Building Windows 8 for the ARM processor architecture

A great and very detailed post about internals of Windows 8 by Steven Sinofsky, President of the Windows Division of Microsoft: Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs


"Windows on ARM, or WOA. WOA is a new member of the Windows family, much like Windows Server, Windows Embedded, or Windows Phone.

... Printer class driver. For Windows 8, we rearchitected the print infrastructure to add class driver support. The majority of printers selling today are supported using the class driver, which means you’ll be able to “plug and print” on WOA without additional drivers. While the new architecture was needed for many reasons, we had printing from WOA PCs in mind from the beginning."

Not only that new WinRT platfrom is "object oriented" (compared to Win32),
it transparently supports a few types of ARM CPUs in addition to variations of x86.

New Metro-style apps build by Visual Studio 11 will run on both x86 and ARM CPUs.
The "magic" happens before deploying trough Windows Store.
Apparently there will also be some limited "desktop mode" on ARM based devices,
with support for Office tools.

Download with self-paced training material used for Microsoft Windows 8 "Camps" Windows 8 Camp in a Box, Consumer Preview Edition

Suggestion by excellent Microsoft Evangelist Dave Isbitski on the camp: this is a great opportunity; forget everything you know, and learn this new great platform. By the way, out of 3 developers options

• C++/XAML
• .NET (C#)/XAML
• HTML5/WinJS (JavaScript)

his proffered choice is WinJS, for flexibility of the language and wealth of libraries.

A brave new world of WinRT...