Win 8 Preview II

This is my second attempt at trying the preview.

After my first attempt to navigate around, the developer preview turned into a nightmare and trying to get out of the metro style apps and also trying to figure out how to shut it down, I spent several hours watching different videos before attempting to try it again.

I would suggest to first watch the entire main keynote as it gives you an idea of how to get around in this new version. There are some pretty neat ideas around how they want to do this but it still needs work.

A few things I discovered during this go around were how to get around a little better. You can use the Windows Start key on the keyboard to toggle between the two top most apps. Normally the desktop and the new Start menu. If you look at all of the panels on the new Start menu, there is one for the desktop. There are two control panels, 1 for the metro style properties and the normal one we are used to.

There is still a problem with not being able to close down the Metro Style apps, you can just hit the Windows Start key to toggle out of it. This does not close the app it just suspends it. All of the apps may not be using any CPU time but they are holding onto memory and if you have just bare minimum installed, this will eventually start causing problems. You can use the Task Manager or Process Explorer to kill them.

I got stuck in the Metro style IE 10, so I scrolled around and found the build link and watched a few videos there and the keynote was one of them.

They kept saying if it works on Windows 7 then it will work on Windows 8, so I navigated to my download page and downloaded all of my online free programs and started the test. The first thing I was greeted with when I tried to run one of my programs that I just recently updated to work with Windows XP was this screenshot below.

As you can see from this screenshot, you can still hit the Print Screen (PrtScn) key and then paste to Paint and then save it as a screenshot.

Anyway as you can see, the .NET Framework 3.5.1 is not enabled by default not sure why, but at least it is an option. After you click that, then it adds the framework and you get the next screenshot.

So after that I get to test my program Windows bit version.

So the program is now verified (by me) to work on Windows XP and Vista, 7, and 8. (If you were wondering I have 8 Gig of RAM in this thing.)

The programs do still work but you may need to enable the framework first.

Another thing I saw in the keynote was the use of Expression Blend 5 for people that have trouble figuring out the layouts of their app. In WPF, then this program may be of some help. They demonstrated the ability for absolute positions on your UI items. One of the reasons I don’t do HTML or WPF is because of the learning curve just to build a UI that looks nice.

One other demo they showed was the ability to access every location that you sign in with your Live ID. The demo showed accessing a drive on a remote system and navigating through a lot of the folders. That is both a cool feature and a security risk. If someone snags your nice fancy SmartPhone, then they could possibly access your files and either get what they want or possibly upload something to that remote system and never have to gain on site accesses.

So to conclude, if I want to play with this preview any further, then I had better start learning HTML. Again, WPF and Expression Blend 5.

From the looks of it, I won't be running Windows 8 on any of my systems besides the preview version, even though they did show a marked performance gain.

I hope this post was a little more helpful and a little less frantic than my last post.

Have fun with it everyone. And again, if you haven’t watched the keynote, it is worth the time if you plan on exploring the preview version.