Hi !
A couple of days ago Microsoft announced that they open sourced the Windows Calculator.
Official Blog Post, Announcing the Open Sourcing of Windows Calculator
And there were a lot of mixed opinions (as usual) about this. Of course, we have the [full time haters] with some arguments like, this is not enough or this is a joke, a so simple app.
However if you read between the lines, there are a couple of very important topics here, which are not related to the calculator at all.
Let’s start with the source code. It’s all available in Github under the MIT licence, and that’s great. If you ever studying CS, you probably already code a calculator, so there is nothing new here. Mine was in Pascal, a long time ago.
But, and this is a bit [But], I don’t think you never added Telemetry to your calculator. And this is the Windows Calculator, there is a lot of telemetry here. You can start to understand how to add Telemetry in a “simple App” (no offense here, please). So, as a bonus, you get access to this information. And if you are very bored, you may want to read the Microsoft Privacy Statement. A nice document around how Microsoft manage personal data.
The 2nd topic which you may learn from the Calculator, is how to manage a product. Again, the source code here is the less important part. But have access to the Feature Process steps, or even to the Feature Tracking Kanban, will give you a sense on how to work with product features, understand releases, and more.
And finally, this is a Universal Windows Platform App, so there is a huge opportunity here to learn Xaml, and it seems that there is some Fluent App Design concept around here. I’m assuming the conversation behind the app, should be amazing!
Happy coding!
Greetings @ Burlington
El Bruno
References
- Official Blog Post, Announcing the Open Sourcing of Windows Calculator
- GitHub Calculator, https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator
- Microsoft Privacy Statement, https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/privacystatement
El Bruno 