I was presenting on Windows Phone yesterday and didn’t see the announcement but as I am catching up it appears that Microsoft announced a little more about the next version of Windows that is code named “Windows 8”. There isn’t a lot of detail but from what I have seen there is a good mix between what we have in Windows 7 with a full file system and access to the resources of the PC and the Metro interface, tiles, and ease of use of Windows Phone 7. There is a video on YouTube that shows the new start screen and some of the other new features.

From what I can see there will be new ways of creating applications using HTML 5 and JavaScript. It is not clear to me if this is the entire application, the launcher, or a combination of the two. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the technology is similar to the way that Sidebar applications were created in Windows Vista. In any case since it is still a PC I would expect that my investments in WPF, WCF, WF, Silverlight, Winforms, etc. will still be useful and that it is not a 100% web only device.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the first betas and see what the future of Windows holds. This is an exciting time to be developing for the Windows platform.