Lost in all of the discussion of Win8's usability changes was the reality that Microsoft effectively deprecated ALL prior mainstream native Windows development paradigms and toolsets. Win32? WPF/.Net? Silverlight? Sorry ... nothing built with any of those paradigms will run on the new default UI of Windows. And according to everything being put out by Microsoft's marketing group, that isn't going to change going forward.

When I put this issue to our Microsoft account team, they said Microsoft "isn't deprecating anything" because the non-default desktop will still support traditional development for now. But saying the tools aren't deprecated doesn't make it true. If you can't build apps for the default UI that Win8 and future Windows users will see, then by definition the toolsets are dead men walking.

In my job in the financial industry, our apps are very large and complex and generally have lifetimes closer to 10 years than the mythical "throw away and re-write every 3 to 5 year" cliche. How in the world can you look an IT executive in the face and tell him that you recommend spending $5M to $50M dollars using an approach that doesn't run on the default interface of your primary corporate user target OS? If you're going to have to deal with the complexity and slower development of HTML+CSS+JavaScript+JQuery+C++ instead of simple drag-and-drop development with everything in a single tool and language, why in the world wouldn't you just go write a web app and at least be able to run the app on more platforms? In other words, why write another long-term Enterprise app for Windows at all; even if native fat and rich-thin apps do save precious seconds for client CSR's and allow developers to be productive in a single language?

So IMHO, Microsoft orphaning all current Windows-native development methods is a far bigger story for corporate developers.