WinRT demystified - Miguel de Icaza

WinRT demystified - Miguel de Icaza

WinRT is a new set of APIs that have the following properties:

• It implements the new Metro look.
• Has a simple UI programming model for Windows developers (You do not need to learn Win32, what an HDC, WndProc or LPARAM is).
• It exposes the WPF/Silverlight XAML UI model to developers.
• The APIs are all designed to be asynchronous.
• It is a sandboxed API, designed for creating self-contained, AppStore-ready applications. You wont get everything you want to create for example Backup Software or Hard Disk Partitioning software.
• The API definitions is exposed in the ECMA 335 metadata format (the same one that .NET uses, you can find those as ".winmd" files).

WinRT wraps both the new UI system as well as old Win32 APIs and it happens that this implementation is based on top of COM.