Ken, you should know the answer to this more than anyone here because you've been part of Microsoft marketing. The event where they showed Win8 was done by WinDiv, not DevDiv. Different people. Different goals. Different marketing. Same non-communication between divisions.

As for products running on ARM processors, Microsoft has already shown Office running on them. Again, think through the points of my previous paragraph and now connect the dots. Which products make the most money for MS? Who runs WinDiv? Where was he before running Windows? Oh... Now it all makes sense. (For those who are simply following along and don't have a pencil to play dot-to-dot, Steven Sinofsky is in charge of Windows development. Before that, he ran Office.)

When Sinofsky ran Office, he was notorious for not letting ANYTHING leak that he wasn't ready to have announced. Why would things be different with Windows? In fact, after Jim Alchin's loose lips (Alchin ran Windows div before Sinofsky) regarding Vista and all the stuff that was yanked from it, perhaps Sinofsky's taking the total opposite approach is the right thing, looking at it from Microsoft's view point. Yes, it isn't clear if you will or will not be able to run other Win32 apps on ARM. But this early in the Win8 cycle, I'm not worrying about it.

I see no reason why you won't be able to run existing WPF or Silverlight apps without changes. If you can't, lots of apps will be broken.

One last thing, can you tone down the Servoy ads in your posts?


>It's confusing as to why Microsoft didn't just announce/show new Windows 8 features along with disclosing details of changes to the developer story. It doesn't seem there is a lot of benefit to questions left about the Win8 developer story for 4 months with ambiguity among devs and journalists.
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>This article also does not say you cannot use Visual FoxPro to create Win8 apps. :)
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>A big unanswered question I have is, will ARM based devices running Win8 be belt to run Win32 based apps, which include VFP apps. My understanding at this point is no, which would mean no VFP apps would be able to run on a tablet with an ARM chip running Win8, same as an iPad. Microsoft tries to make a big deal about tablets running Windows offer benefits over the iPad and Android tablets because you can run full WIndows apps on them, but then that wouldn't be the case on ARM based tablets.
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>It's not clear yet if you will be able to run standard WPF and/or Silverlight apps on Win8 as proper Win8 apps without any changes. One thing history has shown clearly is, when you break development compatibility, you break developer loyalty.
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>And the fact that the dev story/technologies will be different for Windows Phone and Windows 8, this is yet another problem in the story. And then it's not clear how LightSwitch apps will work with Win8 apps, and it appears to me a LightSwitch version 2 will need to be changed so it generates a different output other than native Silverlight to create proper Win8 apps. Imagine if there existed a Microsoft app store today with all various tools and platforms. There doesn't appear to have been a clear unified dev and platform strategy across Microsoft (tools, mobile, Windows, Office, Xbox, etc).
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>Within Microsoft, there is a developer division called DevDiv. But now it appears to me you have developer strategies coming out of DevDiv, Windows Phone, and Windows, and they often compete or don't fit with each other. What many people don't realize is that Microsoft's biggest competitor is IBM, not Google/Apple/Facebook/Yahoo/etc. Microsoft's continued success and growth is based on sales of Windows, Office, and server solutions in the enterprise and business space. The Xbox has done well in the consumer space, but the Zune failed and ended up getting only 1% of the MP3 market. Windows Phone is following the Zune, and there is no evidence that Windows Phone will have any better success in the smartphone space than the Zune did in the music player space. The Nokia deal may help a little, but people buy smartphones now based on the platform and not based on the hardware brand.
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>While I keep up with the Microsoft developer story, it's hard to describe how nice it is now that I use Servoy. I found that Servoy is by far the developer environment most like VFP, is cross-platform and cross-browser, based on open standards, auto runs web pages for any browser based on the rich form designer without changes, primary uses JavaScript for development with a rich set of data-centric object framework, and they never break backward compatibility (about to release v6, after 10 years of product evolution) just like the Fox team. And Servoy evolves with HTML5 and browser differences so devs can create rich data-centric web apps that run in a browser, iPad, Android, WinPhone, etc platform without any changes, even without knowledge of HTML or DOM on the client.
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>I've talked to many companies and developers who have successfully moved from VFP to Servoy (or added Servoy to existing VFP apps), and I have yet to talk one that regarded adopting Servoy. And they all enjoy working with Servoy, the Servoy team, the Servoy community, and have that same passion for the product as VFP developers had (and have) for FoxPro. I'm not saying I jumped off the Microsoft train expecting to watch it crash into a mountain, but I am saying I'm glad I'm no longer on that train. :)