All the major frameworks have touch included (e.g., GWT 2.2 onward; Sencha; Rhodes; Dojo).

No one in their right mind would try to recreate, in Javascript and CSS3, what many smart people have been creating and making right for several years now. The only question is what language you want to use: Javascript (Sencha, Dojo), Ruby (Rhodes), Java (GWT), Objective-J (Cappuccino), Python (Pyjamas, which is GWT converted Python), or Lua (Corona -- which is aimed at gaming features, not business apps, but is very, very good at gaming features). There are others. Presumably MS will come out with something for which you can design in XAML and write in a .Net language.

The issues that people bring up here (how do I move data back and forth) are already handled by all the frameworks; there is no need to roll your own.

There is a whole world out there of frameworks that build apps that run everywhere. It is utterly irrelevant that VS now can handle HTML5: the state of engineering is 3 years beyond that when the MS blinders are removed.

Hank

>If you are interested in the technical aspects of touch technology, Charles Petzold has been writing an extended series about it in MSDN Magazine. (I tend to fall a few issues behind so maybe that topic arc has ended and he is on to something else). I was pleasantly surprised that Petzold has been staying so up to date, for a guy so associated with the early ways of programming for Windows. (MSDN Magazine itself once published a timeline of Windows development with an early part of it labeled the Petzoldzoic Era ;-) ) He has been doing a lot of work lately with Windows Phone 7, hence his interest in touch programming. It strikes me as akin to mouse programming in the early days, when many users didn't even have mice -- not wildly complex but definitely different from what we were used to as developers.
>
>>Hi Dmitry,
>>
>>What you can't simulate on a PC is "touch." Nor any of the other hardware functions unique to whatever device, but other than touch (which is not the same as mousing, although with some frameworks you have to, or can, fake touch responses using mouse events), you are unlikely to be using those other functions when writing business applications.
>>
>>Hank
>>
>>>Hi Hank,
>>>
>>>Thank you very much for a detailed input. Some of terms you mentioned are new to me; so I will have to Google/read/etc. to learn. But if I might ask you one more question, please. Must I have an iPad to create a test (something of a Hello World) application or I can simulate it on a PC?
>>>
>>>>Hi Dmitry,
>>>>
>>>>folks often talk about HTML5 as though it were a complete widget set. It is not. A complete widget set involves some aspects of HTML5 at times, but is more about CSS3 and Javascript than anything else. Check out Cappuccino, Google Web Toolkit, and ActiveWidgets for 3 examples. In each case you will see that there are complex objects, being rendered using various tricks (e.g., sticking an entire "form" as a DOM structure directly onto a parent DOM member, so that the browser's rendering engine renders everything at once -- this was introduced in GWT 2.x, and is the chief way of getting native control display speed on devices).
>>>>
>>>>IOW: Microsoft will need to supply this widgets, and they will need to be optimzed in the way that the 3 I have mentioned above (and there are many others, e.g., the Dojo Toolkit) have been optimized.
>>>>
>>>>If they tie that to XAML, with design in Blend, then they have become interesting. Support for HTML5 itself is not exciting, nor even interesting, really.
>>>>
>>>>Hank
>>>>
>>>>>PMFJI,
>>>>>
>>>>>When you are saying to go with web-based HTML 5 app, can you use ASP.NET (from VS.NET) and use HTML5 with it? Or do you mean to write "everything" in HTML 5? The reason I am asking is I have an ASP.NET application that works well. But I would like it to be "compatible" with iPad and I guess HTML 5 is the way to go. But I am not sure where to start. Thank you in advance for any suggestions.
>>>>>
>>>>>>Then you got the wrong vibe. A customer recently asked me about creating a new app in Silverlight. My advice was to go with a web-based HTML 5 app because it will work on the iPad. Silverlight will never run there.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>My point was that in the enterprise business world, Windows is still king and I don't see that changing in the near future.
>>>>>>