I was on a project last month and developed a WPF application. One of the things I had to do was find all child folders from a parent, simple right? Just use the C# directory class like I'd done a thousand times before... Well I didn't realize that since upgrading to Windows 8, a whole new set of rules cropped up making the directory class unusable. Kept getting authorization errors.
Turns out this little gift from Windows 8 showed up.
Of course at the time I didn't have the skills or time to track down and had to do things differently. I lost about a day on that and had to come up with a really stupid solution on important get it done yesterday project.
So today I'm trying to develop a XAML app. (Not WPF) and I stumble across the issue of the new model for "Sideloading" LOB apps. This means that all the freedom we had as developers in the past is now over. That freedom was as a "User" we could write apps that ran anywhere in the enterprise. And we never were platform weary. NOT any more, due to MSFTs brilliant campaign to turn all desktops into a cell phone, we now have to override the stupid new security settings above, if we chose to write code as a Metro app instead of WPF we have to register to be a developer every 30 days and we have to adopt the "SideLoading" policies to get our stuff onto Enterprise networks. Remember I was writing a WPF application on Windows 8 and it wouldn't run due to security.
This means as a developer you cannot create WPF applications and test them on a Windows 8 platform where most of the business is Windows 7 without monkeying around with your dev environment.
But get this even if you do work around all of these non backward compatible situations, you still can't deploy your own business apps without a trusted root certificate.
I thought they did all this stuff to make common platforms, but in retrospect they are telling the Buisness people to shut up and follow the plan...
This is absolutely ridiculous!
No wonder MSFT stock is sideways. Maybe it's time for us to bolt to Apple or Google platforms.
JP Cowboy Coders Unite!