.NET developers have had major source of anxiety lately: Microsoft mentioned only JavaScript as a programming language for Windows 8 Metro UI application development. Now, since the Windows 8 Preview with development tools was released yesterday, I installed it and it's clear it's not only JavaScript, but also C#, VB and C++. Why Microsoft didn't say this at the same time as they mentioned JavaScript is totally beyond my comprehension.
Here's how Visual Studio 2011 New Project dialog screenshot looks like:
Once the project is created, you end up in the very WPF- and Silverlight-like environment, with new project containing XAML & code-behind files. First thing I did was I looked at the project's properties to see whether Windows Runtime (WinRT) is actually an extension to a standard .NET Framework. To my surprise, Target Framework project property is disabled and blank.
For me personally, I was most worried about whether I will be able to port or extend my UltiDev Web Server Pro project (a tiny free redsitributable web server) to support Windows 8 UI. I wanted to make sure that WinRT framework is compatible with existing .NET Framework. It appears it is.
To find out what .NET framework Metro applications are running in, I simply put a breakpoint in my app and inspected Environment class member values. Here's the answer:
It appears that .NET Framework we'll be targeting is still good old 4.0, with tons of WinRT exntensions, all in GAC, to support tiles-based Metro UI.