I am currently at the Visual Studio Live conference in Chicago attempting to absorb all the information I can on subjects as diverse as Windows 8 application development, Windows Azure, and Node.js.

The first day is all workshops and I’m attending the “Build a Windows 8 Application in a Day” workshop held by Rockford Lhotka. The term “workshop” is a bit misleading as it is more of an in-depth overview of developing for the Windows App Store whether through C# or JavaScript.

Given that this conference is not arranged by Microsoft, the discussion turns out to be quite candid and open. Windows 8 represents a significant change and is in many areas (such as touch and tablet computing support) clearly an improvement. It is obvious however that the right-brain, left-brain split between the “Metro” and the Desktop sides has caused significant confusion in the developer community.

Once I have collected my thoughts and finalized some snippets of code I have been working on I will post it here. Interestingly enough I found myself, during the day, drifting over to the JavaScript side of Windows 8 application development rather than the more natural (for me) C# route.