Desktop apps are coming to the Windows Store
One of the reasons some people didn't like Windows 8 was that it seemed to include two versions of Windows: Live Tiles and the desktop, with touch-friendly apps kept far away from traditional x86 programs. With Windows 10, Microsoft seems to be trying hard to make the user experience feel less jarring, and now, it's taking things a step further with the Windows Store. Once home exclusively to touch-friendly, "Metro-style" apps, it will now house a mix of Win32 and .NET apps as well, along with server-hosted web applications. The result is that users will now have a one-stop shop for all manner of Windows downloads. From a developer standpoint, meanwhile, all of these apps will be able to take advantage of the same Windows Store platform -- that means updates are delivered the same way, and developers can also enable in-app purchases, as they would in any other Windows Store download.
Additionally, Microsoft is giving developers an easy way to port over code from their Android and iOS apps, making it (relatively) painless to convert them to Windows applications and them put them up in the Store. This, too, should soon make the Windows Store catalog look bigger than it once was.
