Chapter 3. The Windows Runtime and .NET
This chapter covers
- Windows Store app system architecture
- The Windows Runtime
- .NET 4.5
At the start of 2000, after everyone stopped panicking about the impending Y2K doom, I got hold of some of the first alpha builds of what would eventually be .NET 1.0. I was part of a group that went around delivering two days of training on the upcoming .NET. At first, there was no IDE, and the bits were for building ASP.NET (or ASP Plus) pages. Nevertheless, to this VB6 programmer, it was clearly revolutionary, especially the brand-new C# language and the actual library of usable classes. (Remember, VB6 had no base class library.)
Six and a half years later, I got some of the first bits for Silverlight and went on to develop the first deployed managed Silverlight app ever—a carbon calculator written in Silverlight 1.1 alpha. Silverlight seemed as revolutionary to me as .NET did more than half a decade earlier.
Now, six years after that, we have another revolutionary platform—the Windows Runtime (WinRT). WinRT may look similar to .NET, but it’s unique in its own way, building on the successes of .NET and Silverlight, plus some secret sauce from the C++ and JavaScript teams. As you’ll learn, WinRT isn’t a replacement for .NET, but it does take care of much of the heavy lifting that used to be done in managed code.