Yesterday I visited the Virtual Build for Windows 8 at Amsterdam. I’ve watched the Keynote presented in Anaheim, California given by Steven Sinofsky. For those who are involved with Microsoft technology, it is a must see!
First of all it was overwhelming. The changes within the User Interfa
ce within the Start screen are all in the Windows Phone Metro Style. The Tiles presented on the Start screen show information from the underlying application. I.e. the email Tile will show information about your latest email.
The multi touch experience gives you the ability to “Swipe” tiles and reorder them individually or as a group. Touching the right hand site of the Start screen will open the so called “Charms”. 
These Charms are Context Aware. When you create you own Metro Style App and tells it to be Searchable, by adding a contract. The Search Charm will be aware of your App!
From a developer perspective I say welcome to a complete new developer community who are now able to develop for Windows8. Developers who are capable in creating applications with Html5, css and Javascript are now “Metro Style App Developers”.
Visual Studio 2011 Express and Expression Blend are the tools to create the new Metro Style Apps. Expression Blend has a new option to layout your app in HTML en CSS besides the already available XAML way to do it. To publish your apps to the Store you can use Visual Studio 2011.
You can still create Desktop Apps but when creating Metro Style Apps the way to go is XAML or HTML / CSS for the View. From JavaScript we are now able to call native operations on Windows8 using the new WinRT Api’’s. The WinRT is the bridge between native operations and the Windows Kernel. WinRt is build in Windows8 and it is not a framework on top of the OS. This will make it perform much better.
For instance the Grid to show images, which lives in the WinRT, can be called from JavaScript. These kind of operations are unimaginable at this moment .
All Windows Live Tiles in the Start Screen (Mail, People, Calendar, Photos) are build using Html and JavaScript!
At this moment I am downloading the developer preview. I can’t wait to see it in action. Need to get a multi touch device to work with it 
Microsoft .Net Lead Developer working at Centric with C#, HTML, Javascript, Css, MVC3, Silverlight....
Arjan Hordijk 
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