What do you think of the Windows 10 SDK Preview?

[ZackTheNever]

Of course I am aware that this is just a preview and there is more to come at Microsoft's /BUILD// event. I would to get your opinion on what you think of the new APIs and process.

 

[luke_f]

To be honest, as a PC developer I am rather disappointed by the current SDK preview. I have been hoping for some cool new features and APIs. Especially, I was hoping for interactive tiles, which looked totally awesome in the MS demo videos and would have really added a "wow" factor to Windows. But right now it looks like this won't come with Win10. In fact, despite the universal app stuff, there's barely anything new. A few things which should have been there from the start were added now, like full Drag+Drop support between apps, allowing an app to open folders in explorer, some smaller improvements here and there,... But despite that? Okay, shared storage for publisher apps is also cool. But not mindblowing.

For WP development this is still a cool update, since it adds in a lot of stuff which was already there on the PC, and now finally comes to the phone. But for PC development, I do not see any major improvements, at least not in the current SDK preview. Microsoft was working heavily on the unified platform and on the Win10 UI. It seems there was only little time left for actual improvements for developers. It might still be that MS adds some more features a little later. But with the Win10 release due in summer, I do not put my hopes too high for any major features to appear.

Still, I am really looking forward to Windows 10! So don't get me wrong. I am really excited about all this. With the new UI, windowed apps, unified store, Windows will be a much more attractive platform. This will be great for any app developer, no matter if PC or WP. Also, expanding the device range to include Xbox and HoloLens is really cool of course. So the Windows 10 release for me is more about the platform thing, the new cool UI and expanded device coverage, which should all help bring more users into the platform and into the stores. From the API side there are currently only minor improvements, but that's okay. Maybe they will add more in that regard with some Windows 10.1 or whatever. Or maybe they saved some surprises for //build? We'll know in a few weeks.

 

[startrunner]

I prefer the old concept of sharing the same code for two different platforms/screen sizes, as separate projects and I'm happy they will still support that. As for the SDK I'm quite pleased to see some new controls in XAML and the old ones having a refreshing new look. Very little has been changed in the APIs though.

 

[luke_f]

After taking a deeper look at the new samples for Windows 10, I have to revert my previous answer: It looks like Microsoft has added quite a big amount of new features and APIs, besides the "Universal Apps" stuff. Surprisingly, they did not talk about many of these new APIs at all, not even during Build. Also the official "what's new" blog posts and websites are omitting many of the new APIs. Most of them are not yet (or poorly) documented on MSDN, so you can only guess what they are doing. But it looks like some of the features I requested on UserVoice have indeed been added, and I am looking forward to using them in the Windows 10 version of my app.

Overall, I am really impressed in the amount of work MS has done for this new iteration of Windows. Not only the new OS itself and the new Edge broser, but also the whole UniversalApps stuff, the new UI controls, a host of new APIs, the whole HoloLens area, Windows on XBox, Windows for IoT, the adapters for Android and iOS apps, the new amazing Visual Studio Code, .NET on Linux/OSX, all the OpenSource stuff... Man, these guys have really been working heavily. They must be motivated like crazy to bring out all this new stuff in so many areas (at least, I did not hear that MS has hired a lot more devs). Really amazing. If someone from MS reads this: Big thumbs up, you guys are awesome!!!

 

[zigah]

This may sound weird, but I don't care about the new features - I would just love for the new API to be more like a stable version 2 of the WinRT, in the sense that bugs were fixed and the API would be more stable and mature. Sure, new features would be nice, but please just let us have the old features first, and working.

So, basically, the lack of new features gives me hope for a more stable API. There, I said it.