Calm down dear.

A short time ago, Mary Jo Foley kicked off another tempest in a teacup by disclosing that Silverlight was dead and soon to be replaced by HTML 5. This  shock-horror revelation followed an interview with Microsoft's Bob Muglia an apparently revealed a massive shift in Microsoft strategy that would render Silverlight and WPF useless.

Recently, questions have been raised regarding Windows 8 and in particular the Metro system which, in beta versions, required portions of the application code to be written in HTML 5. This was, it seems, nothing more than a temporary situation and in later versions of the SDK metro code can indeed be expressed in c#, visual basic and other .net languages.

I think it's important to understand that Metro is not Windows 8. Metro is intended to be a portable subset of the Windows platform which is capable of running on other hardware than PCs. On a desktop system, Metro is seen as an explorer like application that handles notifications from applications running on the system and which displays these notifications in the form of tiles. Underneath, a Metro application uses a dll that contains a subset of the Windows architecture and which is necessarily restricted. It is also true to say, that when required, it is still possible to create applications that rely upon the full gamut of the windows architecture.

Windows 8 and Metro is very much a classic case of "horses for courses" and choice of the application architecture will very much depend upon the experience you desire for your users. Despite the fact that Windows 8 seems to default to a Metro style interface I believe that this is nothing more than a showcase for the new application style which, in the production version, should certainly be an option.

Historically, it has been difficult to create kiosk style applications in Windows and this has been a problem for providers who wanted a far more controlled environment than is provided by the standard windows operating system.  Now, with the advent of Metro, simple, engaging, dedicated applications are easy to create and, rest assured, that these applications will be portable to other devices and platforms.  If however you still require the rich and complex environment of Windows then you can be equally assured that Windows 8 provides you with no barriers.