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We have technologies for web apps. The arguable most feature rich best was from Microsoft, Active-X. But Flash, Java, Shockwave are also all contenders. So was Silverlight. But they failed because web developers are skeptical of Microsoft.

So what can Microsoft do?

What will be Microsoft's next Silverlight, and who will buy?

.Net?
http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/230502/562113.aspx

Get support for current partner platform (had it been Android or WP7) on Symbian and/or Meego. Like, Silverlight support for Symbian.

You mean, like this?

(Second reply.)

Interestingly, that is only available for Symbian 5th edition devices (5xxx line started with 5800XM, N97 communicators), not for new Symbian^3 devices. Also, that seems to be... let's say politiley, limited version, compared to "desktop Silverlight". Wether that will change quickly, or not, will be quite revealing.

Get support for current partner platform (had it been Android or WP7) on Symbian and/or Meego. Like, Silverlight support for Symbian.

You mean, like this?

Ok, WTF. How have I missed that? And that's from last summer... Have to check it out, thanks for the link!

(Not that I'm excited about any MS technology, it's just that in current situation, that's something worth checking out...)

Assuming that will be part of Nokia developer story, which they'll hopefully talk more about next week(s), then choosing WP7 over Android certainly seems to make sense.

Get support for current partner platform (had it been Android or WP7) on Symbian and/or Meego. Like, Silverlight support for Symbian.

You mean, like this?

And no, XNA and Silverlight can't run dynamic languages (DLR) because their CLR lacks Reflection.Emit.

Really?

Doesn't BlackBerry support any JVM language?

It would, as far as I know. I've never had a chance to use let alone program for a BlackBerry device.

I'm not sure if it's relevant anymore, but for the record, JRuby exists for Android -- and Android isn't even a proper JVM.

There are no mobile implementations (except for possibly Windows Mobile 6.x, couldn't find any info on it.)

There is an implementation for Symbian (S60), but, quite obviously, it's too little too late.

Aside from my personal experience, there is that (by now years-old) video where a guy builds a complete database-enabled blog using RoR, from the ground up, in 15 minutes. Do that (or something like it) with Silverlight? Flex? No way

No problem. Have done it several times. You can watch the following set of videos where the guy creates a SOAP enabled server app with a relational database, including what amounts to a reservation system, a management system etc, in what amounts to far less than an hour of work.

The videos are somewhat longer than 15 minutes, but they are educational not demonstrations.

I agree that RoR is a great tool and I have done a lot of work with it. I have even done quite a bit of work with Flex on Rails which I would heartily recommend (I didn't do any of what's on the site, just used their excellent book) - apart from the fact that Flex is not 100% appropriate for REST apps (at least not the previous version, I have not tried the latest). Until earlier this year, for complex business apps, Flex and Rails was in fact my tool of choice for such apps. The reason I used Flex was that it gave both an advanced UI (of the type that can not be accomplished with Javascript) and it dramatically reduced network and server load. AJAX-based Javascript apps hit the server way too much.

With the release of Silverlight 4 Microsoft leaped far past Adobe though. C# is a much better environment than is Actionscript.

I still think Flex might be a viable option

If you think Flex might be a viable option, give the videos above a whirl. Make sure you get the MVVM video too and compare the utter simplicity of Silverlight compared to a Flex app with Cairngorm. If you have any experience with delivering LOB apps where integration is paramount (think SOAP) the videos above should perhaps not blow, but seriously rattle your mind.

Aside from my personal experience, there is that (by now years-old) video where a guy builds a complete database-enabled blog using RoR, from the ground up, in 15 minutes. Do that (or something like it) with Silverlight? Flex? No way

No problem. Have done it several times. You can watch the following set of videos where the guy creates a SOAP enabled server app with a relational database, including what amounts to a reservation system, a management system etc, in what amounts to far less than an hour of work.

The videos are somewhat longer than 15 minutes, but they are educational not demonstrations.

I agree that RoR is a great tool and I have done a lot of work with it. I have even done quite a bit of work with Flex on Rails which I would heartily recommend (I didn't do any of what's on the site, just used their excellent book) - apart from the fact that Flex is not 100% appropriate for REST apps (at least not the previous version, I have not tried the latest). Until earlier this year, for complex business apps, Flex and Rails was in fact my tool of choice for such apps. The reason I used Flex was that it gave both an advanced UI (of the type that can not be accomplished with Javascript) and it dramatically reduced network and server load. AJAX-based Javascript apps hit the server way too much.

With the release of Silverlight 4 Microsoft leaped far past Adobe though. C# is a much better environment than is Actionscript.

I still think Flex might be a viable option

If you think Flex might be a viable option, give the videos above a whirl. Make sure you get the MVVM video too and compare the utter simplicity of Silverlight compared to a Flex app with Cairngorm. If you have any experience with delivering LOB apps where integration is paramount (think SOAP) the videos above should perhaps not blow, but seriously rattle your mind.

I will be flayed alive, but Silverlight 4 is a "Rich Internet Application" framework and with the most recent version, they built in some very tight and effective printing functionality. That, in combination with the ability to pretty much lay things out exactly as you want, export to an image or text format, export the app to an out of browser desktop app, and print in whatever format you see fit, makes it ideal for the kind of ticketing system you're talking about.

Here's a blog on how to implement it: http://wildermuth.com/2009/11/27/Silverlight_4_s_Printing_Support
And another: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/A-look-at-the-Printing-API-in-Silverlight-4.aspx

and here's Microsoft's page hyping it: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/

Here's a blog on linking Ruby on Rails with Silverlight as well: http://techblogging.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/using-silverlight-with-rubyonrails/

Hope this helps.

I merely said that this letter from Steve was less than up front about the reasons why nobody had hardware accelerated video before April of this year. While Adobe may be "lazy" in their own rights, Apple is "lazy" too. If Apple is getting blamed for Flash's crashes, then Adobe is getting blamed for Apple's lack of hardware acceleration.

You present self-defeating arguments in this comment. The Jobs letter doesn't have anything to do with the API just released--because Flash uses a legacy codebase, it was ineligible to use modern APIs that would have provided hardware acceleration, including but not limited to the one announced a week ago. Adobe's failure to offer hardware accelerated h.264 video playback was not a criticism leveled against it. Adobe's failure to write a plugin with acceptable overall performance was, and that's got nothing to do with Apple.

H.264 video playback is hardware accelerated by all kinds of third party software products, none of which had to wait until the past two weeks to take advantage of those features, because of the OS-level Quicktime frameworks. Flash performance was equally terrible before any platform had h.264 hardware acceleration. Again I ask rhetorically, what was the hold up before? Hardware accelerated Flash is relatively new, period, and doesn't explain Flash's terrible performance relative to other platforms, all of which had the same tools available. As the blog post concludes,

"Compared to QuickTime based video playback support in Safari 4.0.x on Mac OS X 10.6.3 (or your standalone VLC/QuickTime player that is) there is still room for improvement in Flash Player."

Both the issue and the resolution are recent and merely collateral issues that have little to do with the Flash performance/hardware leveraging/battery life issue you purport to respond to.

Apple has been dragging their feet on this for much of the last decade

How so?

Citations please -- I'm not finding these benchmarks

Open Activity Monitor and see for yourself. Alternatively:

http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/3015/10847.aspx
http://www.tobinharris.com/past/2008/8/30/performance-of-silverlight-vs-flash-vs-javascript-vs-tracemonkey/ (even using Silverlight 1.0, it was still almost 3 times faster than Flash)
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=35496

Besides, Silverlight 4 does use hardware acceleration, and does use this new API, so I'm not sure where you're getting your (mis)information. You're obviously out of date, and I'm starting to distrust the authority of your words.

Silverlight 4 was finalized in early March (before the new API was publicized) and released a week after the Apple API was announced. Unless you're suggesting that it has time-traveling capabilities, it does not use the just-publicized method. It uses the same hardware acceleration that has been available to developers for months to years--APIs that Flash could have used but for their own inaction. The real question is your apparent confusion over what's happening here, while you speak of setting the record straight.

There are three types of hardware acceleration: (1) hardware rendering (i.e. Quartz, CoreImage, CoreAnimation), (2) GPGPU acceleration of Flash functions, and (3) hardware decoder access for video playback (specifically, h.264). Adobe doesn't currently support any of them fully on the Mac.

(2) is relatively new, so no fault there. (1) has been available to developers for years in Windows, OS X, and more recently, even Linux. Adobe implemented hardware vector rendering 10.1 for Windows and finally rewrote some of the Mac v

I'm perfectly OK with IE using the GPU to accelerate the rendering of web content as long as the actual web code is written to an open standard and does not require some sort of proprietary windows-only plugin or activex controls or something to work.

I didn't ignore that part... but how it works is pretty easily explained by reading the article. There is no need for his ranting post.

99% of desktops, maybe...what about mobile devices, appliances and phones. The desktop isn't the only thing to take into consideration when writing web code anymore.

http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/devices/windows-phone/

Anyway, for a site I would use either Flash or Silverlight for, I wouldn't be targeting mobiles anyway. While mobiles do browse the web increasingly more these days, they're still the fringe.

More people bitch over flash not being on iPhone than complain that the website contains flash...

XNA is sandboxed on the Xbox 360 (in fact, XNA on the Xbox 360 runs on top of a variant of the Compact Framework and not the full desktop/server Framework distribution).

C-to-CIL compilers already exist, Microsoft includes one as part of VC.

Anyway, Silverlight actually disables unsafe code, so C# is gimped in this regard on Windows Phone 7 ( http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/2983/182246.aspx ).

Flash is a problem because it is a vendor standard that doesn't need to compete to survive.

Um, no

It fails to take advantage of hardware acceleration when EVERY OTHER SOLUTION does.

Um, no.

Why am I defending Adobe? Actually, I'm not. I'm fighting laziness.

Good luck trying to use these features on your iPad. So much for multiplatform.

Neither does Silverlight per the google search from a silverlight forum. (I picked the newest post I could quickly find)

http://betaforums.silverlight.net/forums/p/158591/355127.aspx

Flash supports DRM out of the box, and Silverlight has several features that make it better than Flash. Even its open-source implementation is better.

The problem isn't between Moonlight and Netflix.

The problem is that Microsoft isn't allowing Moonlight access to the PlayReady DRM SDK used by Silverlight. Which means Moonlight can't play any DRM'ed files. Which means Moonlight can't play netflix content, despite really wanting to.

Here is a thread on Microsoft's Silverlight forum discussing the matter.

their V2 dropped support for PowerPC macs which several people

So Silverlight can't possibly compete with flash because it doesn't support a hardware platform that hasn't been produced in 5 years now and already has negligible market share?

In Silverlight V3, things getting even more complex as the Win32/64 Silverlight V3 has more features than OS X 32/64 one

The only differences I'm aware of between mac and windows silverlight 3 are quite trivial

While mentioned, where is the iPhone/Symbian and even Windows Mobile support?

In the works . Admittedly, MSFT is dissapointingly behind schedule on this front.

Some of your complaints with Silverlight have merit. It isn't perfect yet, but it has made remarkable progress in the 2 years it has been out and most certailnly is a rival to flash. Flash had an 11 year head start and Silverlight already does just about everything it does and a few things better. Silverlight lags behind flash in market penetration and platform support, but at the rate it is going, it will catch up quite soon.

What surprising is they don't use it for Bing.

http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/announcing-the-bing-maps-silverlight-control/

I really don't see why everybody is acting like the sky is falling over this. The level of cross platform compatibility is not changing in any significant way. Virtually nobody is going to use the Windows only com automation. It only works in a full trust out of browser Silverlight app. 99.5% of Silverlight use is in browser and of that remaining 0.5% most are partial trust apps. I can't think of why somebody with these requirements wouldn't just use WPF honestly.

Here's a more comprehensive listing of the changes to come.

You mean what if Microsoft released a plugin and required it to be installed for some of their sites to work properly? I don't know, I can't think what would happen in that case; probably people would just install the plugin and let it take over running the web app.

Too late.
http://labs.mozilla.com/prism/
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
http://silverlight.net/
http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sidebar-gadgets.aspx
http://www.screenlets.org/index.php/Screenshots

Q: Will Silverlight for mobile plug-in on Windows Mobile be any different from the one on Nokia S60?
A: Silverlight provides a consistent experience across the Web and mobile devices. The same Silverlight applications should work on both Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 devices.

Same goes for anyone "subscribing" to media outlets for a long time which requires Silverlight . It probably means they are easily bought out.

What else would you use if you wanted to do cost-effective live HD streaming?

Media companies who use Silverlight are mainly using it to do stuff there aren't any other ways to do.

We're seeing a huge amount of live sports projects using Silverlight, because nothing else can deliver the same experience economically.

Her's a bunch of high-profile projects: http://team.silverlight.net/

...been impressive when compared to Flash? Really? Then why did mlb.com switch from Silverlight to Flash? I remember when they did this - I had unsubscribed because the Silverlight player was such a mess, and I went back and signed up for the rest of the season.

That said, the ability to write Silverlight apps in Ruby is interesting.

Because so many more people already have flash installed.

Does anyone outside of Microsoft use Silverlight? Seriously? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I thought not. Stop giving Microsoft press every time they "update" their shitty little plugin that no one cares about, and let it die.

I wouldn't say that nobody uses it, exactly.

...been impressive when compared to Flash? Really? Then why did mlb.com switch from Silverlight to Flash? I remember when they did this - I had unsubscribed because the Silverlight player was such a mess, and I went back and signed up for the rest of the season.

That said, the ability to write Silverlight apps in Ruby is interesting.

Hell, I'm surprised Microsoft's never made an 'Excel' component you could code to in IE. But it's certainly better that it be part of HTML 5.

Silverlight Datagrid. http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=116211. Off course all of the arguments against Flash/Flex apply here.

> Except right now, it only supports WMV, WMA and MP3

Of course, but that doesn't say much about the actual codecs used. Flash uses FLV, so? Is that less proprietary?

Silverlight 3 has "extensible media support", which means you can use Ogg Vorbis/Theora formats if you'd like. A Mono implementation of Ogg Vorbis is already available for testing.

See here:
http://silverlight.net/themes/silverlight/getstarted/sl3beta.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#whatsnew
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-24-1.html

What scares me about your post is how certain you are, and how wrong you are at the same time...

Silverlight inherently supports H.264 and VC-1 - the two HD standards, and you are probably happily watching a movie on your BluRay player that is even VC-1 encoded as it is the preferred encoding format for many studios. (VC-1 = WMV)

Additionally, Silverlight supports additional truly open formats, not some format solely controlled by one company like Adobe and FLV. (BTW Adobe Flash Video, even HD is horrid at best compared to Silverlight.)

Also to note, Silverlight3 allows for virtually any codec to be used.

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx#whatsnew

Yes everyone has flash, but what they don't tell you is that you'll also need the Swarmcast NexDef browser plug-in.
Check out the not so great review of the flash/nexdef experience: MLB Support Forums

Oh and if you want to also understand this from Microsoft's perspective: Miscosoft SL Team Blog
The CBS March Madness HQ streaming was SilverLight and was a huge success.

Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't

Wrong.
Mac version: http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
Linux version: http://mono-project.com/Moonlight

Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser

Wrong. The Wii only supports Flash 7. Almost all flash apps check for version 9 or 10 right off the bat so Flash is useless on the Wii.

[Silverlight can't compete with] Flash lite for mobile devices.

Wrong. Silverlight mobile is coming along quite nicely.

Please research things instead of just making a bunch of stuff up and somehow getting +5 informative for it.

Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't

Wrong.
Mac version: http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
Linux version: http://mono-project.com/Moonlight

Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser

Wrong. The Wii only supports Flash 7. Almost all flash apps check for version 9 or 10 right off the bat so Flash is useless on the Wii.

[Silverlight can't compete with] Flash lite for mobile devices.

Wrong. Silverlight mobile is coming along quite nicely.

Please research things instead of just making a bunch of stuff up and somehow getting +5 informative for it.

Silverlight supports Firefox as well as it supports IE on both Windows and MacOS.

I do not remember the last time I even used IE on Windows to browse the web, and there have been *no* sites that use Silverlight that fail under firefox (we try a lot of them when looking for the "next sample to get working on Moonlight" from http://silverlight.net/Showcase).

If what you were implying though was that Moonlight 2.0 was not ready to run Silverlight 2.0 content, you are right. Moonlight, the open source version of Silverlight is not yet ready to render all of the 2.0 content, but it is very close to it.

Perhaps the Portugal government would like to fund the accelerated development of Moonlight by hiring a few developers to assist the project. That seems like a win-win for everyone involved. Faster Moonlight 2.0 and 3.0 and the warm cozy feeling that they made the world a better place.

Keeping up with the microsoft tradition novell unleashes a much touted piece of software which really does not work. Typically inept.

Firefox 3.0.6 32 bit Intrepid

Randomly tried some different stuff from the microsoft showcase http://silverlight.net/Showcase/:

Lasercopter: Cannot work with 1.0 compiled for 2.0
autocosmos tv: Does not even detect the plugin
Meshviewer: Does not detect the plugin
Lorenzo Reca: Does not detect the plugin
Manic Miner: Does not detect the plugin

My teeth start gnashing and give up

WTF is this about: http://silverlight.net/user/Profile.aspx?UserID=34139

Microsoft is probably paying you to spam Slashdot with your bullshit.

I hope you burn in hell.

I take it back. You're not a fanboi. You're just a delusional douchebag with anger management issues.

WTF is this about: http://silverlight.net/user/Profile.aspx?UserID=34139

Microsoft is probably paying you to spam Slashdot with your bullshit.

I hope you burn in hell.

How could an information so wrong have made it to frontpage?
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ there's a mac runtime.

No, it has one

One might almost say that they're intentionally trying to prevent the adoption of standards that could replace their proprietary APIs like VML and ActiveX.

... or could it be this little baby?

Adobe has Flash and Air, which isn't really better except for the fact that at least they're trying to push their crap on many platforms, not only Windows.

Silverlight is apparently available for Mac as well as Windows PCs (see the download links on the "Get started" page, and while I can't currently find any info (and don't have time to google it) I remember reading that it was planned for Linux too. I'll believe that when I see it, however..

The actual events will require both Silverlight and Vista.

Stop spreading the FUD, it may use Silverlight, but Vista is not a requirement. Silverlight 2.0 is even available for the Mac at http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

You'd probably have more success developing your own standard and convincing the world to switch (I'm not kidding).

Microsoft are trying to do something like that with Silverlight. Microsoft would do it, if Apple wanted to play.

Silverlight 2 Beta was actually released today.

Runtime and SDK downloads and lots of other info about it here http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

"It's all the same as all MS: vaporware."

Nice troll, but your stupidity betrayed you. Next time, learn the meaning of the word you use, you won't look like a fucking idiot that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware

"Vaporware is a software or hardware product which is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge, either with or without a protracted development cycle."

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporware

"a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"

http://silverlight.net/

Holy shit!!! That's the link to go to to download the software. Guess it isn't vaporware is it?

Don't cry Mr. Sensitive, it's your fault you're an ignorant asshat, not mine.

I am somehow puzzled by the lack of presence of real life (read: useful) silverlight applets. I would expect microsoft to start using it extensively at this point, because we're hearing about silverlight for quite some time now.

As a développer, I was really hoping some good news when they started this stuff. I was looking forward to get a truly appropriate alternative for the web craps on the rich client front, and this is really disapointing so far. It is going to take much more than a "mine sweeper", "page turner", etc. to get me on board, and nothing seems to emerge as far as I know. Unless I'm really not up to date, flex seems really a lot more advanced.

Anyway, I might simply be plain wrong with expectation of this kind.

They should have used http://www.silverlight.net/ instead :).

Except that there's a known issue with nvidia boards for the last half year that MS has yet to fix, causing all Silverlight audio to clip like crazy and be at 200% volume with no control.

http://silverlight.net/forums/p/3668/10602.aspx

Still haven't fixed it. Though at least now it seems their devs have acknowledged its existence.

Last Ditch? Where has this guy been? Just the WWE could flip the market.
http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

Slashdot is biased as usual... http://silverlight.net/Showcase/