This month is a big one for Microsoft developers. Windows 8 will be generally available in stores on a variety of form factors starting on 10/26, with the BUILD conference following closely in the last week of October. This on top of the Visual Studio 2012 RTM earlier this summer and a Windows Phone 8 release coming soon, and there’s a lot going on if you’re a Windows developer.

If you’ve read my previous editor’s notes this year, you already know that Telerik takes Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 very seriously. As of 10/17, we’ve officially released our set of XAML and HTML controls for building Windows Store apps on Windows 8, including data visualization controls like charts, gauges and bullet graphs. These controls aren’t just ports from old platforms, but controls that have been re-imagined for the touch-centric mobile devices that Windows 8 will be shipping on. In addition, we’ve updated JustCode to support Windows Store project types, JustDecompile to decompile Windows Store and C# 5.0 apps and our JustTrace profiler to target Windows Store apps. If you’d like to see what our amazing customers have already done with all of this great Windows Store support, check out our Showcase Gallery.

Telerik often gets questions from its customers about which of the multitude of app frameworks that Microsoft provides for .NET developers that they should pick. WinForms? WPF? Silverlight? ASP.NET? What’s the right solution for their problem? The answer is always the same: it depends.

Unfortunately, that’s not very helpful, so last year a set of the best and brightest that Telerik has to offer sat down and figured out just what it depends on and whether we could offer clear, concise guidance for our customers. The answer was “yes we could,” so we did that in 2011.

Yesterday’s release of Visual Studio 2012 and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 marks the beginning of a new era. In some ways, VS2012 and Blend are incremental releases, adding even better support for building enterprise and consumer apps and services for the desktop and the web. However, in one very important way, the release of VS2012 and Blend, together with the release of Windows 8 earlier this month, signals a whole new focus for the platform — that of touch-centric tablets — and with it, a whole new way to package and distribute apps for the Windows operating system — the Windows Store.

This month in Florida is going to be my 2nd TechEd ever and I’m sure the best by far. The number of things I get to do is staggering:

• I get to work the Telerik booth for my first big show. We’ll be launching not one but two completely new Telerik products. Fun!
  
• Since the Telerik Ultimate Collection has been nominated for the Best of TechEd, I get to give a dead-run 15-minute demo to the judges with fellow Teleriker Michael Crump.
  
• Also with Michael, I’ll be giving the 30-minute “Telerik + Blend: Better Together” talk in the Microsoft Visual Studio booth showing off how 3rd party controls work inside the newest Blend for building Metro style apps on Windows 8.
  
• The first chapter of the Metro/JS book I’m writing with another fellow Teleriker Brandon Statrom is being printed and bound in a limited quantity for the show. Stop by and get your signed copy!
  
• I get to be one of the Speaker Idol judges every day at lunch.
  
• I’m sure there’s at least one podcast recording in there, too, somewhere…

As of the Windows Consumer Preview (aka Win8 Beta), the WinJS promises object has a “done” method as well as a “then” method. The “done” method is just like “then” except that it turns unhandled errors into exceptions. If you read no further, know this:

Always call “done” as the last promise method in your promise chain.

The Consumer Preview of Windows 8 (aka the Win8 beta) is now available for download, along with the matching Visual Studio 11 beta. You can download them both from the Developer Center for Metro style Apps and at least when I did the downloading this morning, it was smooth and worked well. In case you’re interested, I downloaded the ISO, not the setup, and I am currently writing this blog entry in Windows Live Writer running inside a WMWare Workstation 8.0 virtual machine running on the Windows 7 host OS running inside Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro. As someone said to me this morning: “That’s a lot of VMs!” Maybe so, but the Win8 and VS11 betas are running surprisingly well inside of my Inception-box.

Metro/JS Templates for VS11 in BUILD

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

In the last post in this series, we looked at getting started building Metro style apps built using JavaScript (Metro/JS apps) with Microsoft Visual Studio 11 for the Windows Developer Preview (aka VS11) and Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview (aka Blend).

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

In the previous post in this series, we discussed how to build a deploy a Metro style app built with JavaScript completely from the command line. That’s a useful exercise to prove that there’s no real magic, but I don’t expect most people to do things that way. I expect most people to use Visual Studio.

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

A “Windows Metro style app” is an application built for the devices running the new Windows user experience of Windows 8. A Metro style app built using JavaScript is a first class Windows application built with the technologies of the web, e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG, etc. Unlike a web site, a Metro JS app is not deployed page-by-page from a web server, but rather installed locally on the user’s machine. Like any other first class Windows app, a Metro JS app has access to the underlying platform and is able to share information with other apps.

I have gotten to do a ton of really great things at Microsoft:

• I got to write a column on WPF and turn that column into not one, but two books.
• I got the excitement for every blog post in the first two years wondering if this was the one that was going to get me fired. (It was close a few times.)
• I got to throw several Developer Conferences (DevCons).
• I got to spin up a completely new community from scratch (“Oslo”).
• I got to stay up all night erasing the word “WinFS” from all of microsoft.com.
• I got to be part of a Microsoft product team from incubation through startup to product and then to kaput.
• I got to get ordained as a minister so that I could marry a PM from the WPF team to a PM on the WCF team as part of the talk I gave with Doug Purdy at the 2008 PDC.
• I got to prepare for that talk with Doug until 4am, then walk back to the hotel, causing people to cross the street to stay away from us. And then I got to give that talk with Doug the next morning right after restoring my copy of Windows that had crashed 30 minutes before.
• I got to drag Lars Wilhelmsen up on stage to read Norwegian from the Oslo Tour Guide book, only to find I was pointing him at German.
• I got to throw an SDR.
• I got to play poker with Microsoft power brokers far above my level (and take their money : ).
• I got to sleep at Don Box’s house and become an adjunct part of his family.
• I got to have two design reviews with Bill Gates (as hard as I tried, I could never see him actually enter the room).
• I got to turn developer feedback into hundreds of bugs across dozens of products.
• I got code into Vista (and I assume into Windows 7 and Windows 8 as well).
• I got to work on the team that built the most ambitious set of templates ever shipped with Visual Studio.
• I got a very quick, very deep education on JavaScript and CSS.
• I got to help drive the developer story for an entirely new platform: WinRT, WinJS and Win8.
• I got to lead two product teams through two PDCs (OK, one PDC and one //build/).
• I got to give the //build/ keynote launching the Visual Studio 11 tools for Windows 8 with Kieran Mockford, who will forever be my //build/ buddy.
• I got to see how the sausage is made for SQL Server, WCF, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8 and a host of others. I am forever changed.