It’s interesting that the title of this post was Hello World. Not really interesting, but appropriate, I guess, as I was going to write about my experiences learning to write Metro style apps for Windows 8, and it just so happens that Hello World was the name of that very first app. I think that’s the name of the first app anybody writes in any language.
I guess it’s just the accepted convention. But, what does a hello world app really do? Very little. I remember when I first learned Basic on an old DOS 5 system in summer school. Our first app was also called hello world. And that’s literally all it did. You ran it, and it output ‘hello world!’ to the screen, and exited. The next thing we learned was GOTO statements, and then began the world of spaghetti code. Of course, we were all pre-teens, and they weren’t teaching us how to do anything useful – the final project was a text based choose your own adventure type game. But it was a nice little teaser for what you could do with a computer.
In high school I took a Visual Basic class, and one of the projects was to create an app that loaded in fullscreen, and accepted a login name and password. These values were hard coded into the app, and when you got the correct login, the app exited. Not very useful, but this was back in the windows for workgroups days… We did various other silly things, a phone book app… and I can’t really recall what else.
I took another visual basic class and a javascript class at the local junior college with one of my buddies. We learned a thing or two, but I forget most of it now. After taking the javascript class I started learning perl and php (one for linux administration, the other for web pages) and wrote a nifty little web page that I hosted off my cable connection. I literally have years of programming experience, but none of it in over 5 years. I feel like I am starting from square one. I know this isn’t true, but as I follow tutorials, I realize how little I do know. Maybe once I get going, it’ll all come back to me…
So, last friday, I downloaded Windows 8 preview release and Visual Studio 12 and went to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br211386.aspx and started following their tutorial to create your first app.
I wrote my first Windows 8 app using Visual Basic, and then I wrote my first Windows 8 app using JavaScript. They weren’t too difficult… but then again, all either of them do is say hello to whatever you type in a text box. They also save and load session data so they can suspend – that was a useful inclusion. But now I need to think of something useful to write, and don’t particularly care for it to be a blog reader.
Hmm… what to write…