Windows 8 deployed

In my start of Windows 8 Metro app and Windows Phone 7 development, I have taken the plunged and moved over entirely to a machine running Windows 8 Consumer Preview. At first glance, the apparent lose of functionality is astounding.

I don’t have my Yahoo! and AIM messengers, no Yahoo! email, and my password file is relegated to the Desktop app. Some of the preview apps I’ve downloaded, like YouVersion, are barely what I’d call barebones and do nothing compared to their normal Windows (or even mobile) counterparts. The Wordpress for Windows app closed on me abruptly so I had to load up Wordpress in Internet Explorer to finish this post. Even the Kindle preview app, although functional, left a lot out. Also there seems to be a big disconnect between the Internet Explorer app and the Internet Explorer windowed app that runs in the Desktop app. I’ve lost three revisions to posts with that bug.

The Skydrive built-in is nice although to access Skydrive files from my password program I still had to install Skydrive for Windows which seemed counterintuitive.

To that end, I’m still excited about the upcoming interface changes and am really looking forward to having a tablet or laptop running Windows 8 sometime in the future. My Windows Phone 7 device works great but typing on them is still a pain, to the point where I would not even attempt the longer drafts needed for some of my work.

I have my copy of Visual Studio 11 Beta installed as well as Blend. The Live SDK is installed and ready to go. I’m following Jeff Blankenburg’s “31 Days of Windows Phone” development and so far it’s been a huge timesaver. It is my assumption that learning the Metro style interface on a Windows Phone will be easier since it’s documented a tad more than Windows 8 is, but I could be wrong here.

We’ll see how this goes…