First feature-complete release candidate of Meteor on Windows

announce
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Hello everyone and Windows users in particular!

Today, we at Meteor are releasing the first feature-complete release candidate of Meteor on Windows. We believe that everything that we need for an official release is ready to go, and we’re looking for one last round of testing to make sure things are good to go before we announce it to everyone.

If you haven’t tried using Meteor on Windows, now is the time!

Go to the Windows preview wiki page to download and install this release candidate.

Try out everything - running your existing apps, creating new apps, deploying, etc. Please report any problems you run into on the Windows preview issue tracker.

Thank you to everyone who has been testing the preview releases for the last few months. Things have progressed so much since the first preview released last November, and we wouldn’t have been able to get here without you.

Here’s a screenshot of what running the Todos example app looks like on Windows:

Thanks!
Sashko

13 Likes
5

It’s working well for me (in my limited use of Meteor, probably not getting close to any edge case.)

One thing I’m concerned about with the Windows build is that there is no relation between the Windows release version and the Meteor version it is based on. I know you previously said that it’s built with the latest devel (IIRC) but this (your previous answer) is not actually helpful in a practical sense.

I presume MDG sees this is a different build from the standard one (and therefore deserving of it’s own version number) but I really feel you need to include the Meteor version somewhere.

C:\WebStormProjects\myeto>meteor --version
WINDOWS-PREVIEW@0.3.0
C:\WebStormProjects\myeto>

Will you consider including the Meteor version in there somewhere? Maybe…

WINDOWS-PREVIEW@0.3.0 (Meteor x.y.z)

?

1 Like
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Hi @Giraffeslacks!

Your concern is totally valid - thanks for bringing it up. The main reason this is currently on a separate release track from regular Meteor is for ease of development and updating while we are still working on it.

When the official release comes out, it will be called Meteor 1.1.0 and the same release will run on all platforms. All future releases after 1.1.0 will have the exact same versions on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Thanks,
Sashko

5 Likes
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Thanks for the hard work.
Installed the latest and using it.

One question: When you said the version will be same across platforms, does this mean that the packages will also be compatible with Windows versions?

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Yep - all of the package versions will be the same. They already are compatible - you can run the Windows RC on your Mac or Linux computer with meteor --release WINDOWS-PREVIEW@0.3.0.

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Thanks sashko.

Actually I am using Windows-Preview@0.3.0 but few packages are still incompatible. I am actually raising github issues for some of these. If you are interested by any chance, I could post the links.

EDIT: I guess it has something to do with the version number in the release. Like you posted in the thread, I think once we completely move to main version, the problem would be solved.

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I’m keeping track of them on the issue tracker, so posting things there is great!

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Right! it would be organized if I post the issues there. I will raise the issue.

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So in 1.1.0 should we expect WP8 and WP8.1 support too?
That would be really amazing!

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You can only install Meteor 0.3.0 on windows server if you explicitely run it as administrator!!
That should be obvious, to ask itself to run as admin.

http://screencast.com/t/w5k7vOwhBIB

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This probably doesn’t include .apk building yet, right? Btw, are there plans for tutorials/docs on how to deploy to Microsoft Azure?

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From what I see on GitHub, mobile development will remain a limitation on Windows.

@sashko, is that correct?

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Yes, that I correct for now.

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I installed the unofficial Meteor on Windows (LaunchMeteor.exe, from win.meteor.com) a couple of weeks ago. Now I see that Meteor is officially releasing this new preview. I don’t see an uninstall feature for the unofficial one. Can I just install this new official preview over it? Will they interfere? How can I uninstall the unofficial one to be sure? I see that the unofficial one was installed under C:\Users\my_profile\AppData\Local.meteor. Can that just be deleted and the system path entry removed, or is there more to it than that?

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You should be able to use the new installer to just install over the old one. Let me know if that doesn’t work.

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A couple of questions

  1. Is Windows now considered a supported deployment target, or is it still just for dev ?
  2. How can a package author find out if their package is passing tests on Windows ?

The concerns that prompt me to ask:

  • That MDG splitting time between OS’s distracts them from tasks like better non-Mongo support, and features that my Meteor-using, Mac-laptop, Ubuntu-deploying company needs today
  • That package authoring just got more complex, since I will not know whether my packages “just work” on Windows.
  • That MS users are alot more familiar with VMs than MDG is giving them credit for, and the ones who are not familiar with VMs are not the ones going to be pushing the community forward.

I know - I sound horrible, non-inclusive. But I used to be an MS guy (many years, and many certs earned), and I know what I gained by learning to play outside their closed ecosystem, using VMs, and eventually migrating away entirely.

1 Like
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I would like to add my opinion : (this is just my opinion and has not a lot to do with windows)
They should also focus more on the backend side of Meteor if they want it to be adopted by more people and companies instead of trying to reinvent the front end.

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I would like to add the following. First off, I’m a hobby programmer that would rather buy flyrods instead of upgrading my laptop lol. I started development on an old Toshiba laptop, dc 1.47ghz w/ 2gb ram. It worked fine doing non-meteor development, but…

I found meteor took up to 30s to build and refresh the pages. I scaled everything down in Windows, basic interface, ran a 16gb dedicated readyboost usb, and disabled everything I didn’t use in Windows. It was ok to develop, but I wondered if it would have been better to develop on Linux. I couldn’t find much comparing the 2, so after a few days I installed Linux Mint xfce. What a difference, omg. Less than 10s per hot refesh, and 10 seconds for a full rebuild. I have no doubt it has to do with Windows 7’s resource management.

So for anyone who is developing on Windows on an older system, if you are able, switch to linux if you can’t stand the waiting. I imagine the windows version will get faster, but for now, linux makes it awesome.

If I had a faster laptop I would stay with Windows because that’s the system it will be deployed on and I need previews in IE10.

L.

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@deanius

To answer your perfectly reasonable questions:

  1. Windows is officially supported as a development OS, MDG doesn’t give any guarantees to work well as a production platform. Although, it works well as of the time writing this post, compiling a Meteor app and running it as a node.js app works well on Windows Server 2012, for example.
  2. MDG provides VMs for free, including Windows Server. These VMs can be used to run tests, or deploy binary versions of packages for Windows. There are quotas, but it is usually enough to publish a new version of your package.
  • MDG has already spent months of work to make Meteor run smoothly (or as smoothly as possible) on Windows. We estimate that the ongoing maintenance would require less work.
  • It does become more complex. Sadly, if you want your package to work well on Windows, there is no other way than spending time and efforts making it work well. You can as well not support it and see if your users need it.
1 Like