Pivotal Perspectives Newsletter- Microsoft developer evangelist responds to developer frustration

Sat Oct 4 19:51:50 UTC 2014

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** Microsoft exec addresses topic that is frustrating many software developers
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Each month we encourage developers in the Pivotal Perspectives panel to pose questions for other developers and industry leaders to respond to.  Last month’s question came from US game developer Geoffrey Draper.

http://www.pivotpointresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/geoff_draper.jpg Geoffrey asked “Are any other developers baffled by Microsoft’s strategy? They say  they want us to develop for their platform, and then they deprecate XNA along  with their System.Drawing API for 2D graphics. The only supported options are  to code the entire GUI in XAML (too high level) or DirectX (too low level).  Essentially they are making it overly difficult for us to port our existing Android  games to Windows. Do any other developers feel my frustration? Or has  everyone else figured out a workaround?”

Geoffrey Draper- Software Developer

We posed Geoffrey’s question to the Pivotal Perspectives  panel this week and heard back from over 300 developers during the week of July 21st 2014.

According to Matt Foulon, Pivot Point Research Group analyst, “the  poll results found that 37% of developers agreed that they share Geoffrey’s frustration and  15% said they had figured out workarounds; and 48% said they didn’t have enough experience to have an opinion one way or the other.”

http://www.pivotpointresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/poll-chart2.jpg

Comments from fellow frustrated developers:

“XAML is nice and declarative, and with better performance works nice for some games, but doesn’t help with porting at all. DirectX is way too level without using an engine.” (United States – software architect – game developer)

“I am working in a startup doing a new mobile messaging product which requires a very smooth reactive UI. We are baffled as to what to use on WinPhone so it’s coming a LOOOONG last on our roadmap.” (Australia – start up developer)

Comments from fellow developers who have figured out workarounds:

“Developing with HTML 5 & Javascript is the future. Device-independent, from Java Android to Javascript it’s not too far.” (Germany – professional full time developer)

“I develop using marmalade sdk and don’t sweat the native sdk, that’s my game engine providor’s problem.”(Canada – game developer – enterprise/business productivity developer)

“Seems now the only easy way to make games for Windows Phone is either Unity 3D or HTML 5.” (United Kingdom – freelance/contract developer – enterprise/business productivity developer)

We then asked for a response from Microsoft’s developer relations team and got the following perspective.

http://www.pivotpointresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/derek-burney.png

Derek Burney- Microsoft GM, Technical Evangelism

“Oftentimes a big, long-term vision for a platform requires breaking changes.  With Windows Store apps, we cemented and refined our investment for a secure, developer friendly, highly productive platform that will serve the needs of our customers for many years; we have a platform that is touch first, mobile first, safe to deploy via our stores.  With games, we want a powerful platform that would meet the complexity of today’s immersive games.

Let me explain what I mean by that. We want the best games running on the Microsoft platform – inclusive of Phone, Windows, and Xbox. To accomplish that, we want to make available the best/most powerful APIs and frameworks, and as much as possible we want to decrease the friction to reuse (or port) existing games to Windows/Windows Phone/and Xbox.

Here are a few examples on how we achieve these goals:
* We are making investments to ensure all middleware engines like Unity, Marmalade, Corona, etc.  have a great offering on Windows.
* We are contributing first hand to ANGLE, Cocos2DX, OpenCV and many other OSS frameworks. All of these efforts make it easier to “port to Windows” from Android and iOS.  These ports are built on top of DirectX technologies, so they offer unmatched graphics and media capabilities. Those frameworks access the power of DirectX without having to write against it directly.
* Once you are on the Windows platform, we maximize your code reuse with Universal apps that you can reuse on Windows, Phone, and in the future, XBOX.

I should mention that as part of the we are investing into all these middleware and framework offerings based on the demand we see in the market – if you think we should invest more elsewhere, let us know where (and why).

This leads to the XNA question. It is indeed not the focus of our future investments because today’s technology has outpaced the capabilities of what  XNA could ever expose.  Today’s games are more complex than what the XNA APIs were designed for (e.g. advanced shaders). Direct3D and Direct2D have all the required capabilities – which is why we are investing so much into offering a rich XAML UI platform for controls, and seamless integration with DirectX in the same projects. While we are not investing actively on XNA, the evangelism team does work with Monogame (the cross-platform,  OSS implementation of XNA ), which itself leverages the seamless integration of the UI platform referred to above.  For people that prefer to still use the XNA APIs, they can do so using Monogame.”

We reached out to Geoffrey to get his reaction to Microsoft’s perspective:

“At first I was surprised by Microsoft’s decision to invest in 3rd party tools, but as I think more about it, it makes sense.  Since many of today’s popular game titles are written using Unity or Corona or other such tools, it follows naturally for Microsoft to ensure that Windows is supported by these tools — rather than forcing developers to port their titles to Windows from scratch.  Personally, I’ve always done all my development using each system’s platform-specific APIs rather than 3rd party tools, but maybe it’s time I give them a try!”

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