Brian, Thank you for responding on this thread. It is nice to see your activity here. I followed your blog for years.
If you were going to build an app that YOU had to live with for 10+ years, what would you use to build it? That's a decision that mgmt. is asking developers every day. They have to make a choice what technology to trust over the lifetime of a system. How would you answer it given MS's current Apple like direction of going Dark on any long term ( more than 5 years, maybe ) plans? taspeotis wants a 20 year visibility.
We all know that WinRt is not .net/WPF or Silverlight. We understand that it was built to address a need for MS to build and market to a consumer "app" store environment/sandbox to compete with IOS. But you are asking about LOB for WinRT. In my mind an LOB app quite often lives in a secure environment/machine with the need to break out of the WinRT sandbox. Similar to the differences between WPF and Silverlight. Think Financial Trader Workstations, Call Center applications, Assisted Selling tablets in retail, even the tablets that MS uses at the Microsoft store. How do we take advantage of the goodness that WinRT brings from a performance perspective into non-consumer apps? That's what I think when I hear LOB. Not the latest and greatest Angry Birds or a weather app.
What is your definition of a LOB app?
I also want my LOB apps used by enterprise associates to have the smoothness of animations and the gestures that the user will be use to from the consumer apps. If I have to write it in .net/WPF I am immediately at a disadvantage. It wont be as smooth/fluid. And it wont react to the same gestures without significant work on my part to build them in.
I can separate out the various logic that has to live on the client to "services" or long running desktop apps, it they need access outside of the sandbox, but I need a good way to communicate within the box to the UI if I build it on WinRT. How do I do that? I don't want to make round trips to a server if I don't have to for state or context.
I have to believe that MS sees this and will bring the WinRT stack to all of the OS in a future version. I would bet that there will be the WPF sandbox equivalent of the App store sandbox soon.
In the mean time, if what you are giving us from P&P for WinRT is guidance and a way to build Consumer apps better, that is great! I would love to see the Aggregator, Unity, etc. available for consumer apps. But my LOB customers are going to be asking me how to break out of the sandbox for their needs. How to make .net/WPF apps play nice with the WinRT side. Or how to make WPF apps look and feel like WinRT apps. Help me with those too.
Maybe a set of libraries that allowed a WPF app to behave more like a WinRT app would be a nice addition to the .net 4.5 prism deliverables.
It would also be nice to hear MS re-dedicate themselves to WPF or WinRTWPF or something. But that's not your problem. <grin>
Thanks again for being here and listening.
Pmont
