I never actually built an application (nor a HelloWorld) in WinRT, and I'm very suspicious.
My question is if there are features in WPF/Silverlight that don't exist in WinRT (excluding features that are implemented differently by design)?
And these aspects are most important to me and are the core of my question, and in result, decision to whether start using WinRT or wait for these to be implemented for it:
- Entity Framework?
- WCF RIA?
- MVVM support (Prism)???
- Various toolkits (Silverlight/WPF toolkit), that provide additional controls such as
DatePickeretc.?
It's not clear to me whether WinRT fully targets .NET or how it works.
Also, is WinRT a client-only (like WPF) application or can be ran on a remote client while sitting on a server (like Silverlight)?
Another one: What about backwards compatibility, if I develop a WinRT app, will it ever be able to work on Win XP?
I anyway can't understand why MVVM is not integrated inline and has seamless IDE support as MVC has. but that's just a side note. I can't use XAML without MVVM, any app that is a bit bigger than hello world is easier to do with MVVM.
Update after answer
As I commented on the answer, I do like the design of WinRT, but the question remains unsolved until I know about the specific technologies mentioned above (EF, WCF-RIA + Validation, MVVM, SDKs and Toolkits). And obviously, I'm not gonna start selling WinRT apps or digging into it until I have the above techs as a least.
Conclusion, as one who most of his work is LOB apps, after checking around a bit, HTML5+JS is far from being an alternative to SL. So for conclusion, I stick to SL and keep on recommending it to my customers. SL takes the least development time, and is bug free. Javascript is a dirty error-prone language, no pattern and no nut