Sunday, October 23, 2011

WinJS really not much fun

I am currently mostly doing client stuff. I added multiple screens to the client. I got three different screens now. The login page, the character selection and the game itself. You can create an account, log in and choose a character, but you can't create a new character yet. Also switching characters and accounts doesn't work like it should.

Working with Microsofts new API really isn't much fun yet. The documentation is mostly incomplete and where it isn't incomplete it is extremely brief. It really isn't good for more than looking up the methods of an object. When you want to know what exactly a method does, or more importantly what this is good for, you are pretty lost.

The API samples, on the other hand, are so convoluted that they are hard to follow. They squeeze about five different use cases into each sample, making it hard to tell  the essential lines from the fluff.

And because it's such a new technology, there aren't any sources of information about it except for the MSDN. Nobody outside of Microsoft has written any tutorials yet and useful forum threads are also hard to find.

Fortunately many things which work when programming javascripts for normal websites also work for metro apps. So you get pretty far when you just pretend you are building a website and apply existing javascript know-how. This does, however, leave the sour aftertaste that you are missing out on all the nifty new features like data-bindings or the Metro-specific GUI controls, which could surely solve your problems much more elegantly and efficiently... when you would understand how to use them.

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