I happened to attend a weekly class by Joe Conway, the author of iOS Programming “The Big Nerd Ranch Guide”. The class covered ObjectiveC and iOS development, but today I’d like to talk about what wasn’t covered in this class: mainly discuss how can an iOS/Apple developer get into Windows 8 world, and what are the differences between iOS and Windows 8 development from the programmer’s prospective. Especially, this post is for Apple iOS developers: it may sound strange, but despite the obvious differences between the platforms, you’ll easily find ways of doing familiar tasks in Windows 8.

I have to admit that Joe’s task was daunting, but Joe handled it brilliantly. With about 20 Microsoft developers in the audience he had to give an ObjectiveC iOS class. The great news for iOS developers: by learning Windows you will actually advance in your computer science class, and may be even by a lot! As Joe put it: there’re two sides of the spectrum: one is people who ask me to fix syntax errors, another is you guys with “why can’t you do it that way”? With Windows some relatively hard tasks become easy and possible: editing animations, asynchronous programming, neat process management, I hope these topics will be interesting for you. This won’t be a side-by-side comparison, instead I’ll focus on helping developers move from iOS to Windows and learn something new along the way.

Design Differences

In Windows 8 we like starting with design. Design is what makes Windows 8 and Windows Phone visually and aesthetically different. Apple and iOS design is distinctively skeuomorphic, using properties of objects from the real world (like brushed metal, stitched leather or the now famous Swiss Railroad clock). Windows 8 design is distinctively digital and minimalistic. It doesn’t mean one is better than the other: these are two different design schools. Windows design guidelines are very pragmatic about design approach: a game app doesn’t need to be digital, while a financial app would benefit from a simpler, minimalistic interface. A great resource for iOS/Apple developers and designers for Windows design, has the simplest URL: http://design.windows.com.

If you’re interested in migrating your iPad app to Windows 8, this design case study is a great place to start: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/apps/hh868262. For designers we have tons of design assets, in Photoshop and Illustrator format: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh975421.aspx

From Objective-C to Windows C++, C# or JavaScript

If your only language for the last few years has been Objective-C, I have good news for you. You don’t have to learn something completely new: Objective-C is very close to C or C++, and even C# and JavaScript on the big scale of things (really big scale of things). As developers we’ll start with documentation. Just like the Mac developer library, Microsoft has Microsoft Developer Library, or MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com. Everything I’m posting here is very well documented there.

So, you’re coming from an Objective-C background and want to try some Windows coding? I started to put this table together as a point of reference: it’s not intended as a comprehensive comparison, but more as a reference for developer of where to start. You can also skip through this table, and we’ll go straight to the topics.

Item(

          string name, 

          int dollars, 

         string  serialNumber)

{ 

    Name = name; 

    Dollars = dollars; 

    SerialNumber = serialNumber; 

}

-(id) initWithItemName:(NSString *)name 

valueInDollars:(int)value 

serialNumber:(NSString *)sNumber 

{ 

 self = [super init]; 

 if(self){ 

  [self setItemName:name]; 

  [self setSerialNumber:sNumber]; 

  [self setDollars:valueInDollars];

 } 

} 

This is just a brief overview of the most interesting comparative and “go-to” pointers I found for iOS folks to begin with Windows 8. Honestly, it’s much more interesting to go from Objective-C to C# than vice versa. May be this is because Microsoft really made great investments in technology, and you really need to be motivated to go from .NET code to Objective-C. For the purpose of this review, I’m actually surprised that similar paradigms are understood by both camps of developers mostly without translation.