[undergroundhero]

I enjoy the aesthetic of Windows 8 and was really excited to start messing around with app development as a new hobby project. The WinRT API, though... it's very bare.

Perhaps I was naive thinking the WinRT API would be similar to .NET, but Microsoft could have made it much, much simpler for current .NET developers to start working with WinRT.

My biggest gripe is that WinRT seems to be 100% focused on mobile/tablet platforms. My laptop has Windows 8 and I spend all of my time in the desktop, away from apps. Why? Because there's a lack of "real" applications in the Windows 8 Store. Writing system utilities for a more technical audience is almost impossible. They replaced the excellent System.IO namespace with the Windows.Storage namespace, which doesn't give you access to much of the computer's actual storage [1].

Hopefully I'm wrong and someone posts a reply with an easy way to search through the computer's files and folders, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows...

[TazeTSchnitzel]

>They replaced the excellent System.IO namespace with the Windows.Storage namespace, which doesn't give you access to much of the computer's actual storage

For security reasons. You can open a file picker, but you can't just spider directories on the hard disk, because Windows 8 has quite restrictive sandboxing.

[EwanG]

Although for most purposes you can tell it to just use the "defined" Documents space (effectively user/MyDocuments) which means you shouldn't HAVE to worry about spidering down directories for your save files and such.

Not associated with MS, but currently developing for the Windows Store :-)