Future of desktop applications on Windows 8 [closed]

Question

There are a lot of threads discussing existence of WPF/Silverlight/HTML5 on Windows 8, I just need to clarify the picture about desktop applications only, I have following queries to the experts

1. What are the technologies available for developing desktop applications on Windows 8?

2. What are the technologies I can use for creating rich multimedia applications. Currently I have an application with DirectX 9 and WPF. If I am to develop something like that for Windows 8 then what options are available to me, and what are the pros and cons of these.

3. Is it a good idea to continue with the same DirectX 9 code on Windows 8 as well? What is the best option equivalent to DirectX, Is it XNA or is it DirectX 11 or something else?

Performance an extensibility are critical points to me. All suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

Your question is wrong. Windows 8 contains 2 separate ecosystems:

• Desktop
• WinRT / Metro

Desktop is exactly same as it always was. You use same tools, same APIs, same frameworks as Windows 7.

WinRT is brand new and completely different and incompatible. You can share some code here and there, but it is highly questionable if it is even worth it. Especially if lots of your code is in webservices on net.

So if you ask this kind of question, you need to clarify if you are talking about Desktop, WinRT or are you trying to mix both.