Windows 8 Metro Development Experience

I’ve been running the Windows 8 developer preview for a few weeks, and thought I’d blog about my experiences in converting a Silverlight app I’ve written into a Metro one. I’ll first describe the app, then my experiences developing it.

The App

The application is a family tree viewing application. It came about as I’ve found a few branches my family tree back to the 1600s (with help hooking up with other people on GenesReunited). It isn’t very friendly if you want to see the whole tree as it shuffles all of the individuals around to minimise the screen real estate, which is good for printing, but not so good to make sense of the tree. I was interested in seeing which of my ancestors I had the most history for, and which I wanted to research next, so I created an app to show ancestors without siblings, and to favour clarity over screen real estate.

(When I started writing this app, there didn’t seem to be any family tree apps which showed the whole family tree. I’ve since found that Gramps uses GraphViz to do exactly that).

The screenshot above shows that Metro apps really don’t much unnecessary chrome. Any infrequently used commands are hidden in the app bar at the bottom of the screen. The next screenshot shows the app at full zoom with the application bar hidden.

Development

Now I’ve laid out the background, I can talk about the development experience, and some of that will include talking about Windows 8. First off, Metro’s UI is a bit toy-ish, but I can see that it will feel slick on a touchscreen (I’ve got a Windows Phone 7 device, and am struck by the similarities). The green is pretty garish thoughout, but I’ve attempted to follow this look in my app.

UI and controls

It doesn’t feel as if Microsoft has paid enough attention to using Metro apps with the mouse and keyboard yet. A case in point is in the zooming in this application – I’ve provided a slider in the search bar, but it’s unclear whether there will be a system-wide gesture mapping to pinch-to-zoom in the release. This was necessary for testing, as even though Visual Studio has a simulator which can be used to simulate gestures, the zoom gesture uses the mousewheel, which my laptop does not have.

The actual conversion was surprisingly simple (they promised that this would be the case on the Build videos), but I’m glad that I didn’t hit any blockers. My ViewModels needed minor changes (which I’ll talk about below), and most of my Xaml just got moved across.

The ScrollViewer now allows zooming and panning, so I was able to use this instead of my own ZoomPanControl. Strangely, the zooming is performed by a method instead of a dependency property (making it easier to animate zooms etc). Also, even though it’s drawing visuals, the zoom seems to take a bitmap at full zoom and simply scale that down (this is speculation on my part, but to my eyes the scaled content looks a lot worse than a WPF version which uses scale transforms). Here’s a WPF version of my app at similar zoom:

The text is almost readable, and the connecting lines aren’t suffering from the ugly aliasing.

There are some further niggles, it seems that the ScrollViewer has a minimum zoom factor of 0.1. Additionally, the slider control, even though it was set with a minimum of 0.05 and maximum of 1, would only display values of 0 and 1 on the popup.

Coding

Now I’ve described some of the structural changes, I can describe some of the coding changes. Most of the changes were pretty trivial in the ViewModel – apart from the use of async. The Silverlight of the app was using the Reactive Framework. Other than reading a couple of articles, I hadn’t gotten into looking into C# 5 async yet, but it was pretty trivial to switch over. Testing it is another matter – I ended up downloading the Async CTP to see their unit testing sample, and found that it was the most complex sample throughout. The Reactive Framework allows you to simply control Virtual time using the scheduler, and I haven’t seen anything so simple or elegant for C# 5 async (though testing Observable.FromAsyncPattern methods are similarly tricky to test, as they don't use the scheduler requested; relying on the underlying IO Completion ports for scheduling the work).

[Edit] I originally blogged that I was concerned that there wouldn't be a version of the Reactive Framework for .NET 4.5/WinRT, following some forum rumours. However, the guys have a .NET 4.5 RX build ready.

Other changes in the code mapped naturally across – the FileDialog now returns an IInputStream, but this has a method AsString() to map across to a .NET stream. The List class has had a few of its methods (such as the Sort overload taking a delegate) removed, annoyingly.

Also, now that asynchronous calls are so pervasive, I’m surprised that the Silverlight Toolkit BusyIndicator didn’t make it in.

Visual Studio

First, the unit testing tool is definitely pre-beta. I didn’t actually finish investigating how to unit test my C# 5 async method conversions, as I couldn’t stomach using the tool any longer. I’m also not overly-enamoured with the new Find dialog. Otherwise, it seems to be pretty stable.

Metro-ising

So far I’ve spoken about how easy it was to convert over a Silverlight application to Metro, but Metro does allow many compelling features to be very easily added to the application. Charms could be provided to allow searching of family tree information, and to allow the images to be easily shared.

Once I get hold of a touchscreen device, I’d love to add some snap points to the chart.

Other thoughts

Overall, I’m pleased with the development experience of targeting Windows 8 Metro. I haven’t spoken about the actual platform in this blog, but after the months of silence and confusion about Windows 8, it’s all good news. .NET developers are still first class citizens.

I’m happy that WinRT is back to native code, and as I have experience in C++/CLI I’m very happy that C++/CX seems pretty much identical. From a .NET coder point of view, it’s a little concerning that .NET apps will have a slight performance disadvantage from the COM Interop of the WinRT projected types, but I suppose that’s simply the whole ‘use .NET for productivity, C++ for performance’ argument. And having worked on a few apps that had all of the performant (and usually legacy) parts of the system in C++, with a .NET UI, and the subsequent marshalling layer, it’s quite heartening to think that now we can stay in C++ and write a fast and fluid UI without changing languages.

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