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XNA seems plenty alive on W8/WP8.

Flash and Silverlight are emerging as full fledged OS-like environments inside the browser.

Yeah, I wasn't really meaning end-user skinnable. If fact I'd agree that being end user skinnable just adds confusion in many cases. What I really mean is it should be designer skinnable (and then of course it depends on your products audiance). What I really am trying to say is the seperated your applications function from its presentation the better. If you have code specifically saying this control should use this font and this color, etc when the next version comes out and the PHBs decide they want a more modern look/feel its going to mean a lot of code changes for something completely irrelevant to you as a developer. There are many tools out there which make if very easy to make these types of properties completely independent from code so when look and feel needs to change for whatever reason it takes next to zero of your time. Its just the designers how can "reskin" the app without needing to touch any code. Here is a suite of controls for .NET and Java which at least do the basics of this for you with really zero code on the part of the developer. Now depending on the flexibility you want this may not be enough but it certainly gives you a great starting point VERY easily. Now there are other tools offering similar stuff (these just happen to be my favorite).

It's really very rarely done because it's such a PITA to get working...but here's one (old) article on it...

http://devcenter.infragistics.com/Articles/Article Template.Aspx?ArticleID=1264

just googled for it right quick

But is this feature still supported?
Because Visual Interdev is a discontinued product. It has been replaced by Visual Studio.NET.


Yes. Interdev was rolled into all the other products. The JScript debugger has always been part of IE. A quick search shows two ways of setting breakpoints and after that you can do the step-step debugging you need:

Using the "debugger" keyword in jscript:

http://waltritscher.com/blog/ramblings/archive/200 4/09/19/211.aspx

Using the IDE to set breakpoints:

http://devcenter.infragistics.com/Articles/Article Template.Aspx?ArticleID=2183

DotNet does not work as advertised (EG: have you seen any commercial apps in it?)

- Dell's Website
- MIT's iLab and ShuttleTrak services
- T-Mobile's customer portal
- Infragistics website and software solutions
- Any one of the items listed in Microsoft's .NET connected directory

Or perhaps you would like to look at the massive amount of work that has gone into emulating the .NET framework with the Mono project? No, .NET is completely unsuccessful (BTW, I wrote and run an ecommerce application for my company of employ on .NET that does over $20k/day in business. Sounds like production quality to me.)

As a VB programmer, I've *lived* leaky abstractions. Nowhere has it been more obvious than in the gigantic VB app our team is responsible for maintaining. 262 .frm files, 36 .bas modules, 25 .cls classes, and a handful of .ctl's.

Much of our troubles, though, come from a single abstraction leak: the Sheridan (now called Infragistics) Grid control.

Like most VB controls, the Sheridan Grid is designed to be a drop-in, no-code way to display database information. It's designed to be bound to a data control, which itself is a drop-in no-code connection to a database using ODBC (or whatever the flavor of the month happens to be).

The first leak comes in to play because we don't use the data control. We generate SQL on the fly because we need to do things with our queries that go beyond the capabilities of the control, and we don't save to the database until the client clicks "OK". Right away, we've broken the Sheridan Grid's paradigm, and the abstraction started to leak. So we put in buckets -- bucketfuls of code in obscure control events to buffer up changes to be written when the form closes.

Just when things were running smoothly, Sheridan decided to take that kid with his finger in the dike and send him to an orphanage. They "upgraded" the control. The upgrade was designed to make the control more efficient, of course... but we don't use the data control! It completely broke all our code. Every single grid control in the application -- at least one and usually more in each of 200+ forms -- had to have all-new buckets installed to catch the leaks.

You may be wondering by now why we haven't switched to a better grid control. Sure enough, there are controls out there now that would meet 95% of our needs... but 1) that 5% has high client visibility and 2) the rest of the code works, by golly! No way we're going to rip it out unless we're absolutely forced to.

By the way, our application now compiles to a svelte 16.9 MEG...