Some challenges with MS Surface Development

So I have been playing with the MS Surface for a couple of weeks, and have a pretty good handle on the basics of the development model. As I said previsouly, the nice thing (for me, anyway) is that it is pretty standard .NET stuff. You can do pretty much anything you need to using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). That being said, it is not without its challenges, and I would like to share some of what I have seen so far. 

1) The SDK only installs on 32-bit Windows Vista. This is a challenge for me, since my T4G laptop is running XP, and all of my other computers are running 64-bit Windows 7. The big value of the SDK is that it contains a “Surface Simulator” which allows you to experiment with Surface development without actually having a Surface. I tried setting up a 32-bit Vista VM to use for the SDK, but the simulator does not work in the VM. Now the good news, after a couple of weeks of messing around, I managed to hack the .msi file for the SDK, which then allowed me to install on 64-bit Win7. All seems to work great now.  

2) WPF experience is hard to come by. I can program in WPF, and understand how it works, but when it comes to the fancy styling and more creative aspects of what you can do with XAML, I am definitely no expert. Apparently, neither is anyone else I know!

3) Changing the way you think about the user interface. This is the biggy. The UI model for the Surface is different than anything else with which I have worked. yes, it is a multi-touch platform, which is cool, but hardly unique. If all you want to do is develope multi-touch apps, you can do it much more cheaply on a multi-touch PC (both WPF and Silverlight now support multi-touch development on Windows 7). The unique aspects of the Surface are that it is social, immersive, 360-degree, and supports interaction with physical objects. In order to make full use of the Surface platform, you have to think about all of these things. You also have to break old habits regarding how the user interacts with the platform. We are used to menus, text boxes, check boxes, drop downs and all the usual UI components we have lived with for so long in desktop applications. Or the content and navigation models we are used to on the web. The Surface requires us to forget all of that, and think of interaction in a new way. In this sense, it is more like iPhone development. However, even iPhone development gives you a fairly strict environment which defines how your app ahould look. The Surface on the other hand, is wide open. You can create almost any interaction model you can imagine, supporting multiple user working either independantly or collaboratively, working from any or all sides of the screen, with or without physical objects. This requires a whole new way of thinking, at least for me.

4) Ideas. This is another big challenge. I have lots of ideas for applications for the Surface. Some of them I am pretty sure are good. Some of those are even useful. Some of my other ideas are probably downright stupid. I would like to hear your ideas. I have always believed that, the more people you have coming up with ideas, and the more ideas you come up with, the better your chances of finding great ideas. So shoot me email with any or all ideas you might have – and don’t worry, they cannot be any more silly than some of mine!

Finally, I have added a little video showing just how far you can go with the Surface UI. Hopefully in the next couple of days, I will have a video of some of what I am working on to show.