Alchemy Solutions sent a few of its developers to attend the unveiling of Windows 8 at the 2011 Microsoft BUILD conference in Anaheim California.

The conference concentrated on a brand new runtime (WinRT) and its support for the new Metro touch-first application style. WinRT is a new API rewritten from the kernel up, emphasizing asynchronous methods and patterns throughout to ensure responsiveness. Metro, on the other hand, is a very clean, no-chrome touch-screen interface. At first it appeared to be a bit gimmicky, but as the conference went on it was clear there were many uses for this UI. It’s definitely an improvement over traditional windows when using touch for navigation.

At Alchemy we’ve been discussing ways to simplify user access to NeoBatch Job Monitoring and Reporting services. The Metro UI certainly looks like a great candidate for this task. We are also considering Metro/WinRT advances in NeoKicks and NeoData. And as always, we will try to drive the language improvements in the .NET framework into Fujitsu’s COBOL products.

Microsoft gave us some tablets preloaded with Windows 8 —this was clearly one of the conference highlights. The tablets will allow us to get a jump on laying out how we can integrate our products with Windows 8 and Metro. From our perspective, the conference was a success not only for Microsoft’s Metro UI but for Alchemy as well.