Three years ago, I listened to a keynote at a developer conference. The man from Microsoft beamed confidently at the vast auditorium and said “I can tell you confidently that in a year’s time, you will all be writing Metro applications for a huge marketplace”. We clapped, but as the keynote proceeded and we saw the details, few of us believed it. I glanced around the auditorium and, despite the semi-darkness, could see developers whispering and shaking their heads. It wasn’t going to happen. It was obvious then and with retrospect, doomed. It seems unkind to mention the sorry tale of Windows 8 and Metro, but it has relevance to what Microsoft plans to do for Windows 10.

When Microsoft’s own office suite didn’t bother to support the platform, and the standard windows applications weren’t converted, one joked about rats and sinking ships. After all, Apple made its flagship word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software available for the iPad from the start, whereas Windows 8 required a personality-change back to ‘classic mode’ in order to get any work done.

The first subsequent unexpected disaster was the name-change. ‘Metro’ said a lot about the style. Oops -then suddenly it was ‘Windows 8-style’, which sounded as if the name was made up on the spur of the moment. And then it was ‘Modern’, which could apply to anything, even brutalist architecture. And then it became ‘Windows Store’, which didn’t describe a technology. Now it is ‘Universal Windows Platform’, and the original ‘Metro’ is termed officially ‘Universal Windows 8 Apps’.

The UWP technology is designed to produce applications that are portable across a range of devices, somewhat like Adobe Air, the platform for Angry Birds and many other iOS successes. However, in this case it isn’t cross-platform – a device must be running Windows 10 OS. There is a basic API that is guaranteed to be available whatever the device, and you can make use of APIs such as GPS or pen that are special to a type of device – such as Desktop, Mobile, Xbox, IoT etc. It is somewhat like Apple’s Xcode environment. There is support for adaptive UIs that can change according to both the type of user interface and the window size and resolutions. XAML remains the dominant technology to determine the layout, and it now has additions to support adaptive design.

Microsoft have always been good on detail, but bedeviled at times by extraordinary lack of vision. Windows 8 works reliably within its remit, but for desktop users, its’ remit was wrong. We use it, but with a constant struggle to try to make it look more like Windows 7. Whilst I’m increasingly enamored with Microsoft’s excellent server products, I’m just hoping and praying that Microsoft can provide good-enough reasons for wanting to develop applications for Windows 10 devices.

Are you going to develop applications for Windows 10? If so, what gives you the confidence of a demand for UWP applications? If not, and you develop applications, I’d also be interested to know your reasons.

Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk newsletter of 26th May