WinRT

Today I was lucky enough to get along to the Microsoft WinRT Code Camp which was split into two parts , the morning session covered the stack and Metro UI guidelines and the afternoon hands on lab building an app, with the lab content allowing approaching such from the angle of a c#\XAML or HTML5 angle. The day went pretty well over all with the morning session filling in the gaps adequately with minimal issues from the gear given Windows 8 itself is still pre release. A couple of observations from the lab, I decided to run through the lab using the HTML5 based material given the heavy use of such within current projects at JADE and a personal interest in such ( and allergies to XAML... ) . Across the boards the WinRT Apis are consistent and appear vastly improved at a brief look, over the existing stack. While the JavaScript / HTML5 implementation at first made me wonder why one would bother going to the lengths of supporting the html5 spec just to provide a JavaScript API it became obvious in a short space of time , the implementation would be immediately familure to any web developer out there, deviations from the current w3 spec only to implement functionality not currently supported within such. ( with the intention to move to introduced specs going forward ) The only thing I found lacking in the space of the lab was a jQuery style selector , and a slightly odd way of defining the callback functions, I'd be interested in hearing from those who have experimented with common js patterns and generated Dom elements. On the c# side the new await keyword looks useful although I do wonder in some cases whether having the callback code defined in a seperate block is more readable than having the callback code inline but I guess that will become apparent going forward.