Writing code on the Windows RT

So I've got this Surface RT thing sitting on my coffee table and I don't know what to do with it.  The first thought that crosses a developer's mind is: can I write some code on this?  At the moment of writing there are is no IDE or compiler available for Windows RT.

So this is going to be a bit harder than I thought.  I don't have enough free time (not to mention intelligence), to start writing my own compiler so let's forgo languages that need to be compiled to either intermediate language or machine language.  So scripting it is then.  Powershell is an option, but then I'd have to come up with some kind of way to start unit testing this stuff.  Do I want to write scripts in powershell beyond automation?  I want to write code that can be written in a TDD fashion and be represented in a fancy way.

Then it struck me, I already know how to do this... html and javascript.  Next thing I did was set up a small javascript and html project with Qunit and the html5 canvas.   This turned out to work pretty well.  The only pain I felt then was the lack of a descent enough IDE beyond notepad.  I searched the store and bought a texteditor with syntaxhighlighting.  There are some bugs that need to be ironed out but it suits my needs pretty well. 

Now I just snap my browser on the left side of my screen to use it as testrunner and on the right side of the screen I can code.  Just refresh the left side to watch your tests run.

So If the surface RT is your only device at the moment and you want to write some code, then I encourage you to download this startup project, a syntax highlighting texteditor and start coding!

Have fun!