Since Microsoft unveiled details of Windows 8 to the world during the //BUILD conference in September 2011, there has been some confusion about where and how the new WinRT API sits in relation to .NET and Win32.

Part of this confusion is due to the oversimplified, ambiguous and misleading platform architecture diagram unveiled during the conference (click image for un-obscured version):

In this diagram, it appears as though there is no more .NET & CLR, it looks like Silverlight doesn’t exist and, worse, makes it look as though WinRT is an entirely new Windows subsystem that sits alongside Win32!

I spent a lot of my career at Microsoft building and presenting architectural diagrams to explain the relationships between the various technologies I worked on and other current and new technologies. But I don’t think I ever created something as confusing, misleading and ambiguous as the diagram above!

A tip for whoever designed the above diagram: If you’re going to unveil your brand new OS & app platform architecture to your developer community, make sure your architecture diagram is clear and accurate.

Win32 & .NET are NOT “going away”!

During and since the //BUILD conference I’ve had MANY conversations (and overheard many more) with people expressing concern that .NET and Win32 are “going away”! I’ve seen people state that WinRT doesn’t utilize Win32 API’s and that it “resides directly on top of the kernel just like the Win32 API”!! Nothing could be further from the truth!

The reality is that Win32 and .NET are not going away! WinRT is not magic – it’s simply a collection of native COM objects that are exposed to the outside world using .NET/ECMA-335 compatible metadata (rather than the traditional IDL metadata format employed by all COM objects in the past). This allows WinRT objects to be consumed by native C/C++, managed C#, Visual Basic, etc. and Javascript via Microsoft’s Chakra Javascript engine.

Several other people have attempted to provide a more accurate diagram with varying levels of success. Fellow ex-Microsoftie Doug Seven posted his re-rendering of the Win8 architecture, and MVP & author Shawn Wildermuth recently posted his perspective while explaining how Silverlight sits in this architecture.  Famed Microsoft-watcher Mary Jo Foley also has a post discussing the angst caused by the poorly designed Windows 8 architecture diagram above.

While these newer attempts to describe the new architecture are increasingly accurate, they don’t deal with the issue of the relationship between WinRT and Win32. Nor do they clarify the position of .NET & CLR.

To clarify reality:

Because of the continuing confusion I thought I would offer-up what I believe to be a pretty accurate diagram summarizing the Windows 8 platform architecture:

Hopefully, this new architecture diagram should make things a lot clearer. This new diagram is by no means perfect, but I believe it accurately expresses the major components of the existing and the new OS components. Let me know if you think it needs any further changes in the comments below.

The Issue

I have been banging my head against a brick wall over the last few days trying to get JavaScript & JQuery Intellisense working in Visual Studio 2010 for a web project I am currently working on. I have read all the threads over at StackOverflow, I have read many of the threads on MSDN’s discussion forums and on many pages around the web.

All to no avail – as you can see above, no matter what I did, I could not get any JQuery Intellisense. But why? While it’s not perfect, Visual Studio 2010 has some pretty good (and rapidly improving) Javascript Intellisense support. I know this because I’ve used it on many projects in the past. But for some reason, it was just not working in this current project.

The Problem

I hunted high and low:

• I made sure I had the JavaScript sources local to the project (to rule-out CDN/connectivity issues)
• I checked that I was referencing the correct version of JavaScript
• I added “///<references path=”Scripts/JQuery-1.6.4.js" to my source
• I checked that there were no errors being reported in any of the sources

Nada. Nothing. It should work, but it wasn’t

I thought I’d check in case there were any JQuery updates published to NuGet, so I opened up the NuGet Package Manager console window in VS and typed the following:

PM> update-package

I was surprised to see a number of errors returned, including:

Update-Package : 'jQuery' was not installed in any project. Update failed.
...
Update-Package : 'jQuery.vsdoc' was not installed in any project. Update failed.
...

Huh? That’s odd. Let’s see what packages we have installed:

PM> get-package

Id                             Version      
--                             -------      
dotless                        1.2.1.0      
EntityFramework                4.1.10331.0  
EntityFramework                4.1.10715.0  
jQuery                         1.6.2        
jQuery                         1.6.4        
jQuery.UI.Combined             1.8.16       
jQuery.Validation              1.8.1        
jQuery.vsdoc                   1.6          

To quote Chris Griffin: ”WHAAAAAAAAAT?” Two versions of JQuery? SRSLY?

The Remedy

I remembered that just a couple of weeks ago, I’d updated my NuGet packages and noticed that a new version of JQuery had been downloaded, the old version appeared to be removed from my project and replaced with JQuery-1.6.4. I thought it had been done right, but I guess something must have gotten screwed up in the upgrade.

So, I used "uninstall-package …" several times for each JQuery library until all references to JQuery were removed. Then I used "install-package JQuery” to re-add the latest JQuery to my project. I ran “Rebuild” to re-generate the JavaScript Intellisense, and was delighted to see JQuery Intellisense restored to its full working glory:

WOOHOOOO!

I hope this post helps anyone else out there who’s been struggling to get JavaScript Intellisense working in VS 2010.