Absolute Speculation - Windows 8 Roadmap?

Ok, just to be clear, I have NO inside information, I’m pulling this out of my … well let’s use the phrase “deep recess of my mind” and leave it at that.

Ever since the early demo of Windows 8 (with the new Metro Themed UX) there has been lots of speculation where Windows is heading with this next build. I’ve had some suspicion for a while, and while I’m probably wrong, all of the pieces that I see being showed lead me to one wild speculation, that if I’m correct would be REALLY cool!

Let me give you some of the links I use to come to my speculation

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh335062.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cdndevs/archive/2011/08/16/on-phone-apps-and-web-apps.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/15/welcome-to-building-windows-8.aspx
• http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/windows-8s-user-interface-touching-experience-888
• http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/new-official-blog-gives-away-nothing-about-windows-8-170003

There are actually a lot more links and reading and thinking I’ve been doing, but the main driving observations are:

• Scott Guthrie (His Gu-ness) being moved to oversee Azure platform
• Windows Phone 7 native programming systems being either Silverlight or XNA
• Windows Surface latest release
• Windows 8 multi-touch Metro centric approach
• HTML5 Spec
  • HTML5 Spec will have built in support for Multi-touch
• WPF, while being a “superset” of Silverlight, it’s Silverlight that is getting all the love
• WPF in some ways and Silverlight in MOST ways actually feels kinda like a type of HTML Spec
• Hanselman’s post on JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web- Sematic Markup is Dead! Clean vs. Machine-coded HTM
• Windows 7 and its “built-in” XP VM (where you couldn’t tell when you left Win 7 and went into XP VM)

So what assumptions am I making?

• It would be fairly easy for Microsoft to make a “compiler” that could convert a Silverlight App over to HTML5 ( HTML5 == HTML5 tags + CSS3 + Javascript) and / or vice Versa
• Windows 8 Native programming system will be the same as Windows Phone 7 – Silverlight and/or XNA
• Windows 8’s screen rendering system will actually be IE 10 (this time Internet Explorer REALLY will be the OS)
• All legacy apps (unless written in HTML5 or Silverlight or XNA) will be run in a virtual machine running inside of Windows 8

So here is my roadmap

• Windows 8 will natively run HTML5 / Silverlight
  • I don’t know if this means that it will compile HTML5 into Silverlight, or if it will compile Silverlight into HTML5
• All Windows 7 apps and earlier will run in VM, hosted within Windows 8
• Surface will no longer be a separate OS in the strictest sense, Windows 8 will actually be Surface 3.0 Core
• .Net developers applications will run as follows
  • If built on Win Forms program will run within the Embedded VM
  • If built on Silverlight or XNA will run natively on Windows 8
  • Azure development will be where .Net programmers will move (cloud computing)
  • Build Silverlight or ASP.NET app for UX, and Azure for Business layer / Data layer
    • (can always build and push out as .Net app, but then runs in VM on Win 8)
  • If Silverlight UX deployed to Windows Azure (or next Windows server, more on that in a moment), if caller is NOT IE10 / Windows 8, Azure / Windows Server will on the fly compile and serve Silverlight app as HTML5.
• Windows 8 Server, will actually be Windows Azure, just running locally

Your thoughts Gentle Readers?

(tweet me at @matthewhintzen with your responses)