Excellent start to TP, number one feature.

[SledgeNZ]

Really like where MS are headed with this release for a number of reasons.

 

The first sprint is obviously aimed at the enterprise, keyboard & mouse user.

This is fantastic as it answers the questions raised by the majority of the desktop user base. I regularly go into small businesses where they have Win8.n but have classic shell installed as it was too much of an ask to teach users (not power users) the new way of things.

 

It pushes store apps onto the desktop. This is major in that MS under Sinofsky shut the door on Silverlight\WPF Devs with the derived answer of your future is HTML5/JS. Universal apps in the enterprise have access to the full win32 api (when needed) until they finish exposing the universal api to everything that is needed. The enterprise has heavy investment in not only .net but also most recently, xaml based apps. For enterprise most recently equates to the last 5 years at the earliest. Silverlight drove the enterprise uptake of WPF which was languishing compared to winforms dev.

 

From a touchscreen perspective the first release sucks ass, certainly running on my kitchen (AIO Touchscreen only) it's broken a number of things. No surprise there as we've got months of releases ahead of us. The technical keynote did showcase a preview of how devices move between form factor and I expect that will deliver the touchscreen goodness back to us. For now on the Desktop in a VM is where this is running (At least with enhanced hyper-v sessions we get close to the full experience).

 

The number one feature is by far the commitment to on the fly updates to the TP and not only that but A\B testing built in. As an 'insider' (I'm sure marketing worked on that for weeks) you can comment and have your comments seen by others. I've already added my upvote\request\backing to the comment regarding 'Please make swipe available on the onscreen keyboard'. I regularly jump from desktop to winphone to touchscreen and the only place I struggle to have for example a Skype IM conversation is on the touchscreen.

 

It's very early days but how many other companies of this size push a program whereby you can actively participate and have your voice heard and see the results? Ok, sure, we're yet to see this but the promise is there.

 

Win8 made some very good inroads to touch to the detriment of keyboard\mouse. The arrogance of Sinofsky wasn't well received unless you were the converted. MS have obviously listened and this is a welcomed response from a User, Developer and the person the extended family comes to for advice on tech.

 

Looking forward to the next drop to see what comes out of what you and everyone else is commenting on.