When the announcement arrived that Microsoft would offer the ability to build applications in HTML and JavaScript, you would be forgiven for having passed it off as a bone thrown to the abandoned Silverlight developers, or an attempt to coax web developers into the Windows ecosystem.
How wrong you would have been.
At Microsoft’s annual TechEd event, former C# and WPF devotee Patrick Klug told the history of having to weigh up his options upon seeing that his beloved WPF framework was about to be left behind in Windows 8.
Klug ported his NovaMind application from C# to a JavaScript application that rendered much of the app upon an HTML Canvas, and made use of a menu rendered in SVG. See it in action in the video below.
Taking it all one step further, Klug teamed up with his brother to create Game Dev Tycoon, a game created in JavaScript that makes use of many jQuery libraries for functionality.
In this audio interview, Klug speaks of the benefits of moving from WPF to JavaScript, dealing with an interpreted language compared to a static one, and how debugging works with Visual Studio and JavaScript.
Running time: 9 minutes and 46 seconds
Disclosure: Chris Duckett travelled to TechEd Australia as a guest of Microsoft.
