There have been a flood of Windows 8 announcements in the past few days…
The RTM of Windows 8 has been announced and we know that from August 15th the RTM code will start to drop into the hands of developers and IT professionals who have MSDN and TechNet subscriptions respectively.
The Windows 8 Store is now open for paid apps as detailed here and Windows 8 will be generally available on October 26th.
We also know that Visual Studio 2012 is finished and that it will also be available on August 15th and that there will be a launch on September 12th.
In short, Windows 8 draws closer by the day and my time reflects that in that I’m spending a lot of time at UK Developer events focused on application developers who are looking to build for Windows 8.
Those events are publicised over here;
and we have tried to put together a multi-faceted Windows 8 event that caters for different levels of existing experience.
Specifically, we have a day which has;
- Presenter-led sessions with demos walking around Windows 8 as a developer platform.
- Separate space for hands on labs where you can bring your laptop and build up a Windows 8 application by adding features one-by-one.
- Separate space for developers who have already started coding to come along and talk about their implementation or their UX with me and colleagues from my team. My team also has Samsung slate devices for people who want to try their code on a touch based slate.
We’ve already seen a bunch of UK developers at these events (and others) across the last few months.
We hope to see you at one of the future dates 🙂
Mike Taulty 