I am a .net developer. I also develop in IOS and Android. I wanted to look into Metro with winRT so I bought a new laptop with 14 gb memory and installed the windows 8 consumer preview release. It's little buggy and has serious windows update issue. Check out my previous blog. Metro screen to desktop is not so smooth and that damn charm bar is so hard to get to. How the hell do you kill running apps in Metro screen. I hope Microsoft fixed all these in finally release or else there is not point developing anything in Metro. But anyway I want to talk about developing (complains) in Metro today.
I already have projects that I developed which took many many months or my life so I wanted to use existing .net dlls. But I CAN NOT reference it in Metro app. It will not let you. So I decided to port it over to Metro library project but Metro library project will not reference the 3rd party dlls either, WTF. This is a serious issue for me. I do not want to rewrite the same code over again. The fact that they wont' let you use existing code is terrible. Why couldn't they throw in another layer of abstraction like bridge layer or something. I was thinking about developing my app in Metro but I am now thinking why not use IOS iPad at this point if I have to start it all over again.
My solution? well... I am thinking about using web api in MVC. I can run it locally as a windows service or web service and call json object and use it in Metro app. That should work but it's not the best idea either. I am going to try this and report back.
Microsoft, why you no like developers.....
boy, that feels little better.
Update: I found this link http://blogs.msdn.com/b/piyushjo/archive/2011/10/10/calling-a-wcf-service-from-a-metro-application.aspx
I am going to try this.
