Do Windows 8 Store Apps (Metro) run in Windows 7 or XP?

Question

I want to know whether Metro Applications developed using Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and .Net FrameWork 4.5 can run in Windows 7 or XP.

Not the normal Windows Form or WPF, I want to know about the all new Metro Apps.

What new things needed to run Metro Apps in Windows XP or Windows 7

Solution 1

What new things needed to run Metro Apps in Windows XP or Windows 7

A virtual machine of Windows 8. Metro apps currently don't run on Windows 7, and definitely don't on Windows XP. According to this thread, it's difficult but might happen eventually:

Keep your eyes out on future Channel 9 videos and on the BCL/CLR blog for more information around the challeges of enabling the Portable Library story, however, I will give a quick summary with regards to ViewModels:

While the ViewModels themselves are defined by the application, they often take dependencies on types (ie INotifyXXXChanged interfaces, ICommand, etc) that live inside the framework. Currently if you look across our multiple .NET platforms (Silverlight, Phone, .NET and now Metro style apps), these all live in different assemblies, and with Metro apps, a different namespace/technology (WinRT). This makes it challeging to give the user a surface area that can compile against and still have it run on all these other platforms. We've got some ideas on how we're going to enable this, however, it requires some work and doesn't come for free.

In saying that, however, we completely see the value and really, really want to do this.
David

But it's not currently possible. At best, you could just make a desktop app version of the same thing.

Solution 2

I tried it on Window 7 and answer is definitely no, you can not even develop Metro style App in Windows 7, for developing also you need Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11.

Solution 3

I'd be astonished if Win8 Metro-Style apps would ever work on Win7 - there is a huge amount of OS level infrastructure necessary to get those apps to work on Win8 that simply isn't available on Win7.

Having said that, people have figured out to write applications that can be made to work on both *nix and Windows with a recompile, so I imagine eventually it might be possible to write an app that could be recompiled to produce a metro-style version and a WPF/Silverlight version. But that technology simply doesn't exist at the moment.

Solution 4

This depends on what you might want to do.

For example, if you're developing a game and want it to run on Metro/Modern UI but also on other Windows versions, MonoGame is a great option!

It will allow you to develop for and run on:

• All Windows desktops
• Windows 8 Metro/Modern UI
• Mac OS X
• Linux
• XBOX 360
• iOS
• Android
• Windows Phone

And possibly more platforms on the future.

In my honest opinion having such a wealth of target platforms warrants any learning curve you might have to develop for MonoGame. And not to mention that you can develop in the comfort of Visual Studio, so IMHO it's something to be considered even if your app is not strictly a game (who said you can't develop a non-game with a game framework...?).

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Update: Here's a tutorial, and by the way, you may want to also consider HTML5 for games or non-games. Cut the Rope (very fun game) uses this, and it seems to be doing pretty well (I didn't even notice it was HTML5!).

Solution 5

Id say no, based on the fact that Metro requires WinRT which is not available on Windows 7 or XP

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Comments

[Camilo Martin]

people have figured out to write applications that can be made to work on both *nix and Windows with a recompile and without a recompile too: see Mono.

[Nick T]

Not sure, but Github for Windows looks Metro-themed even in Win7

[Ry-]

@NickT: It’s Metro-themed. It’s not a Metro application and doesn’t share any UI components with Windows 8.