser, on any device,” said Somasegar on his blog.

Monaco is not intended as a replacement for the desktop IDE. Instead, it parallels what Microsoft has done with Office, which is to provide a cut-down online editor for occasional use. Monaco currently targets only web applications running on Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud platform. The technology is not altogether new, since it is built on the same base as “Napa”, the online editor for Office 365 applications.

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At the launch, Monaco was demonstrated by Erich Gamma, of Design Patterns and Eclipse fame, who says he uses it for real work. He assured us that it is built on web standards and compatible with iOS and Android tablets as well as desktop browsers.

Online editing with Monaco is only one part of what Microsoft now calls Visual Studio Online. The product also includes a hosted version of Team Foundation Server, offering source code control, collaboration tools, and an online build service. These features were already available as part of Team Foundation Service, which is now replaced by Visual Studio Online. If you are happy with the cut-down Visual Studio Express, or already have Visual Studio, then subscription is free for teams of up to five users, with additional users costing $10 per user/month for an introductory period, and rising to $20 per user/month.

Microsoft is also offering Visual Studio Online Professional, which bundling desktop Visual Studio Professional with these online services, for teams of up to 10 users, at $22.50 per user/month rising to $45.00 per user/month. This follows the same model which Adobe adopted for its Creative Cloud, where you get cloud services bundle with tools that run on the desktop.

Pay even more and you can get Visual Studio Online Advanced, which oddly does not include the Professional IDE, but supports unlimited users and has additional reporting and collaboration features, for $30 rising to $60 per user/month.

When does the introductory offer expire? It’s until further notice – 30 days’ notice will be provided before it ends. Confusing.

Somasegar also announced the preview of a new online service called Application Insights. This service analyses and monitors data from .NET or Java applications running on Windows Server or Windows Azure, and .NET applications on Windows Phone 8, reporting on availability, performance and usage.

Another new service is Elastic Load Test (not to be confused with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud), which simulates multiple concurrent users for testing the performance and behaviour of an application under stress. This requires the expensive Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN subscription, and offers 15,000 virtual user minutes per month, with additional virtual user minutes at $.001 each.

Finally, he announced a partnership with Xamarin to enable development for iOS and Android in C# and Visual Studio, extending the existing Portable Class Libraries so that non-visual code can be shared across different Windows platforms as well as the new mobile target platforms.

I spoke to Xamarin’s Nat Friedman about this and wrote it up on the Register here.

Microsoft’s strategy here is to persuade existing Windows developers, familiar with C#, Visual Studio, and both desktop and ASP.NET applications, to stick with Microsoft’s platform as they migrate towards cloud and mobile. In this context, the heart of Microsoft’s platform is Windows Azure and Office 365, which is why the company can tolerate iOS or Android clients.

The company will also hope that a proliferation of apps which integrate and extend SharePoint online will help drive subscriptions to Office 365.

The latest Visual Studio includes a new Cloud Business App project type, which is an app that sits on Windows Azure and integrates with SharePoint in Office 365. Coding in Visual Studio and deploying to Azure, both for Cloud Business apps and ordinary web applications, is now an easy process, reducing friction for developers deploying to Azure.

More information on Visual Studio Online is here.

.net, development, microsoft, professional, software development, windows, windows 7

ComponentOne’s TouchToolkit for Windows Forms: another approach to the Windows tablet problem

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Software component vendor ComponentOne has released Studio Enterprise 2013 v2.5, the latest in its suite of components, with support for Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013.

The piece that caught my eye is the TouchToolkit for Windows Forms.

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Here’s the problem. The Windows desktop is poor with touch control, which is why Microsoft created Windows 8 with its alternate, touch-friendly Windows Runtime platform. However users are resistant to the changed user interface, and it does not help with existing desktop apps.

Developers are also faced with a question of simple mathematics. Develop a Windows 8 Store app, get a market of x. Develop a Windows desktop app, get a market of many times x, since Windows 8 can run desktop apps, but Windows 7 cannot run Store apps.

Embarcadero approached this problem with a framework called Metropolis, for Delphi and RAD Studio. It builds apps that mimic the Windows Runtime look and feel, but which are actually desktop apps. Of course they do not run on Windows RT, the ARM version. It is a confusing solution in my opinion, leading users into what Martin Fowler calls the Uncanny Valley, where stuff works almost but not quite how you expect.

I prefer the thinking behind the TouchToolkit. Take your existing Windows Forms apps, or write a new one, using these controls to make them more touch-friendly. They will never be as well suited to touch control as a Store app, but they might be good enough, and of course will run on Windows 7 and earlier versions.

The controls include a magnifier, support for zoom gestures, and a touch event provider that adds gesture support to any control.

Windows Forms, we all know, is not as good as WPF if you want an application that scales nicely and supports modern design. On the other hand, Windows Forms is pragmatic and easy to use framework that remains popular for line of business apps.

development, javascript, mobile, software development, Web

Appcelerator plans to rethink Titanium architecture, standardise on WebKit JavaScript engine

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Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie has posted about his plans for Titanium, the company’s cross-platform mobile development toolkit.

The plan is to completely rewrite the core engine, while maintaining a mostly-compatible API. Central to the plans is the idea of using one JavaScript engine on all platforms:

With Ti.Next, we’ve created a small microkernel design that will allow us to have minimal bootstrap code in the native language (C, Java, C#, etc) that talks to a common set of compilers, tools and a single JavaScript Virtual Machine. We have found a way to make the WebKit KJS VM work on multiple platforms instead of using different VMs per platform. This means we can heavily optimize the microkernel (herein after called the “TiRuntime”) and maintenance, optimizations and profiling can be greatly simplified. We’re talking about ~5K LOC vs. 100K LOC per platform.

This will make it possible to share almost all the Titanium code itself across all platforms. The Titanium runtime itself will be shared code written in JavaScript.

Appcelerator says that Titanium code will be “faster than native code in most situations.”

No date for Ti.Next is given though according to this slidedeck the plan is to have the “first set of developer builds available soon to GitHub repo – possibly in the next 45-60 days”. It adds, “production builds are a ways away.”

Using a WebKit JavaScript engine on Windows Phone, for example, sounds interesting.

.net, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

Anders Hejlsberg says C# 6.0 to use Roslyn compiler, coming in next Visual Studio after VS 2013

A disappointment at Microsoft’s Build conference last month was lack of news about the next version of C#, version 6.0. C# architect Anders Hejlsberg did present a session, but it was on TypeScript, a language which compiles to JavaScript.

Aside: Hejlsberg talks about the new Xbox music app in Windows 8.1 (and Xbox One) which is written in JavaScript. It is a large app with 500,000  lines of code, and new features are now implemented in TypeScript (30,000 lines so far).

However, Hejlsberg did also talk about C# 6.0 at Build, during this Channel 9 Q&A, though you have to scroll through to reach the C# content (about 34 minutes in).

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He confirmed that C# in Visual Studio 2013 is the same as before, but there will be new previews of the forthcoming “Roslyn” compiler soon, and that C# 6.0 will be in the “next Visual Studio after” which suggests Visual Studio 2014, presuming Microsoft sticks to its annual release cycle.

“We are at a point where the Roslyn compilers are done,” he said.

Roslyn, Hejlsberg explained, is the new compiler for “C#, and VB, and the language services in the IDE.”

Roslyn performance will be at least as good as the existing native compiler, says Hejlsberg. It is better suited to parallel processing so will take advantage of multi-core machines, “particularly for large projects.”

You can read more about Roslyn here. Microsoft describes it as “opening up the Visual Basic and C# compilers as APIs.” Practical benefits include features like instant porting of VB code to and from C#, and the use of C# and VB as macro languages within a .NET application.

Hejlsberg also says that Roslyn will enable a faster pace of evolution for C# in future.

Another aside: Xamarin, which provides a compiler for C# targeting iOS and Android, gets a nod of approval from Hejlsjberg. “I’m a great fan of their work,” he says.

Blogger (and former Microsoft Excel developer) Wesner Moise provides a transcript of the key points.

development, mobile, professional, software development

Mobile developer survey: Apple iOS most profitable platform, but even Windows Phone is viable

Vision Mobile has released the results of a survey of 6000 mobile developers, sponsored by Blackberry and Mozilla.

Reading through the survey reminds me that despite the critical importance of apps to mobile platforms, surveys which look at developer intent are poor predictors of the future health of specific platforms. High interest or even affection for some new platform tends to dissipate quickly if platform adoption is poor.

Developers influence the success of a platform by developing (or not developing) desirable apps, but this is only one among many factors. Others include:

  • Mobile operators: which devices are they promoting and subsidising most?
  • Devices: which has the right blend of looks, usability and features?
  • Fashion: which smartphones are my friends using?
  • Price: which devices are best value?
  • Marketing: which vendor is doing the best job?
  • Enterprise: in business, security and manageability are important

The report confirms the dominance of iOS and Android and is generally down on Windows Phone while there are more optimistic remarks than I had expected about Blackberry 10 and Firefox OS (but note the sponsors).

Here is a stat that caught my eye though:

Monthly Revenue per developer per platform:

  • $5,200 iOS
  • $4,700 Android
  • $3,600 Windows Phone
  • $2,900 HTML5
  • $1,200 Blackberry 10

There is more money in iOS and Android, but Windows Phone and to some extent HTML5 is financially viable too. On niche platforms like Windows Phone, I guess there is a benefit in having less competition.

adobe, development, microsoft, software, software development, visual studio, windows

Adobe Creative Cloud giveaway at Microsoft Build: sign of a new alliance?

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At Microsoft’s Build conference last week, one among a number of giveaways to all attendees was a year’s subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. This was announced by Developer and Platform Evangelism VP Steven Guggenheimer during the day 2 keynote.

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Creative Cloud costs $49.99 (or £39 + VAT) per month for an individual subscription.

Guggenheimer in effect said that the gift came from Adobe; he suggested that “you guys should send them a nice email”.

The stated purpose of the giveaway is to promote the Digital Publishing Suite (DPS). Creative Cloud comes with DPS Single Edition, which lets you create rich, interactive magazine content and publish it to the iPad and Android. Announced at Build was DPS support for Windows 8.1 in “late 2013”; a sign if nothing else that Adobe is taking Microsoft’s tablet platform seriously.

The odd aspect though is that Build is a developer conference and not quite the right target audience for DPS. On the other hand, there are numerous tools in Creative Cloud that are well suited to developers, including the Edge web content tools, PhoneGap Build, and of course the mighty Photoshop for image editing.

Adobe’s Adam Lehman was interviewed at Build about the Creative Cloud tools, especially Edge, here.

Microsoft is no longer trying to compete with Adobe on design tools. Expression Web and Expression Design have been discontinued. The Flash versus Silverlight wars are also consigned to history, making it easier for these two companies to work together.

microsoft, software development, visual studio, windows

Microsoft Build 2013: Love the platform?

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The paradox of Microsoft: record revenue and profits, but yes, Windows 8 has been a disaster so far, and the company has lost developer and consumer mind share.

That might explain why there was no lack of availability for tickets to Build in San Francisco. With a smart PR move, Microsoft “sold out” of a limited first allocation, then made more available, and you could register right up to the day before. Attendance estimates are around 4,500.

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The atmosphere was good though, and someone remarked to me that it felt a bit like an early Mix event, Microsoft’s web and design conference back in Silverlight days.

Blue was the colour; and for me Build 2013 was a Windows 8.1 event, though attention was also given to Windows Azure and Windows Phone.

Microsoft has two goals with Windows 8.1.

One is to placate users who essentially want Windows 7.1 and have been wary, confused, or worse, in their reaction to the Windows 8 Modern (or Metro, or Windows Store) user interface.

The other is to establish a new tablet platform, something which has yet to happen despite significant numbers of Windows 8 installations out there since the launch.

There was solid progress on both these fronts at Build, though whether it was enough is of course open to debate. Windows 8.1 is a nicer experience, especially for desktop users, and the user interface feels more elegant and refined than Windows 8.0.

No matter what you may have read elsewhere though, Microsoft is not backtracking. The focus at Build was on the new app platform and its improvements. Developers I spoke to were generally happy with these. “It’s caught up with Silverlight”, one told me.

At Build 2011 and 2012 there was some disappointment among developers, that Microsoft seemed to be pushing HTML and JavaScript above C# and .NET, for its new app platform. There was a perception at Build 2013 that this is no longer the case, though C# architect Anders Hejlsberg spoke on TypeScript (which compiles to JavaScript) rather than C# at his session; and a Microsoft engineer I spoke to denied that there had been any change of direction internally; the official line is that this is developer choice.

In practice, the developer choice tends to be C#, which dominated the session examples, and there was no more gossip about Microsoft abandoning .NET.

Windows seems to be on a one-year refresh cycle now. No date has been announced, but the signs are that Windows 8.1 will follow one year after Windows 8.0, which means RTM (the release build) no later than August and machines on sale in time for the winter season.

Much was already known about Windows 8.1, so were there any surprises? The main one was the evolution of Bing. The key phrase is “Bing as a platform”.

Bing is much more than just a search engine. We’re always a platform company. As we’ve been building this great search experience, we’ve actually been building this rich platform.

said Program Manager David Robinson in this session. Bing services are not just search, but also speech recognition (as seen on Xbox) so that developers can create “natural user interfaces” with voice control, text to speech, and 2D and 3D mapping with driving directions.

The other twist on this is the new search app in Windows 8.1. The way search works in Windows 8.1 has changed quite a bit. Search within an app should no longer rely on the Charms menu, and developers are expected to put a search box into their user interface. Search in the Charms menu is a system search, that integrates local and web results. Thus, if I search for Build, I get the Build apps, local documents mentioning Build, my own photos, web results relating to the building industry, word definitions, and so on. If I search for “Event viewer”, I get the control panel applet, a Wikipedia entry, a couple of Microsoft support articles, and then a general web search with infinite scrolling to the right. If I search for a celebrity, I get a rich multimedia view.

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The search engine here is not pluggable; only Bing will work. This is smart strategic thinking, since it is at once a compelling app, an easy way to navigate Windows, and a way of building search share for Bing.

There are some details of search yet to be revealed. In particular, I asked how an app can integrate its own content into an “Everywhere” search, and was told it has yet to be announced (even though Windows 8.0 has a search contract that you would have thought would fit perfectly here).

My own experience of Windows 8.1 is positive, though since I have little difficulty with Windows 8.0 I am not a good test case as to whether it will win over those sticking with Windows 7. The Start button is mostly cosmetic, but I suspect I will find myself right-clicking it frequently to bring up the Win-X menu, now complete with Shutdown option.

Surface RT is greatly improved by the update. There is some performance gain, and the addition of Outlook to the RT desktop makes it twice as useful for businesses using Exchange or Office 365. Windows 8.1 also comes with Internet Explorer 11 with WebGL and some user interface improvements.

Microsoft does feel somewhat diminished these days, thanks to the decline of the PC and its smaller area of dominance, despite its continuing healthy financials. Can the company recover any of that ground? To do so it has to drive adoption of the tablet personality in Windows 8. Microsoft has made a poor start, but it may yet come together.

At a sparsely attended session on The Story of Bringing Nokia Music from Windows Phone to Windows 8 the Nokia Design Principles caught my attention:

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The speakers conveyed real enthusiasm for the last of these, “Love the platform”, which is something I have not often encountered in the context of Windows 8.0, especially as the first release felt rough and not-quite-ready from a developer perspective. There is no doubting its potential though, and if Microsoft can win a bit more developer love with the 8.1 release, then we may see growth. 

development, microsoft, open source, professional, software development, visual studio

Visual C++ will implement all of C++ 11 and C++ 14, some of C99 says Microsoft

Microsoft’s Herb Sutter spoke at Microsoft Build in San Francisco on the future of C++.

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Microsoft has been criticised for being slow to implement all the features of ISO C++ 11. Sutter says most features are now included in the public preview of Visual Studio 2013 – which has a “Go Live” license so you can use it in production – including the oft-requested variadic templates. The full list:

  • Explicit conversion operators
  • Raw string literals
  • Function template default arguments
  • Delegating constructors
  • Uniform int and initializer_lists
  • Variadic templates

More features are coming in the RTM (final release) of Visual Studio 2013 later this year:

  • Non-static member initializers
  • =default
  • =delete
  • ‘using’ aliases

A technical preview will then follow and Sutter listed possible features of which there will be a subset. Full conformance will follow at an unspecified time.

Microsoft is also promising a full implementation of C++ 14, the next update to the standard, even though the exact specification is not yet fully agreed. Some C++ 14 features will be implemented ahead of C++ 11 features, if they are considered to add high value.

Two other points of interest.

Async/await (familiar to C# developers) will be implemented in the post-RTM CTP because it is such a useful feature for Windows Runtime app developers, even though it is not part of the ISO standard.

Finally, Microsoft will also several C99 features in the RTM of Visual Studio 2013:

  • Variable decls
  • C99_Bool
  • compound literals
  • designated initializers

The reason for implementing these is that they are needed to compile popular open source libraries like FFmpeg.

I asked Sutter why Microsoft is not planning full conformance to C99. He said it was a matter of priorities and that work on C++ 11 and C++ 14 was more important. If there are particular additional features of C99 developers would like to see implemented, contacting Sutter with requests and rationale might eventually yield results.

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