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Windows 8 Developer Preview

Posted Wednesday, 14 September, 2011 - 07:02 by Inertia

A public pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers is now available to the public, but since OpenTK is platform neutral the truly good news is that the disc labeled "developer tools" includes a preview of Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express!


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the Fiddler's picture

Re: Windows 8 Developer Preview

Posted Wednesday, 14 September, 2011 - 11:28 by the Fiddler

Just installed this for testing. It's very different from Win7, so no comments yet. Also need to test OpenTK.

Inertia's picture

Re: Windows 8 Developer Preview

Posted Saturday, 17 September, 2011 - 10:56 by Inertia

The new Metro UI has been designed for tablets, kinda alien at first but it's probably the best way to go for the casual user who should have bought a gaming console instead of a computer ;)

Visual Studio 11 Express on this DVD is useless to us, it can only be used to create Metro Apps in Javascript, Visual Basic, C# and C++.

cody's picture

Re: Windows 8 Developer Preview

Posted Saturday, 17 September, 2011 - 19:01 by cody

But can you run a compiled OpenTK-App on Win8?

Inertia's picture

Re: Windows 8 Developer Preview

Posted Sunday, 18 September, 2011 - 19:28 by Inertia

Yes, OpenTK works flawless with the Win8 (x64, didn't test x86) version linked above.

Win8 is simply Win7 with some new features:

  • the Desktop gadgets introduced by Win7, the start menu and the idea to sell you stuff that you can get free on the web (a.k.a. "Apps") are what is now called Metro. Keeps reminding me of a Nintendo Wii.
  • OS startup is really fast due to smart use of "sleep" state. It's supposed to be pretty awesome with a SSD.
  • Vista and 7 removed support for Hardware Mixing of Audio, this is returning in Win8 (but not included in this pre-beta). This may be the only part that really affects OpenTK, it's possible that OpenAL gets an update due to this. (don't quote me, speculating here)
Inertia's picture

Re: Windows 8 Developer Preview

Posted Wednesday, 19 October, 2011 - 17:07 by Inertia

In order to keep this post somewhat complete, here's a link to a full version of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. Windows 8 is only required if you want to develop Metro apps, everything else should work with Windows 7 (x86 and x64), Windows 8 (x86 and x64), Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) and Windows Server Developer Preview (x64). Detailed information can be found at MSDN's page for Visual Studio 11.