Windows 8 Keynote Fun

Windows 8 looks really interesting. And I mean really. This evening I watched the live keynote streamed from the Build conference (you can find a video here). Worth a look, behind all the marketing hype is a system that is a proper step forward. It was lovely to see something that puts touch interfaces to the fore.

For me the great thing is that it provides a user interface which is very similar to Windows Phone. The “Metro” interface which launched on Windows Phone 7 is now being rolled out onto Windows 8. Furthermore, with Live Tiles and a XAML powered front end it looks like any skills that you might have picked up making Windows Phone programs will map very nicely into Windows 8. In fact the new Visual Studio 2011 seems to make it possible to move applications between the platforms very easily.

Lucky delegates at the Build conference will be getting Samsung tablets with a developer preview of Windows 8 pre-loaded. For those of us not out there in LA Microsoft will be making the software available tomorrow for anyone to download and play with.