Microsoft woos developers with Windows 8 demonstration

Windows 8 an exciting overhaul, but tight integration with Windows Live could cause grief for the enterprise

Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 on Tuesday, revealing a dramatically different Windows for both users and application developers. It validated some of the rumors about the new OS and squashed others.

No target date was offered as to when Windows 8 will be publicly available.

Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky and four Microsoft product managers demonstrated the Windows 8 client operating system at the company's Build conference in Anaheim, Calif.

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Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 on Tuesday, revealing a dramatically different Windows for both users and application developers. It validated some of the rumors about the new OS and squashed others.

No target date was offered as to when Windows 8 will be publicly available.

Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky and four Microsoft product managers demonstrated the Windows 8 client operating system at the company's Build conference in Anaheim, Calif.

Here's the upshot of the new features:

The new UI of Windows 8 is the "Metro-style" application which looks much like Windows Phone 7 with applications' "Live Tiles" organized in groups and oriented first toward touch. It still supports a keyboard, including keyboard shortcuts, and a mouse, and includes a virtual onscreen keyboard, too. It natively supports a digitizing pen.

Click to see: Windows 8 Start screen

Integration with Windows Live will feature prominently and could be the feature that most worries enterprise IT professionals. When a Windows 8 user logs multiple machines into the same Windows Live account, that user can access all machines remotely, even if each of those machines is parked behind a firewall.

Users will be able to roam all of the settings between machines, including applications, personalization features and taskbar. Developers are encouraged to build apps that use Windows Live Skydrive as if it were a local hard drive. Sinofsky says that this feature is secure because Windows LiveID uses a trusted authenticated connection on both PCs. But it also raises concerns, says analyst Wes Miller, research vice president at Directions on Microsoft. "I like the sync story," he tweeted. "But it's REALLY emphasizing Live. Is Windows Live enterprise ready?"

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Windows 8 will run on Intel and ARM chips and is designed for hardware-accelerated graphics, extending the work started with Internet Explorer 9. Windows 8 will be the platform for PCs and tablets. While Windows Phone 7 will remain separate, developers will be able to easily port their applications from Windows 8 to WP7 with as little as a few lines of code.

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Windows 8 will natively support just about any program language, including C+, HTML5, XMAL, Silverlight and Javascript. The Metro-style UI uses a new framework dubbed the Win Run Time. It includes more than 1,800 different objects for Windows application developers to use, "all natively built into Windows, not a layer on top of Windows, this is Windows," Sinofsky said to applause. "You pick the language you want to use and you can build your own Metro-style applications with W8."

Windows 8 will support all Windows 7 applications and older Windows 7 hardware. It uses a smaller footprint (less memory, fewer processes), even on older hardware. But no mention was made of backward compatibility for older Win32 apps, like those built for XP. Windows 8 will include Hyper-V in the client and that will, presumably, be the method whereby an enterprise will run its legacy apps.