Introducing the “Month of Metro”

As you’ve probably heard, the first real beta of Visual Studio 11 and a “Consumer Preview” of Windows 8 are coming out tomorrow. We are very excited about VS11 and Metro, and we want to hit the ground running once the beta is available to bring Metro support to our product line.

For that reason, we are starting what we’re calling the “Month of Metro”. For the month of March, we’ll be buckling down and working on Metro support all across our teams and across all our products (where applicable). We’re planning to make weekly beta drops of our progress available to customers via our regular beta channels, and (knock on wood) to ship Metro support in an interim release at the end of March or early April.

Of course, the current releases we shipped this week already do provide basic integration into Visual Studio 11 (based on the current Developer Preview from last year’s //build/ conference); this upcoming work is focused on going beyond the existing functionality, towards new VS11- and Metro-specific features.

So what products does this touch? More than you might think:

Data Abstract and RemObjects SDK for .NET, obviously, will gain full support for creating managed Metro client applications that can talk to your servers.

Data Abstract and RemObjects SDK for JavaScript will support creating JavaScript-based Metro applications, including templates and the whole IDE experience.

Oxygene for .NET (“Emarcadero Prism”) will of course support creating managed Metro applications, WinRT components and anything else needed to make it a full member of the WinRT tool chain.

In addition, Oxygene for Java and RemObjects SDK for Java, while not directly supporting WinRT or Metro, will also benefit from integration into Visual Studio 11, of course. The same is true for Hydra.

Stay tuned to this page over the coming month for frequent updates. You can find all posts relating to the “Month of Metro” by subscribing to the category.