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Microsoft Programming Apple

Will Steve Ballmer Speak At WWDC Keynote? 280

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stranger-things-have-happened dept.
truthsearch writes "An analyst reports that not only will CEO Steve Jobs return to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference stage — he missed last year for medical reasons — but he will be joined there by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdrey said that Microsoft has been given seven minutes during Jobs' keynote to talk about Visual Studio 2010. Chowdrey said that a new version of the development tools software will support native applications for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS." Update: 05/27 19:17 GMT by T : As reader theappwhisperer points out, Microsoft has responded to this rumor via the company's Twitter feed with an unequivocal No.
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Will Steve Ballmer Speak At WWDC Keynote? More

Will Steve Ballmer Speak At WWDC Keynote?

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  • huh? (Score:2)

    by s73v3r ( 963317 )

    Is it April already?

    In all seriousness, I might welcome Visual Studio for the Mac.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Altus ( 1034 )

      This doesn't sound like they will port it to the mac. In fact I think that would be pretty bad, the UI is just totally in apropirate. It sounds more like apple is trying to find a way to let people develop for the iPhone and the iPad (and maybe the mac as well) using a PC. This could be very useful for iPhone developers.

      While I'm not sure developing mac applications on windows makes much sense, it could be very nice for setting up automated build machines in a mixed platform development environment.

      • Look for the upcoming merger/acquisition.

        • Look for the upcoming merger/acquisition.

          Don't Bogart that joint, my friend. Pass it around.

        • Look for the upcoming merger/acquisition.

          Wow, the last time When bill gates was there to invest a chunk of change in apple development it was partly motivated by MS trying to avoid the Antitrust abyss by making sure MS was not a monopoly (at least on the commercial side).

          Now it's a role reversal. MS is at this point in time a Fscked company (Win7 blow on touch devices, WinCE is on life support on phones, xbox360 has lost it's pricepoint sweet spot and is now squeezed by nintendo and Playstation, the big payday product, Office, is seriously thre

    • In all seriousness, I might welcome Visual Studio for the Mac.

      I guess they're going to add a compiler for Obj-C? "Obj-C.net, horrible syntax isn't just on the Mac anymore! Get your copy of @interface Windows *[@implementation Visual_Studio 2010] today!".

      • Apple could add an object-C compiler for Visual Studio any time they want. Visual Studio does not restrict what compilers can be on the backside, for instance ICC and GCC both work well under VS.

      • For what it's worth, clang already builds with visual studio, and can compile Objective-C code for that platform. I believe it can also be used from the IDE (it isn't used to do syntax highlighting or autocompletion though, so that might be what this announcement is about), and it can already be used to create iPhone binaries, if you have the headers installed.

        And horrible syntax? What, having each parameter explicitly named is bad now? Or are you just complaining about the separation of interface and

      • Objective C is what C++ should have been. It is true that the unconventional syntax drove people away. If you look at the concept of java and compare it to the implemention of java you can conclude that a lot of the late binding ideas of java were fantastic but something went wrong (I am reminded of this every time I look a my process list and see all the big real-memory apps are java, and they take ten times longer to start than they should.)

        Objective C has the finest elements of java, but lacks the over

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      I kind of like the idea of rivals being friendly with each other. Better than the alternative... extremism. Not really sure what an OS extremist would do, though.

      Anyway, I'm sure MS Office is still pretty big on Mac OS.
      And iTunes on Windows probably pulls in a decent amount of money for Apple.

      So there are plenty of benefits to being able to play well with others.

    • Heck I'd LOVE Visual Studio for the Mac. Just from a personal preference standpoint, I find Visual Studio far easier to keep things straight in comparison to Xcode.

  • DoJ dodging (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheKidWho ( 705796 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:29PM (#32363678)

    Seems like they're trying to dodge the DoJ by adding "competition."

    Regardless this is pretty nice, it means I can developed for my iPad/Phone/Pod on my core i7 desktop rather then my 4 year old iMac.

    • Seems like they're trying to dodge the DoJ by adding "competition."

      No one has yet explained what dev tools have to do with competition law for a platform with 20% of the market. This is just another rumor based upon speculation about other speculation. Don't hold your breath.

    • So you need a quadcore 8-threaded 2.66GHz CPU to dev applications targetting a single threaded 600MHz device with a 480x320 screen ?
      This tells a lot about your integrated development environment.

  • hope he doesnt pull one of these!!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc [youtube.com]

  • Rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DavidR1991 ( 1047748 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:30PM (#32363708) Homepage

    It won't be MSVC. It'll be the new Office for Mac introduction.

  • Bound to be a big win (Score:4, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:30PM (#32363712)
    I feel certain that most Apple developers would rather stick needles in their eyes than use Visual Studio. For one thing, it's more visually appealing.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I feel certain that most Apple developers would rather stick needles in their eyes than use Visual Studio. For one thing, it's more visually appealing.

      Yes, but only for the people watching the developers stick needles in their eyes.

    • Re:Bound to be a big win (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ares ( 5306 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:39PM (#32363856) Homepage

      having used apple's developer tools after spending years using microsoft's, let me assure you that apple's ease of use advantage ends when you open up xcode. sure you get used to gui design in interface builder, but vs is still orders of magnitude easier. therefore, the only developers who would rather stick needles in their eyes than use microsoft tools are those who have never used microsoft tools to begin with.

      this, of course, makes no commentary on the quality of code that ultimately results from the use of the respective tools, just the ease of use of the tools themselves.

      • Re:Bound to be a big win (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Monkeedude1212 ( 1560403 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:45PM (#32363966) Journal

        Basically what you said, I think its not so much about Apple Developers choosing Visual Studio, but Visual Studio developers being able to work on Apple Applications.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ares ( 5306 )

          exactly. its hard to complain about a free product, and i doubt there will be many mac os/iphone/ipad developers who will rush out to spend several hundred dollars on vs for the mac to replace the xcode that apple gives away for free in their development environment.

          more likely, microsoft sees the app store for what it is, a cash cow for apple. its thinking may well be that by moving vs to the mac, it can capitalize on developers' existing code bases necessitating only a build step for those developers to t

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Altus ( 1034 )

            Its more likely that this will be about VS on windows being able to compile applications for the iPhone/iPad (maybe MacOS but that seems less likely) than a port of VS to the mac.

            For one thing, porting a UI that complicated to the mac, would be a ton of work with fairly little pay off. On the other hand, giving windows developers the ability to write apps for the iPhone has a lot of value and lots of people who want to make iPhone apps who dont already own macs (and do own VS) would rather just install an

      • I was just talking about the visual aspects themselves, not necessarily the "user experience". Seriously, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft has gone whole-hog using Apple's widgets and UI paradigms; more likely, they've put an abstraction layer between VS's native Windows widget calls and the OS's widget services.

      • I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient (Score:5, Insightful)

        by melted ( 227442 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:56PM (#32364116) Homepage

        And I had been using Microsoft tools for 15 years before looking at them. Sure, it's jarring at first, but you get used to it. Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water. It's not even close.

        • Re:I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Ares ( 5306 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @01:11PM (#32364358) Homepage

          And I had been using Microsoft tools for 15 years before looking at them. Sure, it's jarring at first, but you get used to it.

          definitely. and it doesn't take a terribly long time for it either. i was looking at it from the perspective that apple has traditionally concentrated on ease of use in its entire environment. having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.

          Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water. It's not even close.

          you ain't kidding on that. even compared to mfc, apple wins. how microsoft managed to promote mfc for years without registry and security attribute classes representing critical aspects of the underlying operating system is beyond me.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by NJRoadfan ( 1254248 )

            having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.

            XCode and IB remind me of developing with Borland C++ circa 1995 or so. Create the GUI in a seperate app and then load a project in the main IDE to code and compile. VS.NET (And VB before it) simplify it. Create GUI objects, double click on the object and access the code for the events behind that function.

            you ain't kidding on that. even compared to mfc, apple wins. how microsoft managed to promote mfc for years without registry and security attribute classes representing critical aspects of the underlying operating system is beyond me.

            MFC was a joke. I never bothered to learn how to program with it. Win32 isn't exactly intuitive to build an OO framework on. Borland managed to do it somewhat better with VCL, but it was never popular. do

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

          Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water.

          That's hardly a fair comparison. The Win32 API is 15+ years old. It was built to support the previous 16-bit Win16 API. It spans the development of about 8 major operating systems.

          Newer portions of the Windows API being introduced with Vista and Win7 are a lot better than most of the older stuff and the integration of .NET into Windows has pretty much given you a completely re-written object-oriented approach to the Win32 API

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by UnknowingFool ( 672806 )

            Apple's Carbon APIs are by comparison at least 9 years old when Apple moved from System 9 to OS X around 2001. However if you count legacy, Cocoa is based on NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP which go back to the 1980s. The deprecated Classic API goes back to System OS which also goes back to the 1980s as well.

            The difference between MS and Apple is that Apple went through the APIs during the transition and cleaned them up. I remember reading somewhere that they reduced the number of APIs from 8,000 to 2,000. Apple

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by EMB Numbers ( 934125 )

            Apple's Cocoa frameworks started out as NeXTstep in 1988 (22 years ago) and have changed only incrementally since. Microsoft should have been embarrassed to ship Win16 let alone Win32.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP [wikipedia.org]

          • That's hardly a fair comparison. The Win32 API is 15+ years old

            And Cocoa is older. It is a linear evolution of the NeXTSTEP APIs, that first shipped in 1988 - many of the classes and methods from then still work. It is a full implementation of the OpenStep specification, published by Sun and NeXT in 1994 (and mostly finalised in 1993). A lot of Mac apps don't step outside of the classes defined by OpenStep, although there are a lot of new APIs outside of that.

            Windows 3.11 was introduced the same year that the OpenStep spec was created, and only one year before i

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by yabos ( 719499 )
        The only hard concept for me was hooking the UI up to code. In VS you double click on some UI element and it creates the action code for you. With IB and XCode you create the action code manually and CTRL+drag a link from the widget to the code. A little more work but once you get used to it it's not so hard.
      • I honestly like xcode better then visual studio 2005 (the last version I have used). Personally I like the thinnest IDE I can get. I find xcode to be a little heavy sometimes, but I find VS to be in my way most of the time.
        • VS2010 is much cleaner than the previous versions. Built on Presentation Foundation instead of WinForms. You might want to check it out.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      I've had needles [slashdot.org] stuck in my eye. Twice. [slashdot.org] And I paid for the privelede! Beats being blind, and it's relatively painless. Especially if it's a surgeon sticking needles in your eye.

  • Based on Jobs' comments about Flash, he probably feels Ballmer is a pioneer and great friend of freedom and openness, and should be welcomed with open arms.

    Maybe they will make all the Apple stuff adopt silverlight too! JOY!
  • It's not too late to bolt down all the chairs yet.

  • My first thought was: Apple & Microsoft start to team up to combat Google.

    Think Russia & U.S. vs. Germany in WWII.

    Considering Apple's become more like Big Brother in recent times, why shouldn't they be buddies?

  • In this corner... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:42PM (#32363918)

    I'm guessing an eight round electrified cage match with Jobs and Ballmer in Mexican wrestling masks and refereed by Chuck Norris

    It will be inconclusive for seven rounds until Jobs seriously injures Ballmer with a flying clothesline after Ballmer cheats with a folding chair strike to Jobs' liver. Ballmer will tag in Bill Gates, but Jobs will tag in Phil Schiller. Schiller will then proceed to completely own Gates and win the match with a shining wizard followed by a dragon whip and atomic crotch punch.

    The result will be Apple's market cap continuing to stomp on Microsoft's, and the kickoff of Phil's worldwide "Schillermania" tour.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • XCode for Windoze? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:49PM (#32364020)
    Instead of this, why doesn't Apple just release XCode for Windows? Seems to me that would make far more sense than getting in bed with MS.

    • Three words: iTunes for Windows.

      Apple is great at a lot of things, but writing/porting applications is not one of them. It makes much more sense to extend the functionality of MS's (far superior, IMO) Visual Studio. The extensibility of VS means they don't really even need MS's cooperation or approval... which is pretty fucking ironic when you think about it.

  • This is the dumbest rumor I've heard in years (Score:4, Insightful)

    by paulschreiber ( 113681 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @12:53PM (#32364078) Homepage
    There is no way Apple will let you develop for the iPhone OS using MS' developer toolchain. No way whatsoever. I'll bet Trip Chowdrey $500 right now this doesn't happen.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jo_ham ( 604554 )

      Why not?

      Xcode is free, you just need to pay the $99 to be able to sell apps on the store (which you would have to do on either platform) and opening up the machines you can develop on means potentially more apps in the store. Maybe it might even drive a few Mac sales, by choice rather than necessity.

      I have to admit it's a bit out of left field, but stranger things have happened (like Apple going Intel, or Steam being released on the Mac [Valve 6 years ago: "Half Life will NEVER be ported to the Mac" Valve y

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      Clang already builds on Windows and can be used from Visual Studio. Adding Objective-C syntax highlighting and code completion to Visual Studio wouldn't be too hard (the code for doing it is in clang already, it just needs connecting up to hooks in Visual Studio). Letting people develop for the iPhone without buying a Mac might be a good strategic decision for Apple, and only having to maintain an Interface Builder port for Windows, rather than a complete XCode port, would save them some money.

  • microsoft is heading back to its proverbial roots? It started out by selling ms basic to just about everyone, after all.

    will we see them scale back windows (including mobile), focusing on xbox, exchange and development tools?

    • Microsoft will become less and less important in the years to come when we can easily break their lock-in with all manner of mobile internet appliances. MS days as the 10,000 lb gorilla are coming to an end. They have to reach out or die a slow and horrible death as the need for Office or even the need for a desktop dwindles. I imagine the future where your desktop is more server then client.

  • I can see it now... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sophomoric ( 1715780 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @01:04PM (#32364244)
    I can see it now... Steve Jobs walks on stage after Ballmer finishes and says: That's great Ballmer, but unfortunately we're not going to be able to accept any apps created in Visual Studio, but thanks anyways.

  • People actually like Visual Studio? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tylersoze ( 789256 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @01:08PM (#32364316)

    One of the most surprising aspects coming out of this rumor (which is complete and utter BS BTW, I wish I could get a job where I could just spout crazy BS all day, as opposed to just doing it for fun on slashdot :) is learning that people actually *like* Visual Studio? Who knew? I mean XCode has its problems, but I can't wait to get home after a day of working with VS and open up XCode and have some fun do iPhone coding.

    • Personally VS2005 and 2008 are my favorite dev environments (can't speak for 2010, haven't used it much), I can get a lot done very quickly with those tools. In fact, I know a lot of devs (.NET fans or not, MS fans or not) that particularly think VS is one of MS's best software offerings they have ever made. I also know people who like BOTH XCode and VS. Of course, these days I have to work with RAD (yes, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit).

  • Intellisense, Intellisense, Intellisense!

  • ...about Apple changing it's developer TOS to say that only apps that were originally written in Objective-C or C/C++ then linked directly to the iPhone SDK APIs are allowed on the store, does anyone really believe that they'd now let VS compiled apps on the iPhone? I find it hard to believe that Microsoft would have created a complete IDE for the iPhone SDK to match the TOS as it is now. More likely they'd port the .NET runtime to the iPhone and then their IDE would develop .NET apps like it does now. T

    • Fun fact: Visual Studio 2010 includes Visual C++ 10, just like Visual Studio 2008 includes Visual C++ 9.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by yabos ( 719499 )
        Yes and like I said, MS would have to add a lot to link to the iPhone SDK APIs since it currently is mostly used for Win32. No one is going to code an entire iPhone app in raw C++. Even in a game, you are going to use the OpenGL view classes plus other UI widgets from the SDK.

  • Tech-Ed != WWDC (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AwaxSlashdot ( 600672 ) on Thursday May 27, 2010 @01:19PM (#32364484) Homepage Journal

    Yeah sure, Steve Ballmer will very likely speak about VisualStudio 2010 on June the 7th. But this will be at Microsoft Tech-Ed, developper and IT professionnal conference.

    How a miss-informed analyst can shake the web by spitting improbable rumours.

    (I won't talk about the fact that VS10 is deeply oriented towards the introduction of .NET 4.0 and corresponding C# evolutions, that VS has currently no ObjC parser — and will never include GCC even if it is Apple reference compiler — and that VS GUI editors are built for WinForms and WPF/SilverLight, not Cocoa, so this just ends leveraging their syntax highlighting text editor)

  • Developers, developers, developers... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Minwee ( 522556 ) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Thursday May 27, 2010 @01:22PM (#32364544) Homepage
    If Steve Ballmer is giving it, wouldn't that make it the WWDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDC keynote?

  • "This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool."

    now explain me how this fits with "VS10 for iPad/iPhone dev".

  • All of my apps are coded in C# and there are thousands of others that I know of. It cannot be a big leap for visual studio to add support as well. The real question is how is apple going to handle the not requiring a mac to compile or publish.

  • I thought he was just going to dance around and shout "developers!" over and over again... let's just make sure all the chairs are bolted to the floor first!
  • <head explodes>

    But, seriously, I'm still running Tiger so this would give me an opportunity to try developing for the iPhone / iPad. I've been sweating the upgrade to Snow Leopard because this is my primary machine, my hard drive's almost full and I would need to purchase upgrades for several apps. I've thought about purchasing a new HD then using CarbonCopyCloner or similar software to image it and copy it over. It all seems like a lot of work though...

  • ... have yet to be nailed down.

    Like the furniture.

  • Grand Central Dispatch is a high level C based technique for distributing computation of heterogenous cores such as GPUs and CPUs. It is open source, but having vendor support from MS might be the key to wide adoption and standardization.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch [wikipedia.org]

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