Mobile Portland: HTML, CSS, and JS: Welcome to Windows 8 October 22, 2012

If you're a web developer, now you're a Windows 8 developer. Using standard web technologies, web developers can target the largest device market by deploying on Windows 8.

In this two-part presentation, Microsoft Developer Platform Evangelist Jeremy Foster will provide an introduction to Windows 8 design and development.

Part One: What differentiates Windows 8 apps from previous and competing platforms?

We'll explore how Windows 8's comprehensive design language provides a robust and cohesive methodology for pegging the UX meter.

Part Two: Developing on Windows 8

Welcome to Microsoft's native (but by non-proprietary) Windows 8 development environment! You'll meet the WinJS library: a wide-open JavaScript library for Windows 8. WinJS allows HTML5 compliant data-tags to become controls, templates, and Windows 8 contracts. It provides a very lightweight but powerful navigation framework that can hold rich page state. It implements asynchronicity through the CommonJS promise pattern. It provides classes and namespaces, and a lot more. Plus, your favorite 3rd party JS libraries work in Windows 8! JavaScript apps running natively on a device including graphical hardware acceleration -- that's awesome.

CSS, the styling language you know and love (even more now at version 3), is implemented very thoroughly and even has support for some new features like flexboxes and grids, so layout in a Windows 8 app is far less painful than web dev days of old.

About the Speaker

Jeremy Foster, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft

Jeremy Foster was educated in computer engineering and mathematics, gathered disparate industry experience in education, aerospace manufacturing, and insurance. With just enough and not nearly enough education and experience, he finally joined Microsoft with the goal of informing and inspiring other software developers to write code and write it right. When he is not working, he is likely spending time with his wife and son, hiking and camping, sailing, scuba diving, or working on house projects. Find Jeremy online at @codefoster and codefoster.com.