Slashdot Mirror
Cross-Platform Microsoft
willdavid sends us to the ZDNet blogs for a provocative opinion piece by John Carroll. He points to Microsoft's evident cross-platform strategy with Silverlight, and wonders whether the company couldn't make money — and win friends — by extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm. "Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."
Guess I can forget about it for BeOS.
1. Insure all your Linux DLLs (*.dll) are in your PATH statement.
2. type make
3. ???
4. profit!
Microsoft has NEVER supported a competitor at first and then let that version slip to a very sub-optimal state so the Windows-only version seems better, have they?
Is this the embrace or extend step?
and when does step three kick in?
Ice Cream has no bones.
No. The "primary fear" is and has always been that Microsoft will get some "Intellectual Property" into a Linux project in such a way that it will allow Microsoft to sue the developers/users of that project.
If Microsoft wants to port something to Linux, that's their option. They have the people and they can download all of the source code.
And they can license their product any way they want to.
The only problems arise when Linux developers (as opposed to Microsoft developers porting something to Linux) have access to Microsoft "Intellectual Property" and may become "tainted" by it.
So this is like ActiveX 2.0, the cross platform edition? Another with Ajax, Flash, and a host of other technologies, silverlight just seems like a blatant attempt at locking the net into the .Net framework.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Silverlight may port but all the stuff that Silverlight pograms are going to link into are NOT. ActiveX, DirectX, etc are not going to port. Unless Microsoft plans on going whole hog on cross platform compatibility, this is only an attempt to get the web dev community which has historically been LAMP/JAVA based to switch to Microsoft products and not to actually provide a cros platform product. People think Silverlight is the answer but once people start tying into Microsofts backend (as I'm sure they want), you can say goodbye to that cross platform compatibility and Firefox's market share as you will again require IE and Windows to use Silverlight alot of those programs that use AciveX and DirectX and others of the Microsoft non-cross platform tools and features.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Someone get the 'itsatrap' tag in here quick! We know it's impossible for Microsoft to directly support a competitor in any way. /sarcasm
Seriously, if they actually make good on this and continue to support the Mono version, more power to them.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
I have often wondered when Microsoft's troubles will come home to roost. The problem with fences is that not only do they keep others out, they keep you in. Microsoft has gone to great trouble to lock people to their OS, and to design it with that lockin in mind rather then security or speed or reliability. At some point, it will be too crippled to compete with Linux. I don't mean next year, I mean 5 or ten years down the line.
It seems to me that Microsoft has to eventually modernize, and the easiest way would be to drop Windows and go with Linux. By easiest, I don't mean best for Linux fanboys, I mean with the least effort on their part. It would be easier to write a system call translate layer than write a brand new OS from the ground up. It will also make it harder to write in the crippleware lockin features they love so much.
Now I doubt Microsoft will want to do this any time soon. But they could migrate that way slowly, starting with porting their Office suite to Linux. As I understand it, they have only two profit centers -- the OS, mostly from OEM installs, and Office.
So I wonder if this move to cross platform, and their two recent open source licenses, is their way of dipping their toes in the water. I don't say they have a ten year plan for this, but maybe small ventures like this one will eventually turn into a full blown platform-neutral version of Office, and maybe a way to wean themselves from the burden of maintaining their crippled lockin OS.
Infuriate left and right
How exactly is Microsoft going to be supporting these cross-platform apps? Maybe they're thinking about doing what they did with IE on Macintosh, produce a version for other platforms, then stop distributing or providing updates to it once they decide it's no longer convenient.
Business applications are kind of strange beasts in the software world because of the long usage life they're expected to see. That's one of the reasons companies often want some big name company behind a product because they're afraid somewhere down the road the company might fold and they'd be left without support for a vital application. The problem is most of these companies haven't yet realized that open source applications provide much better guarantee because even if the original developers quit working on the application, it's always possible for someone else to take up the reins. In a proprietary system, even with a big developer behind it, there is nothing insuring that development continues on any given application.
Of course, in this case it sounds like maybe Microsoft is doing the right thing and actually helping the Mono guys make their product compatible with Microsoft's, but I'll still be wary of anything Microsoft is distributing directly.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
"Microsoft has NEVER supported a competitor at first and then let that version slip to a very sub-optimal state so the Windows-only version seems better, have they?"
Slashdot has NEVER given Microsoft an even break.
...for Adobe and Flash/Flex. For Linux, it's no news.
.NET...well, I've worked with .NET, at least the handcuffs are golden.
As for locking people into
The F/OSS community has by and large rejected Mono due to total (and warranted) distrust of Microsoft.
I don't care if $silly_marketing_product_name runs on linux, OSX, FreeBSD and Haiku. I don't trust Microsoft and I don't want a software on my box that will let them extort money through threats of patent litigation. I trust Sun a whole lot more and if $silly_product_name gets big we can legally reverse engineer it implement it on top of the JVM.
Honestly, the MSFT folks are a bunch of smart people. They hire pretty much only the best. I would wager that a significant chunk of their workforce, and even a majority of their developers and researchers, would love to do interoperability and open-source. If they can convince the business guys, the people in charge who make the high level decisions, that cooperating is better than extending and extinguishing, they're on the way to making the software world a better place for all.
We haven't even established that this product is mediocre yet, let alone 'excellent'. Lets see if its even worth side-tracking the resources of a lot of developers before we drink this particular Kool-Aide.
Have gnu, will travel.
...many examples before. Have You remember Internet Explorer for Unix? Cross-Platform Active X? Anything Microsoft did cross-platform before and it survived for more than few months? If not, why someone should believe this is THE case, THIS time? Artur
I can only imagine how many ways this can go bad, and I am sure that I am not alone. But how about all of us that think that this likely to go bad just be quiet on this one - lets hope for the best, what's the worse than happen?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
"...and wonders whether the company couldn't make money -- and win friends"
Didn't learn anything at all from the elementary school story about the fox/crow/rabbit and the hungry, hungry alligator, eh?
Anyone remember how IE and Microsoft Office had similar stories on Windows and the Mac? Tell me this will not happen again.
"When Microsoft writes an application for Linux, I've Won." - Linus Torvalds
Office and Windows are what is keeping Microsoft alive, and they know it.
Read, and read.
I'm not going to rag on the writer of TFA since he makes it clear he's presenting things from the perspective of a developer, but from the business side, no way. Ever.
The Banjo Players Must Die!
I'm sorry but MS Sliverlight is a direct attack on Adobe and their Flash product and this is a direct move to protect the Windows monopoly. Adobe Flash is a well established development platform which runs across all desktop computing platforms. Heck, Nokia even has it running on the N800. Adobe is the new Netscape and Flash the new Navigator with MS Silverlight being the new MS Internet Explorer.
So anything which grows that MS product will be good for protecting the Windows monopoly. If Flash is killed off, and in typical Microsoft fashion, MS Silverlight will become a Windows-only product. In 20 years of Microsoft history, there is absolutely NOTHING which shows any other path. A press release does not mean squat when it comes from Microsoft. Talk about doublespeak and truthiness.
And to even think that Microsoft wants to help enable Linux by the goodness of their heart is a fool. At Microsoft, it's all about 'Adobe must die, Linux must die. Long live Windows, long live Microsoft.' and only a complete newbie would/could think otherwise. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The key point to remember here is that Microsoft acting friendly towards Linux is not the same thing as Microsoft acting friendly towards Free Software. If this Silverlight stuff -- even the Mono implmentation -- is actually open enough that it could have been released under the GPLv3 without somebody getting sued, I'll eat my hat!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Porting the plugin makes sense, but will the dev tools be available on other platforms than windows ?
If not, move around, nothing to see.
Microsoft supports cross platform capabilities for their web editing program, Frontpage. Frontpage users have been able to upload their pages to Linux servers for years.
Shouldn't you be doing something else? Like updating your website?
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
John Carroll the author of the FUD piece, who literally spent years doing trolling the ZDNet talkback forums back in the day in support of Microsoft, so much so that, lo and behold, he was then given a column of his own to write Microsoft FUD articles, and was eventually, in 2005 awarded with a job at Microsoft, something he's been hoping for for years (only took him something like 7 years). The guy is the biggest shill for Microsoft I have ever seen. He was praising VB and ASP as being superior to Java (no lie, look it up in the archives at ZDNet) back when the whole .Net circus was still a wet fart in BillG's pants. It is HIS JOB to paint Microsoft in a favourable light and as being better than anything else.
Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash? After Microsoft killed Internet Explorer for Mac and Windows Media Player for Mac (not that they even remotely considered maknig any of that available on Linux)? You trust them? You trust some guy who has been praising Microsoft exclusively to the detriment of all else for almost a decade?
You have to be joking, right?
Microsoft is trying to expand their platform, which won't make you platform-agnostic at all. While that can technically be labeled as cross platform it isn't what either you or me would call cross-platform.
Suse was bought by Novell.
And if Novell will be bought by MS???
Argghhhhhh!!! Argghhhhhh!!! Arrggghhhh!!!! xDDD
Novell was a Linux's VIRUS for all the time!!! Its team was too!!!
I think it sucks compared to Eclipse/Java. Stock, there's little refactoring support, the templates/generators aren't a nice to access, the code completion isn't nearly as context smart, and the list goes on. Eclipse is just much more complete and seems to know what I want to do more than VS.
I cannot tell you just how much my wolf-in-sheep's-clothing detector is tingling (okay, it's just the hairs on the back of my neck, but still).
Be verwy, verwy careful...
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
I mean, when you hit compile, it generates and spews out a command line to a little text window. Which is fine, but it doesn't bother to actually parse that data and present it in a meaningful way. You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
;-)
Of course if you choose to view the raw output via the "Output" view, then yes you will get that. Of course, I always find it much easier to choose the "Error List" view where you can just toggle to choose if you want to see errors and/or warnings and/or information messages. Then just click on each any item in that list to take me to the corresponding issue in code.
I think the above shows your level of "I've tried using visual studio tools", so I don't see the need to go further (in fact I didn't read any further)
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Everyones a skeptic, I know, but there are a few good signs. For one, the dev work isn't being done at Microsoft, its being spearheaded by the MONO crew. The Microsoft folks are kind of technical advisors, in direct contact with the Linux developers, giving advice and recommendations on implementation, etc. That I think is the biggest sign this will be a success. This isn't an internal project that we know of based on a memo or press release, this is an active project which has screenshots and source that can be downloaded and played with ...
First, you have to recognize the target, which is *not* Linux. It's Flash.
Right now, Flash is a cross-platform delivery system for highly interactive content. (READ: unstable piece of shit that is not a real standard.) It's very popular for media players (Youtube), ads, and cheezy games. It basically made ActiveX irrelevent, and Microsoft is still a little peeved.
So, by helping the Mono folks make Silverlight available cross-platform, they get to look like the good guys, as well as give Adobe a full-frontal assault on Flash.
Right now, we are in the "embrace" stage.
Once Silverlight takes off and displaces Flash as the delivery system of choice for shitty-assed content, Microsoft will be free to extend Silverlight in any way they desire, without passing those changes on to the Mac or to Mono. So, they get to extinguish Java and Flash, and then once Silverlight is the only delivery system on the internet, they get to displace the web, as well.
This is just like their bid with ActiveX. The main difference is, they learned their lesson the first time. Don't make it MS-Windows-only until *after* it is perceived as the only system available.
Yes, this is paranoid ranting. But after you've been kicked in the balls four or five times by someone, you get a little antsy around them.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Agreed, the last Windows development I did was some years ago, but even then VC++ and later Visual Studio got kind of annoying. But their debugger really is good, and very fast too even on crappy hardware.
I think it's probably hard to design an IDE that appeals to everyone. Clearly VS appeals to some wide developer demographic, or else it wouldn't be the success that it is. But there will always be those who write and compile everything manually, and if they hop into an IDE at all, it's to use the debugger (for Java development, I debug in IDEA, and it's pretty sweet. I'd never actually edit code in it, though).
"Microsoft has NEVER supported a competitor at first and then let that version slip to a very sub-optimal state so the Windows-only version seems better, have they?"
Consider this, if MS can get some code portable to Linux / OSX, the ultimate goal being, crappy bug ridden security nightmare cross-platformness, with all the new security holes it will open up. It will trash a major argument in favor of Linux / OSX. So I propose they really intend to port insecurity and undermine one of the strong points of the competition. It's a brilliant move on MS's part.
Oh and that whole thing about "hey it works, but there's some headaches...", and the slowly tightening the screws. Windows for the optimum experience... down to we own you. What would be really fun to see come out of Microsoft? Fully armored and armed with machine guns police / law enforcement robots. Robocop anyone? MS robocop? heheh
What if the third party developers develop tools for Silverlight in Linux and these tools become very important for the customers? MSFT can release the next version and wait for the previous one in Linux to die a quiet death. But if the customers refuse to budge? Could this happen. I know it is almost wishful thinking but still, why would the customers continue to play the same game after knowing so much about the tactics of MSFT?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I see... So because there is already a well established product out there, there is no need for another compeeting product? Personally I've never looked at silverlight beyond thier demo site, I wasn't all that impressed. But I can't stand working with flash. If silverlight uses .NET I'm all for it, I'd rather have a consistant development environment than work in both VS and the Flash IDE.
Deal with it.
/. hoping to get mod points so you can bury comments you don't like.
Ballmer talks about how the GPL is a "cancer". Yet you hang out on
That doesn't change the facts.
Microsoft can put Microsoft coders to work releasing Microsoft products on Linux.
Microsoft can license those products under whatever license Microsoft wants.
And no one could complain.
But when Microsoft talks about "working with" non-Microsoft coders to get Microsoft products on Linux, there's too much of a risk of Microsoft's "Intellectual Property" being "improperly" incorporated into such projects.
Everyone who isn't a Microsoft fanboi needs to ask themselves WHY Microsoft wouldn't handle such project itself, with its own people, if it saw the need for such on Linux.
I think the above shows your level of "I've tried using visual studio tools", so I don't see the need to go further (in fact I didn't read any further) ;-)
Apparently 5 minutes in the IDE is all GP needed to discover he didn't like it. I actually read the whole post and the entire thing was filled with things that were easily correctable, like what you pointed out.
When I first tried tabbed browsing, I honestly didn't like it. I first tried giving it a shot in Firefox and then in IE when IE7 came out. Now I use Firefox 2 throughout the day (except when I'm debugging in VS2005) and I wouldn't want to live without tabs.
Some people fear change.
I'm a big tall mofo.
You can put readline macros in ~/.inputrc. The readline(3) man page tells you how, and the readline package for your OS should include some examples in a documentation directory, e.g. /usr/share/doc/libreadline5/examples.
You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
... Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane?
.Net because it's optimized for that. The code-assist, templates, and help files are all geared toward .Net development. If you're doing .Net, there's nothing better. That's where VS's advantages stop, though.
.Net and VS to other platforms, as well as keeping up Office and Visio, they could still dominate the software industry without the headaches that Windows brings. I want VS and .Net for the Mac!
I see you haven't discovered the "Error List" window. View > Error List (Alt-V-I or Ctrl-/-E). It has 3 toolbar buttons at the top (checked-state type) one for errors, one for warnings, one for messages.
I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Idiots, indeed. Create a new installer project. Tell it to use the output of one or more of the other projects in your solution. (Solutions are multi-project binders, projects are apps, libraries, services, sites, etc.) You can even add wizards and (*shudder*) registry entries in addition to the regular file copying functions. You can specify new files/folders/shortcuts in the program files, start menu, or any other place in the filesystem. From nothing to a functional (but ugly) installer takes little more than 5 minutes. And it handles all the uninstall stuff (and install-new-version-in-place-of-the-old-one stuff) for you too (your program will appear in the Add/Remove Programs panel automatically).
Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment?
Again, you didn't actually learn to use the tool. Tools > Options (Alt-T-O) shows you the typically huge (and rightfully so) options pane of an IDE. It's no larger or more complex than Eclipse's, if you want to get into comparisons. But notably, the first option on the first pane of the first item listed in the tree-control on the left (Environment > General) is called "Window Layout". It has a set of two radio buttons. The first one is the default, labelled "Tabbed documents". The second one is labelled "Multiple Documents". I'm guessing you want the second one.
Can someone please describe what is so great about visual studio? I've heard other people say it, but I really don't see it. (Please compare and contrast to Eclipse and/or Xcode.)
Personally, I find the all-in-one IDE (Eclipse and VS) much more usable than the everything-spread-over-hell-and-creation IDE (Xcode).
VS has advantages in working with
Eclipse kicks VS's ass in supporting eleventy-thousand languages and has a slightly less developed template system, probably due to most of those languages' plugins being in perpetual beta. Code-assist is nearly non-existent in anything other than Java, and is mostly useless because of that. Help files are also non-existent.
Xcode is geared toward C and Objective-C. Ugh. Screw that crap. It complains if you try to use Java, and it seems to ignore your commands if you try to use C++. You aren't doing it The One True Way With The One True Programming Language (Obj-C), thus you aren't worthy of, well, anything. Get off its lawn. I'm not wild about Xcode, mostly for that reason. Apple includes PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (?), and probably a half-dozen other nice little languages with their systems, but they don't get off their ass and add the necessary meta-code to make Xcode work properly for those languages.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that if Microsoft would give Windows up as a good try and focus on bringing
``extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm.''
Excellent development ecosystem? Don't make me laugh. I've been hearing about the asserted superiority of Microsoft's development tools and the wonderful enterprise features of their products for years, and always thought to myself "well, probably." However, I recently started working in a Microsoft shop and I can tell you first hand that the Microsoft "development ecosystem" is not excellent. It's not terrible, but it's not great, either. Certainly not worlds better than some already available environments (cross-platform or otherwise).
Without going into specifics, I can say that I spend more time struggling with Visual Studio than doing anything else. Most of the features I want are actually there, but it's not always obvious where to find them or how to use them. Some features are missing, or are nominally there, but fail to work in the situations where I need them. Then there is a load of baggage that just gets in the way. Erorr messages that it gives me are almost always uninformative, wrong, or both (my favorite so far is "'1' is null or not an object"). At first, I thought it was just me being inexperienced, but even colleagues with years of experience run into these same issues. And it's not like I'm very demanding; usually, I'm just trying to find out what the value of something is or how the program got to a certain point.
And that's just Visual Studio. We use a number of other Microsoft products in our workflow, and there are issues with most of them. For the most part, these are usability issues. They don't actually prevent you from getting work done, but they do slow you down. Stability issues come a distant second. One issue that hasn't affected me but is affecting the company as a whole is that a lot of time goes into making sure things work with the current _and_ previous versions of Microsoft products. Sometimes, this is as simple as just not using some new feature, but sometimes it takes up a lot of time.
Note that I have purposefully highlighted the bad parts and omitted the good ones. My point is not to give an objective impression of the Microsoft platform for development purposes, but to show that it falls short of excellence. I would never choose it myself, but I wouldn't say it's actually bad. Just not excellent.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I mean, when you hit compile, it generates and spews out a command line to a little text window. Which is fine, but it doesn't bother to actually parse that data and present it in a meaningful way. You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
Huh? You're looking at the Output window, which shows the build output. Visual Studio does parse that into a list of errors and warnings, accessable from, the "Error List" window. You can turn off warnings in this window to just show the errors. Double clicking on the errors will take you to the correct source file and line that generated the error.
Oh, and then there's deployment. I worked for a while with some folks that had a C++ application that talked with the Microsoft SQL database and IIS. Their "push" procedure involved remote desktop to the server, clicking buttons to take down the server, pointing it at the maintenance site, creating a new directory in the file explorer, naming it correctly and copying the existing database files to it, copying over the newly compiled bits, testing it in situ and finally pointing the server back to the live site. This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Yes, they're idiots. We do all of this automatically through NAnt. I'm pretty sure you can do this all through the command line if you're masochistic (quite frankly, the Windows command line sucks hairy balls). But theres seriously no excuse not to have deployment automated, especially if its taking several hours.
But thats not what I'm here to rant at you about. I'm here to rant about Visual Studio. Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane?
Theres a setting in Visual Studio that lets you switch to a windowed environment. Tools->Options->Environment->General->Window Layout->Multiple Documents. It still constrains those source code windows to the area of the parent window (Visual Studio's window), but you can pane them and everything. If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
Gargh, its frustrating. Why can't the compiler take normal command line switches with meaningful names?
I use MSBuild to compile our app, and it takes command line switches. I'm not sure what kind of switches you are looking for, however. You don't get things like specific optimization switches, since those are in the project settings, but I typically build one of a set of pre-defined modes (Release, Debug, etc).
Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?
cmd sucks. Big time. It would be nice if they could actually start pushing powershell, but thats unlikely to happen anytime soon. They should have put it in Vista, at the very least. Hopefully their next server product has it.
The debugger is even worse, hiding and showing things based on what it *thinks* I want to see. The only benefit it has over gdb on the command line is mixed assembly/source view, but at least with gdb I can quickly disassemble whatever I need to, not just where the PC is.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples of the debugger hiding and showing me things. It pretty much shows me what I ask it to.
Can someone please desc
I mean, when you hit compile, it generates and spews out a command line to a little text window. Which is fine, but it doesn't bother to actually parse that data and present it in a meaningful way. You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
/? is too hard for your. If you want to script something, there's the newer Powershell coming down the line. Until then, Nant is a wonderful scripting tool.
*Sigh* Here we go. Its call the "Error List" window. By default its there, so I would go and reopen it the next time you compile. Code properly, and the warnings go away. If you can't figure out good coding practices, then clicking on the Warnings button on the Error List window will filter out all the warnings.
Oh, and then there's deployment. I worked for a while with some folks that had a C++ application that talked with the Microsoft SQL database and IIS. Their "push" procedure involved remote desktop to the server, clicking buttons to take down the server, pointing it at the maintenance site, creating a new directory in the file explorer, naming it correctly and copying the existing database files to it, copying over the newly compiled bits, testing it in situ and finally pointing the server back to the live site.
Sounds like that's the process they wanted. My deployment is a simple nant script. All it does is copy files and create and sign a manifest file. I use Sql Compare to update the database along with some custom scripts. That's it. I can do an upgrade in 15 minutes. ClickOnce is a great way to deploy an application.
This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
How is that the fault of any MS product?
But thats not what I'm here to rant at you about. I'm here to rant about Visual Studio. Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane? Gargh, its frustrating. Why can't the compiler take normal command line switches with meaningful names? Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?
I guess you don't know how to redock the windows or use the split pane features. I also guess csc
The debugger is even worse, hiding and showing things based on what it *thinks* I want to see. The only benefit it has over gdb on the command line is mixed assembly/source view, but at least with gdb I can quickly disassemble whatever I need to, not just where the PC is.
Ya, its a pain how it makes the point the exception occurred at highlite in yellow, with a big box pointing to the line explaining what the exception is, and what some common causes are. That's AWFUL. How dare it do exactly what you tell it to (no, it doesn't change its behavior randomly, there are settings that YOU control which dicate how much to show or hide).
Can someone please describe what is so great about visual studio? I've heard other people say it, but I really don't see it. (Please compare and contrast to Eclipse and/or Xcode.)
Maybe if you took the time to learn the tool you'd have an easier time.
John Carroll started out writing pro-MS trolls at ZD net as comments. He was so good at it, garnering loads of comments from ignorant biters (myself included) that they have him writing for ZD now, presumably for money.
Come on, guys, you bought this? Cross platform MS? I'm laughing at the (so far) 77 biters who bit this troll's bait.
I guess myself included, as this is, uh, a comment I guess.
Damn. IHBT.
-mcgrew
Your a dumb ass. Try using a product before you rant about it. I bet you played with it for a week or two and that was it. Much like the people who try Linux for a month and hate it. All you Linux/mac people kick and scream that if they only spent more time with it. Well right back at you, why don't you spend more time with Visual Studio.
A simple macro suffices only for a single line of text. Suppose I want to be able to edit any number of one-line commands prior to executing them.
Right now I'm forced to copy-and-paste using gnome-terminal but that's an ugly solution. Ideally, there would be some command that would change the contents of the edit buffer to the contents of whatever file I choose.
Thanks for trying.
Why do I need another 'flash-like' player that has no meda for it, that has no widely availabe development tools, etc.
:-)
And I've had to try to install Mono before (on Centos 4) and it was an involved process and then found out a dependency was broken (Centos's prob, low support, "oh well") and stopped there. Then I relized I didn't want to go through all that extra effort of crapifying my systems for one specific program, and located a just as capable light weight alternative that comes without all the cruft.
I'm much less stressed.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Let me start with the whole MDI/Tabbed interface thing: if you're using a Mac, I can see where you're coming from. However, when you have a "task bar" showing you all open windows (rather than all open applications as OSX does), it gets cluttered very quickly, as does the alt-tab selection. This is where it comes in particularly handy.
Oh, and to bring you up speed with the Windows command line is sadly still sorely lacking in the flexibility of shell scripting, though Windows PowerShell is a vast improvement available for Windows 2003 Server and will be included with Windows 2008 Server
Now, quite a good deal of what you've mentioned about Visual Studio really don't include the more visual aspects of it, much of which focus around Microsoft-centric technologies. For example, if you're going to use a visual designer for QT-driven GUIs, you'll probably use the QT designer (though I must admit QT GUI development is simple enough to not really need a visual approach like this, imo). Likewise, if you are going to create an MFC application, it makes sense to use Visual Studio. The same is true, of course, for .NET's System.Windows.Form namepsace. One also has to admit that Microsoft did implement features such as IntelliSense (yes, I expect you probably dislike their implementation) pretty early on.
I've done my fair share of development on Windows and Linux, and I've dabbled with XCode on OSX. My personal opinion is that the tools available on all platforms each have their individual strengths and weaknesses, but my preference definitely leans toward Eclipse. I suspect that the primary reason for using Visual Studio is for those developing with/for Microsoft-centric technologies, which is really quite practical. For others, it is a matter of simply not knowing (and not caring to know) about the alternatives out there (I'd say QT easily has the upper hand on MFC, of course) and/or staying with their comfort-zone.
So unfortunately, I was unable to tell you what makes Visual Studio so much better than Eclipse or XCode; however, they all fulfill their purposes well, in my humble opinion. So now it's just a matter of sitting back and waiting for the super Microsoft-haters to berate me for saying that something from Microsoft is actually useful, as there's no way so many business could use them if they weren't. :-)
man sed
man awk
Then Google both.
Will it be documented as clearly as OOXML?
I thought so.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
You're right. The one thing I struggle to fault MS on is their development toolset. Up to a couple of years ago, I was programming in asm, c/c++ and java. Today, you'll find it hard to make me give up C# and my Visual Studio IDE.
Maybe the market shares are shifting, but I'm getting so many queries about Mac and Linux versions of software, that I just can't stick with just Windows anymore. I haven't explored Mono much yet, but I need something that's cross-platform and if C#/.NET/Visual Studio isn't giving me that, then I need to drop it and move to something that does. Maybe MS is waking up to this and the idea that people using their products to create apps for non-Windows platforms isn't all that bad. I hope so.
"excellent development ecosystem"?
This must be a different Microsoft than the one I'm familiar with.
I think it's probably hard to design an IDE that appeals to everyone. Clearly VS appeals to some wide developer demographic, or else it wouldn't be the success that it is.
It's not necessarily that it's so good, I think it's that it's backed by M$ marketing, that it's for the most popular operating system, and it allows programming using MFC and everything else M$. It's one of the few choices for Windows application development.
I loath developing for Windows or on a Windows system. I've use many different IDEs and other development applications on different platforms (Windows, Linux, various UNIX systems, some mini and mainframe systems) including some applications for embedded development. There are a few things I like about the M$ IDEs (I started many years ago, so I have seen several versions of Vidual Studio and VC++), but I've found other IDEs much more useful. In addition, any time I can develop on a platform other than Windows, I will. I do not like the limitations the Windows environment places on me when I'm developing, not to mention I've always spent more time debugging OS and compiler problems than I have my own code problems.
I will continue to stay clear of anything M$ as much as possible until I see a clear history of them playing nice with everyone else on the block. I will also try my best to stay clear of Mono or anything not M$ but based upon M$ "IP" (it's bad enough I have to use Evolution because the company I work for insists on using the POS Exchange for groupware). To date they have never played nice with anyone. The aim of the company is to direct the world into paying them money for anything and everything possible. They have a clear history of coopting or killing competition, and there's no reason to think they've changed now.
Paul G. "I don't do Windows" Allen
sed works but it's not too far off from loading the file in emacs, editing it, saving, and then reexecuting. At the very least I'd want to print the edited command before executing it when using sed, whereas if I could just load the file into the input buffer I could see exactly what was about to be executed when I hit the enter key.
sed rocks though, don't get me wrong. It's just overkill for this particular application.
Speculative maybe. But it's good to be wary.
I work for a web services development company that relies heavily of most all of the targeted technologies (AJAX, server side scripting, Flash, etc). Just yesterday this very subject came up as we look at our business strategy over the next few years and what technologies we will need to adapt.
From what I've seen Silverlight is very much like Flash functionally. In fact (and please feel free to correct me) aside from being a WMV wrapper and there-by providing their own DRM system natively I see very little difference. From a developer stand-point it could be interesting. The multi-language support could speed development up in many cases and help create more interactive content as developers get to use tools they are familiar with to achieve the kinds of things they'd like to.
That said Adobe has been in this game for a long time now. Companies don't usually last that long being stupid so I'll be very interested to see if and how they respond to this. They absolutely *have* to see that this is a threat to one of their business models. And frankly I think Microsoft has done some things here that Adobe should have done already. Microsoft *will* get penetration enough to make a serious go if it simply based on their recent acquisition.
Gloves are off. Personally I'd like to see Adobe pull this off, but they are going to have to react quickly and I haven't heard a lot of buzz coming out of their corner. Time will tell. Silverlight is still in Alpha and while the demo's are interesting, I'd stop short of calling them revolutionary. I think it really will come down to developers on this one.
Quack, quack.
If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
:D
Right click on the tab. Select "Floating".
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
A better place to ask these types of questions would be www.experts-exchange.com.
From the wikipedia:
/standard/ (which I do not like... I always prefered Java Applets) for such kind of content, and it has come a loooong way to support all these architectures.
Opera is not supported in the current releases but will be supported with future builds,[11] as will be Windows 2000.[12] Additional platforms are being considered as well.[13]
I am writing this comment from my Opera browser in Linux... (imagine, two layers of incompatibility) while I am looking a flash video in youtube (and after failing to see the Silverlight "demo" video because it is in some obscure format WMV).
I could even write this comment using my Wii (and watch YouTube videos...) while I am sure MS will not make the least effor to make Silverlight content avaiable in those competing platforms...
My point?
We have got into a point where Flash is the
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Scratch that. Only works on the Start Page. Grr.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Right now, the dominant computer platform is the mobile phone. The iPhone is just the headliner, the rivals in development will be just as innovative. I wonder how Microsoft intend to deal with that development?
VS + Resharper is pleasure.
The main complaints I have with Visual Studio is it's bloated and the debug inspector has a horrible interface. A bunch of narrow boxes that you have to hover over with your mouse. If I could set breakpoints as currently done and have inspection done like gdb, I'd be happy.
Development Ecosystem?? Huh? What? "Development Ecosystem??"
You're the guy in the first panel of this cartoon, aren't you?
"Development Ecosystem"... excuse me while I go call Ralph.
Instead of ranting more than the one you denigrate, how about showing a counter example where Microsoft HAS played fair?
Infuriate left and right
First, thanks for the Linux support.
.Net, Mono, WPF?
Second, from Microsofts own web site http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/collusion.html
collusion
noun
Definition:
secret cooperation: secret cooperation between people in order to do something illegal or underhanded
I don't think Microsoft helping Novell is illegal, but it may be underhanded.
Is Novell helping Adobe make sure thier media.flashplayer.class/plugin runs just as well under
Does Microsoft lack the programming talent to create a cross-platform browser plugin without depending on a 3rd party? Libflashplayer.so doesn't require any 2nd or 3rd party support.
Just curious,
Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
The only inspector worse than the VS inspector is the FlexBuilder/Eclipse inspector.
Really?
So Microsoft doesn't have a Linux Lab?
So Microsoft hasn't already dug through the source code to find what patents Linux is "violating"?
Seems a bit contradictory to me.
Are you serious? .NET. I like Mono. I use linux for most of my computing because it meets my needs better. But I hold nothing against Microsoft, and if they can beat flash, then god bless them for it. I'd love to be able to build that type of interactive web content in visual studio (gotta admit, it's fast. Particularly when dealing with multiple data sources whether they be on linux or windows). The time I'd save at work would be incredible.
Flash: It has a monopoly right now. It is a piece of shit. It barely supports linux. And beyond that, I have to use terrible development tools in a windows environment to do anything with it.
Silverlight: Gives me hope. I like
Adobe Live Motion in 2000 ADOBE couldn't take down Flash
now flash is even more common and powerful and wide spread
does this mean MS is gonna buy adobe
geeze I hope not...
----------
Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
...where they look like ass on anything except IE
It's a cookbook!
Cross-Platform Microsoft - good grief!
In the other news, honest lawyers have been reported making an exact estimate on the amount of government organization that will be required in order to process all the resident aliens. In order to achieve this some number of peaceful force will have to be applied, and it may get pretty ugly as the religious tolerance is going down cases when temporary tax increases will affect yet again just how much of working vacation will the rest of the population (including the christian scientists) will be able to get.
A government representative was quoted while attempting to act naturally:
"Now, then I am terribly pleased to be able to anounce that we are almost exactly done know what we are going to be doing about all of this. Alone together we have made a commitement, which is clearly misunderstood by some of the New York cultured individuals. Same difference, we have to ask ourselves a question, are we going ahead with the decisions made after so much consideration and applying all of the political science? I can proudly declare: It's a definite maybe!"
---
Oh, and by the way, Microsoft Works on plenty of software documentation too.
You can't handle the truth.
...Once Silverlight takes off and displaces Flash as the delivery system of choice for shitty-assed content, Microsoft will be free to extend Silverlight in any way they desire, without passing those changes on to the Mac or to Mono. I really have no idea what the answer to the question I'm about to ask is, so I'm prepared for the worst (so long as no one links John Dvorak - that's more than I can take today)...
Do you think the MS developers that are spending so much time and effort (read: blood, sweat, and tears - as the developers here are well aware) to work on making Silverlight work with Mono will really want to stop making their project as good as it can be? Do you think Microsoft has the loyalty from their programmers to tell them, "OK, stop adding features that work cross platform and change direction!", and have them give up on what they've been working on? Microsoft developer or not, as we (developers) write code, that code becomes our child in a sense. We want to do everything that we can to see it succeed - and management can bugger off, we know that code better than anyone else on the planet, and no one can replace us (without studying up for a good long time without touching the code).
Furthermore, don't you think these developers will have bonded quite a bit to their fellow developers over at the Mono project? They probably spend more time communicating with these guys than they do their siblings and parents. This networking probably also gives them good inroads with a good number of people and companies.
I just think that what you suggest would result in either direct insubordination or group defection. These guys (the real developers) could probably just hop over to google if they wanted to stage a protest.
What do you guys think? Am I way off base, yet again?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
"This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has)"
.NET languages, for that matter), JScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, TCL, etc, can all be used to script in windows, in both the CLI and the GUI. Using .WSF extensions (Windows Script File) you can mix and match any of those languages in your scripts as you please. Throw in the new command shell (Powershell, formerly Monad) and its integration with the scripting host, which is also integrated into PS's own scripting language, and you've got yourself a rather badass scripting system.
It's sad, but Windows' scripting engine(s) (via Windows Script Host) is perhaps one of its (unfortunately) best kept secrets, VBscript, C#, ASP.net (or any of the
I'll agree though, they'd be saving allot of time ad energy by scripting it instead of remote desktoping, but they're probably under the common misconception that Windows scripting is limited to batch files and vbscript. Also, just to nitpick, DOS isn't a part of Windows anymore, I don't reckon it ever has been part of the NT line, for that matter.
"Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane?"
It's a common misconception, but the large majority of Mac OS apps are actually MDI. The trouble is, MDI only actually 'works' on Mac OS, due the Finder bar taking over as the all-encompassing container pane, making the desktop act as the container, rather than a new window. There's nothing wrong with MDI itself, it just shouldn't (imo) be used on systems which don't implement it like Mac OS does.
"Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?"
See Powershell. It's lightyears ahead of cmd.exe, and frankly, I'm begining to prefer it over Bash , CSH, and ZSH, flexability and scriptability aside, it's pretty bloody powerful.
Its nothing more then MS trying to lock people into what they think things should be. Don't develop for it, don't install it. If you find a site using it, email them and complain. NOTHING good can come of it, avoid it like the plague.
I don't care what they say, MS is up to no good as usual with it.
It also works on any of the tool palettes that adorn the side-tab area of your screen. I do that with Properties when I'm working on the visual layout portion of a Windows app project.
I remember when MS had a version of IE running on Unix (HP-UX specifically, probably Solaris too). Of course, it no longer does. IE on the Mac has been discontinued as well.
The dead enders will be giving up soon. John Carrol and objectivity on MS don't belong in the same sentence.
Problem is, they're not just going to kill them, that might even be good.
They plan to *replace* them with something even worse.
Right now, Flash is a cross-platform delivery system... It basically made ActiveX irrelevent, and Microsoft is still a little peeved... Once Silverlight takes off and displaces Flash as the delivery system of choice for shitty-assed content, Microsoft will be free to extend Silverlight in any way they desire, without passing those changes on to the Mac or to Mono... This is just like their bid with ActiveX.
Uhh, "Flash" is delivered as an ActiveX control.
If you go into your "Tools | Internet Options | Security | Custom Level", and turn off all the ActiveX stuff [controls, scripting, etc], then you'll never see another Flash display on a web page [dittoes that dreadful Acrobat Reader, or the Gosh-awful Quicktime/iTunes client].
Microsoft's problem is that ActiveX controls were a little TOO powerful - they enabled competitors' products, like Flash, Acrobat, and Quicktime/iTunes, to be run straight from the browser.
Pipe your sed output, without trailing linefeed, into xclip -i. Then xclip -o the text. Press enter when done. In the future, yank the text into your kill ring (C-y) and rotate the kill ring as needed (M-y).
It's really not that hard. They just kill the project. Eliminate its funding, reassign all the developers, break up the group of people who did it, destroy all the internal documentation. Once you've scattered all the people involved, the project is pretty much dead and buried.
Projects get canceled all the time. If it's a particularly interesting project, some of the developers might be attached enough to it to keep a checkout of the source, maybe fiddle with it from time to time, but the chances of them doing anything significant are pretty small, when they'll have something else to do and aren't getting paid to work on it anymore.
And to be honest, I don't know that many developers who get that attached to their work once they've had a few projects canceled out from under them. Sure, a few people might, particularly if it's the first time it's happened to them, but if you work for a big corporation you just get used to the idea that at any time, some jackass in a suit with an MBA might decide your work isn't ever going to pay for itself and shitcan it. That's life, either you go crazy, you get used to it and enjoy your paycheck, or you quit programming, get an MBA and become the jackass.
Yeah, every once in a while you hear about some project that's been canceled that's kept alive by the programmers afterwards, but they're exceptions, not the rule.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
you don't develop the code, it develops you.
It's pretty cool, methinks, that MS is putting some effort into this. As far as the future goes, no worries... wherever they come up short, we'll help them along.
Hope is the currency of fools
they won't tell you this but IE for UNIX was only done so that Microsoft could pay Mainsoft a ton so at the same time, they could afford the new license fees for Win32-UNIX. Microsoft licensed out the Win32 source to a handful of vendors who, through compatibility libraries, brought Win32 source code compatibility to UNIX. Ofcourse, they did this only long enough for many UNIX vendors to port their UNIX apps to Win32 and establish their UNIX products on the Microsoft platform. Then Microsoft pulled the rug out from under them all, except Mainsoft, with massive license fee increases. All but Mainsoft could no longer afford to support the Win32-UNIX libraries and a whole bunch of apps no longer got UNIX version updates because these companies were not going to now port back to UNIX.
This is why Microsoft should not have been allowed to own both the OS and be an application vendor on that OS. While fine before being a monopoly, once a monopoly AND a very very bad monopoly, the public should have been protected from these kinds of business practices. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Caroll has been astroturfing for years on ZDnet.
What's in a sig?
Actually, if you want to get technical, Macromedia has been in this game for a long time now. Adobe's fairly new at it, unless you count their (relative) success pushing PDF as a de facto standard. Adobe does not have a perfect track record for developing great software, so I'd say the jury is still out as to how Flash will fare under their stewardship. I wouldn't underestimate Adobe's potential stupidity. Didn't I hear rumors about them wanting to tie Flash and PDF together in some way, and make them downloadable as a single (presumably gigantic) plug-in?
Breakfast served all day!
fine, then let someone compete with them except let it not be Microsoft. They have shown how they operate and it is not in anybodies best interest that they play in this field/market. And if you have any hope that a Microsoft technology will get you anywhere but roped, lashed, bolted, and tied to Microsoft you are seriously mislead. And yes, being roped, lashed, bolted, and tied to Microsoft is a bad thing. It terminates choice.
And there's nothing wrong with Flash being a monopoly, it's not like they are preventing others from competing. Not to mention they actually hold no control but control over the Flash environment. Are you attempting to compare Adobe with Microsoft in the evil monopoly market? yikes!
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You don't have to use "terrible development tools in a windows environment". You could use some half-decent Mac tools in a wonderful environment.
You just chose Windows.
the big problem here is that they own and control the OS AND they have used that illegally and constantly to harm choice in the applications market. THAT is the deal here. Not all businesses are evil and even if some are, they don't always have the means to dictate what the market gets. Microsoft does all this and more. Bad monopoly, bad Microsoft, bad Silverlight. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
no, Microsoft does not compete, they crush and remove choice. Competition is good and though this might look like competition, solely because it is Microsoft it means that this will limit competition and limit choice in the long run. There is nothing in the past 20 years to show there's any other way for Microsoft.
If they win this, you lose.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
> At Microsoft, it's all about 'Adobe must die, Linux must die. Long live Windows, long live Microsoft.' and only a complete newbie would/could think otherwise. IMO.
Uhhh...so Microsoft wants Windows to be the dominant OS and wants the company to be as successful as it can be for as long as it can be. Stop the presses. I don't really see why anyone would expect otherwise. Do you think that Coke wouldn't mind putting Pepsi out of business? Now you may argue with their tactics (and many do!) but as a private company focused on profits they should be allowed to compete as they see fit.
So Frontpage was responsible for goatse! Better go check goatse in Firefox to see what it is really supposed to look like...
And the FOSS community should support Adobe because they?
1. Have opensouced the flashplayer?
2. Have ported their tools to Linux even as closes source?
3. Provide support for Linux equal to the support they provide to Windows and MacOSX?
Right now Adobe has a slightly better record than Microsoft when it comes to Linux support. They have updated their flash player for Linux.
However the have not ported their Shockwave player, Flash development tools, Photoshop, or any of their tools.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Everyone seems to think something along the lines of "Once flash is dead M$ will quit giving a damn about silverlight cross platforming". Granted, they do have a history of doing just that, but all of the major examples you'd care to think of are with regards to offline software. Online software is quite different, they can't just "kill" flash because it's no skin of a users back to have both installed concurrently. Adobe will keep on making flash, their market share will certainly drop, but it won't drop to zero, and as long as there's money in it I don't see why Adobe would abandon flash.
.NET promotion, and attempting to knock Adobe down a few pegs should they ever decide to get into a graphics software battle. Flash won't die, and silverlight will either go cross-platform cross-browser to the extent that Flash has or it will fall short and be forgotten, all because it's within a luser's abilities to install flash player for their browser of choice.
That Adobe won't quit will single handedly require M$ to maintain silverlight across platforms, lest the 'paranoid' prophecies become self-fulfilling and the whole idea is defeated.
My money is squarely in the corner of "Trojan IP" (my only actual fear),
That said from what little I know about silverlight I rather like the idea; flashlike functionality without having to deal with actionscript (sorry to all those flash gurus out there, but I happen to like strict syntax checking)... if only it didn't hate us Opera users.
Compete? That would be great but that is not how they work. Instead of competing, they leverage their monopoly on the desktop and force their products on the market. End of competition, end of innovation, end of market.
Pepsi keeps Coke in check and Coke keeps Pepsi in check. I don't like their exclusive deals with businesses and I stay away from some businesses because of this. But there are other businesses I can go to quite easily and without jumping through hoops.
It's all about Microsoft's methods of doing business and the 20+ years of history they have using these methods. I don't care if there is one bit of a tasty treat coming from them, 20+ years of history says that if the one treat can be forced onto the plate of most customers, soon there will be no other treats to taste, soon that Microsoft treat will taste like shit and cost you a bundle over and over again.
Pepsi and Coke...Not even close.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It's not about supporting Adobe, it's about keeping choice and competition in this market. Everyone should know that a win for Microsoft is a loss for competition and a loss for freedom of choice. Not to mention the typical loss of innovation.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
What problem? who needs or uses Mono anyway? Silverlight will go the way of Beagle and the other two or three Mono applications - right down the drain. Linux doesn't need a common language runtime just for the sake of it - there are standard programming languages with excellent and complete system library bindings. A CLR does not add any value here.
If Microsoft has to force their über-great Flash ripoff onto me, I want at least a real native executable.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
You want to look into GTK#. It's a port of GTK+ (the widget kit used by GNOME, the GIMP, and Pidgin/Gaim for a few examples) to .NET and Mono. As the name implies, it works with C#. As far as IDEs go, you can continue to use VS on Windows, and use Mono's form designer (Glade). On Linux, you want MonoDevelop, which is a port/fork of SharpDevelop (a Free .NET IDE on Windows) to Mono/GTK#/Linux
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
>> Microsoft is out to terminate Adobe Flash, gain control of the cross-platform AJAX developers, stop Firefox growth, and force Google to work under Microsoft's terms.
... which, incidentally, is why there are so many anti-Microsoft people out there.
> Negative. Microsoft is a publicly traded and owned company. Their one and only goal is to make money for their shareholders. Everything they do is subordinate to (and supportive of) that goal.
So you don't think they intend to do that by dominating markets, like they have done or tried to do with every single market in the past (assorted quotes: "knife the baby", "cut off their air supply", "I'm going to #@$@#ing bury [Google], I've done it before and I'll do it again")?
You don't think it would be more profitable for them to be the only game in town? You don't think that they would like to "eat Google's lunch" and get all those billions of advertising dollars Google is making for themselves?
Sure, they're doing it for the money. That's never been in question. But their *strategy* for making money has always been to get a stranglehold on the market and ensure that everyone is dependent on Microsoft products. Money is the "why", but termination is the "how"
So we should lock out a competitor too keep choice and competition?
You do know how strange that sounds.
I am all for a free open standard to replace Flash but I just don't see how Silverlight is any worse the Flash. If it is open enough then it will be better then Flash.
Frankly as a development language Flash is just nasty.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm sure many people have had this same question- Why is it that Microsoft never jumped on the Linux bandwagon and released their own distro complete with windows compatibility? It seems to be stubbornness more than anything else, but that act would position Microsoft for success well into the future.
"... get an axe!" -Ash, Army of Darkness
So, one bloated proprietary piece of crap fighting the other? Wouldn't it be wonderful if, say... THEY BOTH DIED A HORRIBLE DEATH?
Ah, wishful thinking.
You make some good points and I'm not going to defend Microsoft's behavior. All I'm saying is that I think it is silly to begrudge Microsoft for wanting to beat the competition and be as successful as they can -- that is their raison d'etre. The methods that they use to do that is a totally separate issue. Maybe I just haven't beamed down to the hippie spore planet or something?
With multi-platform flash and Ajax etc, the underlying OS is not very important. All you need is to have a system that can support flash etc and you can browse, watch movies.... That's part of the reason people have not been compelled to get Vista - they work less and less with the OS.
So the challenge for MS is to get people to want their OS again? The only way to do this is to get people to adopt their media platforms, then, at some stage, bind those platforms back to the OS.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Microsoft is not a competitor.
Let's see if I can explain this:
Say you're starting a business and you are looking to open a store front.
There is this business park right in the middle of downtown where all your customs already go.
So you open up a store front down there and it turns out that the property owner of the business park also has a store front there and it's really close to yours.
You think it's no big deal until you start expanding your business and something you do pisses off the business park owner. You don't think you're competing but still he's pissed off.
Now, you're finding out that your workers for the expansion are having difficulties getting to work. There's now a guard shack at the entrance and your guys keep getting stopped for no reason at all. You discuss this with the park owner and he claims it's all a misunderstanding, it'll be fixed real soon. After months it does get solved but now there's construction right in front of your business. The park owner again says that it'll be fixed soon.
What you didn't realize was that the park owner, all this time, has been setting up his own store front that sells the same thing you're selling. Not only that but when customers enter the park, the traffic routing is directed right by the park owners new business.
You only get a handful of customers any more and have to close shop eventually.
Still think competition of any kind is good competition?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Microsoft is FAR from having a monopoly in this product area. Flash is really the only product that does what it does. It therefore has a defacto monopoly. Microsoft is the "little guy" coming onto the stage with Silverlight. I highly doubt Flash will go anywhere, it's insanely popular on the internet today. Just because it's microsoft doesn't mean it's inherantly evil. Silverlight could really push Flash to improve htier product, which is what competition is really about. I think the fact that Microsoft is working WITH the mono people on this project is a step into the light.
How can adding another product to this area remove choice? right now there is only Flash in this area, the choice is either Flash or nothing.
Adobe Flash is a well established development platform which runs across all desktop computing platforms.
And yet they still can't (or won't) make a native 64-bit version. I wonder why that is...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
when you've been in this business as long as I have( and many other Slashdot'ers ) you no longer feel that it is a separate issue when Microsoft is involved. Competition is a very good thing and it is an incredible motivation and innovation driver and a market with this competition is exciting and productive.
The problem starts when a company like Microsoft implements protectionism mechanisms to keep their control of the market( Windows ) and drives down/out competition which threatens their market in any way. For Microsoft, any company which develops a product with a customization or developer market and gains a majority market share is a threat. They are a threat mainly because that company now controls many developer minds and therefore are a threat to Windows market position. Quadruple that threat if the product developer actually supports this product on other operating systems. This last bit is usually what throws Microsoft management into a tizzy and a bright red bullseye gets painted on this product and product developer.
It's Microsofts might and willingness to use it which kills competition. What happened to all the email clients when Microsoft pre-loaded MS Outlook in Windows? Had Mozilla not survived in the Linux market and on a good chunk of Windows desktops, there wouldn't be any kind of browser in Windows but MS Internet Explorer and even then, it is always there and required in may cases.
I think it's just that you've not seen how bad Microsoft has been to competition over the last 20+ years.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. On one side we have Adobe who have a binary only flash plugin for Linux x86 only. If you use a 64-bit system you can use nspluginwrapper, or worse if you run something like PPC64 architecture you can go pound sand. Adobe's support for open source really isn't all that much better than Microsoft's. With Silverlight, where they are helping Mono to port it, there stands at least a small hope that it remains an open standard that they can update on their own in the future. Then every x86, x86_64, PPC, PPC64, and whoever else running whatever else can continue to keep with the current release. Of course, I understand peoples concerns with Microsoft locking it up and saying go screw. Neither one is ideal; it's like picking the greater of two evils, and I can't really be bothered to care who wins. Actually I hope neither does, and it spurs severe competition so that they keep trying to outdo each other with cross platform support, etc. If, for instance, you can run Solverlight on Linux on PPC, x86, x86_64, Mac on PPC or Intel, Windows, blah blah blah, maybe it will scare Adobe a bit, and get them to release plugins for additional platforms as well...
And yet they still can't (or won't) make a native 64-bit version for Linux is what I meant to say.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Sure. Just like I wouldn`t put pirhanas in my fish tank to maintain "diversity of species" in it.
Microsoft has a monopoly on Windows Desktop PCs and has at its disposal millions of preloads a week.
Flash is really the only product that does what it does. It therefore has a defacto monopoly.
And what does that mean? They have marketshare but it is not a bad thing unless you don't like the product. They do not prevent others from competing.
Microsoft is the "little guy" coming onto the stage with Silverlight. I highly doubt Flash will go anywhere, it's insanely popular on the internet today. Just because it's microsoft doesn't mean it's inherantly evil.
Yes it does. Microsoft's long history shows that they will do more to prevent actual competition then they'll do to compete on product merit. And once they crush the other guy, their preload strategies pretty much block any sane business developer from even considering competing. The result, a stale market.
Silverlight could really push Flash to improve htier product, which is what competition is really about.
But when Microsoft is involved, it's a new game and competition is what gets terminated.
I think the fact that Microsoft is working WITH the mono people on this project is a step into the light.
How can adding another product to this area remove choice? right now there is only Flash in this area, the choice is either Flash or nothing.
Adding a Microsoft product to this removes choice over time and history shows that over and over again. As for there not being any other competitor, well there is Sun Microsystems Java FX coming down the line.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Finally, someone that knows how to use VS.NET. I asked on freenode's C# channel and got responses that suggested most people there were ignorant of answers (as opposed to me be being an annoying n00b). I come from IDEA and that has some features that are very nice to me. One that I find essential in an IDE is that it gives you immediate feedback on your errors. For example, the instant I type a newline I'll be told that I forgot a semicolon the line above. VS.NET seems to either be EXTREMELY slow with this feedback or only tells you errors when you compile.
. html But the thing that confuses me is that most VS.NET users think it's the best IDE ever without using this plug-in so I want to know if VS.NET can already do this stuff out-of-the-box.
My second favorite feature is I can find my files in a brain-dead way without using the mouse. If I type ctrl-n, it pops up a tiny text box that has focus and I can type the name of a file I want to use to immediately start working in it. I don't have to check if there's already a tab open for it. I don't need to find it in a little explorer. The text box does pattern matching and camel casing (ie: I can type in IOU and it'll suggest the file InputOutputUtil if it exists in my project). Does VS.NET have anything like this?
A dangerous lack of warnings: It seemed to me that VS.NET doesn't warn you of some stupid things you're doing. Now my memory is hazy, but I believe it doesn't tell you about unused variables for example.
Lack of useful highlighting: If I recall, VS.NET does not highlight local and instance variables differently. Is there any way to turn this on in VS.NET?
Code navigation: If I'm looking at some code that says "foo.bar();" and I want to know the implementation of bar(), I can ctrl-click on it or ctrl-b with the cursor over it and it instantly jumps not only to the file where bar() is defined, but the bar() method. Does VS.NET have any capability like this?
Now, I'm going to answer my own questions here by saying VS.NET can do this with a plugin made by the same guys that make IDEA. It's called resharper and you can get it here: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/index
If we get an open implementation of it then yes, it is cross-platform, just like C is cross-platform.
I am trolling
Just wait for the killing robot machine to travel back from the future.
about half of responses to the root post (redundantly) describe what will be their next step after that and why it'll end being cross-platform in any meanful (to everyone but MS) sense
How can they use thier windows monopoly in the case of this story? The story says they are halping the mono team develop silverlight in linux. How exactly can they bundle this linux software with windows?
So there will be 2 other huge companies compeeting against microsoft, Adobe, and Sun. That sounds like perfectly reasonable competition to me. 3 Massive companies each pushing thier own product.
Windows has been around for even more years, and Linux useage is on the rise.
Internet explorer is well established, and despite that, firefox useage is growing and growing. I would even go so far as to say that IE is causing Firefox to get better, because of.. competition.
Yes, Microsoft played dirty in the past. Recent trends are showing that they are starting to change thier ways. You need to be willing to accept the fact that things change.
the instant I type a newline I'll be told that I forgot a semicolon the line above
C# shares this in common with C: whitespace is irrelevant. That semicolon could be eleventy-thousand lines later in the file and it wouldn't matter. It just can't have any non-whitespace in the middle.
The text box does pattern matching and camel casing (ie: I can type in IOU and it'll suggest the file InputOutputUtil if it exists in my project). Does VS.NET have anything like this?
There's a third-party add-on for that. I forget what it's called, though.
it doesn't tell you about unused variables for example.
Yes it does. They're in the warnings section of the Error List.
VS.NET does not highlight local and instance variables differently. Is there any way to turn this on in VS.NET?
Not that I've found.
If I'm looking at some code that says "foo.bar();" and I want to know the implementation of bar(), I can...
Right-click, "Go To Definition". If it can find it (in a reference with debug info or in your source), it will open the file for you.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
one of their execs is on record at zdnet news saying that the real threat to microsoft's dominance on the web is web2.0 and all these scripting technologies. google it. its about 1.5-2 years old, IIRC.
Why WASTE MILLIONS marketing linux when web2.0 and http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?7027 allow dummy installation training?
And there's nothing wrong with Flash being a monopoly, it's not like they are preventing others from competing. Not to mention they actually hold no control but control over the Flash environment. Are you attempting to compare Adobe with Microsoft in the evil monopoly market? yikes! Wow, I can't help but say this: you're an idiot. You're essentially saying that Adobe should be allowed to hold a monopoly simply because the only people with resources to compete (and desire to) is Microsoft. And that Microsoft should not be allowed to compete in any markets.
How about this: I don't like you, so because of that you are no longer allowed to leave your house. If you do, I will obtain a restraining order and have you arrested. After all, you're my enemy and because of that I should be allowed to do whatever I want and you aren't allowed to interfere.
Moron.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I dual-boot Vista and Linux (openSuse) and have been developing .NET apps and web apps for over two years. These days, while I do nearly all of my development in Windows (Visual Studio is simply the best IDE I've ever seen, bar none... though for Java I've found NetBeans is pretty good) I've found pretty much everything I do works perfectly well in Linux using Mono. Make sure you have the WinForms package and, if needed, the mono-basic (VB.NET support) package installed, plus packages for whatever database you use, and you're pretty much good to go for desktop apps (console apps will work with just the stuff that installs itself if you use any GNOME apps - I'm a KDE user and those were still already auto-installed).
.NET/Mono for full cross-platform capability. It would be nice if there was a better IDE available for the other platforms... monodevelop shows a lot of promise but is still years behind VS in terms of features. You don't even need to recompile using Mono; Mono understands the intermediate language produced by either their own or Microsoft's compiler, and will JIT compile it to native code. I think Mono has native support for a few architectures (other than x86/x64) already, in fact.
.NET libraries I havne't found that to be a problem. Besides, you can link to native libraries if need be, although I'm not sure if that works cross-platform without recompiling (never tried).
I hear Mono is now working properly on OS X as well. Considering all that, I'd say you should be fine working with
Obviously you'll need to avoid using any Windows-specific features, but given the size of the
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Ooh, new refactoring tool? Sounds good. Can you give me a quick idea of what it can do that the built-in refactoring can't? I've found VS2005's built in refactor is actually pretty good; thinks like changing a defined name (variable, class, method, whatever) giving an automatic option to refactor with just a click of the mouse is pretty sweet, as is the automatic refactor when working in design view (of course, this has been a feature of VS for years and years, now).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
So how can I buy a Mac OS license for my hardware?
For most developers who complain about Silverlight going cross platform (including its .NET component) I bet I can find a past post or two complaining that Microsoft keeps users locked into one platform. It's not about technology, it's about an agenda against a company and finding the negative point from any angle even if points conflict with one another. I call these "pseduo-developers" -- very opinionated but also most likely very young or having a very small slice of experience or of vision.
The bit that drives me nuts with the built in refactor is its insistence on rebuilding the entire solution before it can establish what to refactor. I haven't used Resharper enough to really get a feel for it, so I'd suggest just looking at the website for it. It can probably explain better than I can anyway.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
well, some gold sealed internally doesn't sound great for me... latest advancements of flagship language c# are a little addicting though
Nah. It won't happen. Look how "cross-platform" .Net is. It is not. Even if MS makes a little of their tech cross-platform, you will still be locked in to development on MS-only.
.Net to Mac and/or Linux (no, not Mono, I used it, too lacking). Oh, and also when MS ports their dev IDE cross platform.
.Net is a very good programming framework and I think that C# is a very clean language. However, I always get annoyed at the fact that when I use C#/.Net/VS I am stuck in MS-only-land. When I do Java work, I get to pick my environment.
Give me a wake-up when MS ports
Funny thing. I can get the official Sun JRE/JDK that runs on MS Windows, Mac and Linux. Oh, and I can get a sun made IDE that runs on Mac, Linux and MS Windows. Oooh, did I mention that all of the Java IDE's I use work on Mac, Linux and MS Windows?
I think the whole MS-lock-in stuff sucks. I do a lot of C#/.Net development and think
I have given up all hope of Microsoft ever changing. I now only use MS Windows at work and I only use their dev stuff when I am paid to do so. There was a time when I enjoyed using MS Windows, though sadly that joy has left me many years ago due to the actions of Microsoft.
I get paid to do C#/Java work. When I get home I work on Mac and Linux only now. A few years ago, I would come home and actually enjoy bringing my programming work home with me. Now I only do that if the work I bring home is Java stuff. Thanks Microsoft for killing the joy of your platform and software for me by trying to dictate where, how, when and why I use technology.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Adobe deserves to get their ass kicked.What they have done to the macromedia suite of programs is what the jews did to Jesus.Except nobody should forgive them.They need to pay the ultimate price.I hope flash disappears in the next 2 years.And anyway from what i've seen in silverlight it's a better product anyway.U can write stuff for it in javascript or any other language.Screw actionscript!
go microsoft on this one.
So Quicken got wipped out by Microsoft Money? Microsoft doesn't have a perfect record at killing the competition. They are not some all powerful monster that you must fear at all costs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That is a horrible "explanation".
Microsoft is not a competitor in the spirit you wish it to be. We all know that. That aside, Microsoft is introducing a competing product in a market that's dominated by a huge gorilla that is sitting on its laurels (familiar?). Just the idea alone that such a heavy hitter is bringing in its own smaller gorilla should encourage that fecal-filled Flash gorilla to get up and start working out. Maybe actually get into shape and start working with everyone else. You know, what this very community WANTS it to do, but it doesn't have to.
There may be some consequences later, but no one can really foresee them (Yes I'm aware of their history and track record). But without them introducing Silverlight, what would have happened with Flash? It would probably just be just as awful as it is now.. sitting there.
(insert LOLCAT here)
Microsoft's APIs are an ecosystem all right. One of those toxic post-apocalyptic ones with tentacles reaching out of swamps to strangle passers-by.
Actually, Office on the Mac was better than Office for Windows, at least a couple years ago. It actually went as far as to have exclusive features, apart from standard OS compatibility features one might expect. I haven't used Office on any platform for a while, so I won't comment on the current state of things; just pointing out Microsoft has done at least one GOOD THING in the past relevant to cross-platform support. Thanks to the MS Mac Business Unit.
There's no 64-bit version for Windows or Mac OS X either. Adobe should rightfully be criticized for not having 64-bit support in Flash right now, but Linux users acting like they are the only ones left out of a 64-bit Flash is just ridiculous.
One man's selflessness is another man's annoyance.
Another great MS product designed, in the spirit of Microsoft Media Player, IE, etc, to kill off an equivalent product by being included in the MS OS for free when non-monopolist competitor has no monopoly cash cow to fund its product, and not charging for the development tool.
.NET to create content with it. We all know how cross-platform .NET development tools are -- Windows only.
Yeah, real cross-platform -- you have to use
Hardly much of a definition of cross-platform the one calling Silverlight cross-platform.
I think Microsoft just likes to be able to FUD about linux's patent violations.
(hmm 'FUD' as a verb....)
M$ should work with Wine community to get silverlight works under wine just like picasa/google earth linux by google. :/
But i think M$ may not contribute back the result to the community like google had done
I should start by saying I've always been a MS skeptic technically and thought their business practices abhorrent.
.NET in a way that is simple and fun to use as a developer.
...although that is still a rather dismal hope.) MS seems to have got enough ducks in a row to be moving ahead so quickly and strongly that no other dev platform developers can keep up, especially the open source community. It seems that .NET is gaining the momentum to be the multi-platform desktop client (and now maybe rich web) that we always hoped Java would be. Even if the open source world is a few years behind on things like WPF/WCF, it still seems like an asset to have the multi-language .NET environment and GTK# / Windows Forms across Win/Linux/OSX, as well as standardization in the language.
.NET and SL 1.0 will even be a source of inspiration to the open source community to innovate forks?
.NET gets replicated in the open source world, we hopefully get to keep it for good, and get rid of issues like vendor lock-in and obsolesence (VB6 comes to mind). (Just beware the trojan horse of MS patents! If we all adopt .NET and build a thriving open-source cross-platform community around it and then MS successfully claims patent rights, goodbye world of free open-source! (.NET based OSS anyway))
.NET at work for a few years, SL is looking mighty attractive assuming the users get it installed.)
But right about now, I am starting to wonder if the amoral forces of capitalism are leading us to the verge of good things for all platforms materializing, and a win-win for the consumer (and in this case, developers developers dev *ahem*.) Since the mid-90's, Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons and has put a lot of cool ideas into practice with
Sure, Microsoft is always trying to set itself up for greater success, but this doesn't always have to come at the expense of everyone else. (At least, I hope they are primarily greedy rather than predatorial
The only nasty thing I see MS doing is trying to extract $$ from the open-source world based on patents/IP on the cross-platform stuff. MS has been burned on patents themselves, and with the growing mainstream angst against patents, the optimist in me perhaps naively hopes that the recent FUD cross-licensing tactics is as far as they will go, or will be able to go.
That aside, MS can't make us do anything we don't want to do. If Silverlight 2.0 is full of Windows-only stuff, web developers don't have to adopt it (they would be idiots to, if it meant reaching significantly less users), and continue to use SL 1.0 with SL 1.0 toolset. Perhaps
My point is that sure, MS will likely have the best tools, and will be doing as much fancy stuff to bolster Windows as they can, but once
I used to be a Linux freak, and went without Windows for about 4 years, and still have linux on my primary desktop, but I don't really mind anymore having Windows around in order to use MS's slick IDE, and maybe some of their MS Expression tools. I think the cross-platform-ness of the clients is much more important. Honestly, my hope right now is that Silverlight becomes as commonly deployed as Flash as quickly as possible, because I hate the idea of learning Flash-only languages and libraries and rewriting data structures and things in multiple languages in different environments (I am not a web developer and have yet to get into Flash, but after doing
Thoughts?
Don't fear the penguins.
It seems fairly simple to me. They want to - lately, but still - respond to Adobe's lead regarding content spreading on the Internet, so they create Silverlight, now they want to use the community itself to help kill that lead off. I'd have no problem with that, them being a company and all, still, if they want Silverlight to be crossplatform - I mean _really_ want - then they should invest a few developers - they have plenty of - and really do release versions for other platforms, and do support them in the long term. But it doesn't seem they want to do either of them [release and support] so they try to drive the FOSS people to make the port and inject their IP in the FOSS world with their handwork. This way they won't have to deal with support - it's not their product after all - and they can still stop aiding them whenever they see fit.
The biggest problem MS has to face is loosing control over developers, development tools, and development platforms. You have no control without proper lockin, they saw that this can work and they probably wish to keep up with that. Thus, while I'm happy to see new shiny toys come into play, intentions and talks should always be taken with a rather large grain of salt.
Maybe something good will come out of this, but I hope it will be Adobe releasing new stuff to counterplay Silverlight, rather than Silverlight gaining too much ground in the FOSS world. Why prefer one ompany over the other ? Well, a record of past actions and behavior can help.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
That's because Windows 64-bit ships with IE32, which is what the default shortcuts point to on the install, (For compatibility with 32-bit plugins & BHOs exactly), even on Itanium. So most users won't be too bothered by lack of 64-bit Flash, as IE-64 needs to gain traction from the whole universe of addins getting moved over.
Firefox-32 on Linux-64 requires a whole chain of 32-bit dependencies, and Firefox would be the only program making use of them, so they're very noticable. And Linux users, tending to be more purists, are a bit more pissed off from this.
No, I'm not being ridiculous, I'm simply not commenting about a 64-bit Windows version because I didn't know if there was one or not. I don't use 64-bit Windows so I never had a reason to find out. I corrected my comment because I figured there would be a chorus of people criticizing me that there was a 64-bit version for Windows, but I was referring specifically to Linux since I have a couple AMD64 machines that I run Ubuntu on.
To be honest, I find it pretty ludicrous that something like Flash can't be built for 64-bits without much trouble. It's not like it's an OS or anything. How low-level can the code be that it takes more than a few compiler switches and at worst a couple tweaks in the code to build for 64-bits, especially when Flash runs on so many devices?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Silverlight v 1.1 does not and will not run on Power PC Macs (that is 58% of our Mac-users).
This is not a cross platform product.
2 of my 3 home Macs failed to run any of the examples on silverlight.net.
-- somewhat_distant
They've done it before. They've killed projects like this, or severely crippled them, probably intentionally, before.
However...
I'm not sure if there's significant chunks of the official Silverlight actually running on Mono. I was under the impression that it was actually a re-implementation. Which means that if MS really kills Silverlight, we can start shipping Mono plus Mono's own Silverlight with/for Firefox. It's kind of like Mono itself -- Mono, at this point, could be severely hurt by Microsoft's dominance, but not actually killed in its own right.
It's like Java. Microsoft killed Java with their JVM, but only as a potential platform of choice for Windows and the Web. We still have Sun's JVM, and we can still use it for portable apps, or just for enterprise apps on the server. I hate Java for everything but its portability, bytecode nature, and garbage collection (which is a lot to like, actually) -- but Java is living proof that the most Microsoft can do to an open source project, even one they embrace/extend/extinguish, is severely hurt it. They can't kill it.
HTML is another example. Microsoft has, in fact, set the Web back years. They did, in fact, try to kill Netscape. And Netscape has come back as Firefox to haunt them, and even that tiny amount of competition has forced them to move back to "embrace" mode.
Even if their intent is to extend/extinguish, I am really hopeful that we can always fork or force them to embrace.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Duh? Because its own people cost money.
Doing Mono this way means they can get all kinds of people from Mono to do the work for them, and then they can play the IP card and kill the project when they don't need it anymore. Right now, they need Silverlight to be cross-platform, so that people have no reason to choose it over Flash.
This is the Embrace period.
Once it becomes THE way to get web content, and YouTube runs on Silverlight, and Flash is dead -- then they can start adding features to the Windows version of Silverlight, and stop helping Mono.
That will be Extend.
Basically, get everyone preferring the MS platform, because they're seen as the innovator, because they're adding more features -- mainly because they can copy any feature from Mono, but not the other way around.
Then, they can play the patent card whenever they want -- hell, they may already have these patents -- and basically make the Mono version of Silverlight illegal. Linux people will hate it, and everyone else will go "C'est la vie" and just use Windows when they want to look at a Silverlight page, because who knows if it'll work right in the insanely-limited legal version of Mono.
That would be Extinguish.
The GPL cannot possibly do this, by the way. It's entirely possible to avoid using any GPL'd code, and no one can play the "GPL card" later.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's bull. Silverlight - even in alpha / beta has always been meant to be cross-platform. I've been following it for for a long time now and it's always used a cross-platform cross-browser compatible plug-in. The first time I used it I installed the plug-in in FireFox. I'm sick of people ignoring facts and just jumping on the anit-Microsoft bandwagon. I'm no blind Microsoft follower, I'm just sick of hearing garbage presented as fact.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
"This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products."
Developers need to get their fears straight.
I'm less concerned about Silverlight being locked to Microsoft platforms, than I am about the entire web being locked into Silverlight. I'm sure many here agree...
This article seems primarily concerned with how MS can make the most money. It seems like an interesting standpoint to have. Not even the biggest MS fanboys are concerned with MS making money.
Resharper is awesome. I love JetBrains. I still think that IntelliJ is the best IDE I've ever used... Even before they had built-in form building tools I still thought it was light-years ahead of Visual Studio. You still have to manually add references to standard classes in VS - ugh. Oh well, I'm stuck working with VB6 these days anyway. *vomit*.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
What, pray tell, is AJAX losing ground to?
.NET, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, whatever you want -- it's all on the server side, and none of it matters. As long as it speaks HTTP and delivers HTML or XML, browsers will talk to it, either with normal HTTP/HTML, or with that plus AJAX.
.NET, which is meant to be a generic runtime environment, so theoretically, you can actually write the parts that go in the browser in ANY sufficiently high-level language. Oh, and it'll have nice, Flash-like graphics, so we won't really need plugins anymore, except maybe the occasional PDF.
The only other contenders I see are Java, Flash, Silverlight, and native desktop apps.
The other things you listed are wholly irrelevant, being server-side technologies. Perl, PHP, Tomcat,
Which means I can easily move from Perl to PHP to Tomcat to Erlang to Brainfuck if I feel like it, all on the server side. I can even write parts of a site in one language and parts in another.
Silverlight is more dangerous, and also has more promise.
The promise is, it's built on
(More languages doesn't excite me as much because I'm learning to love JavaScript. It's Lisp, but it looks like C... But Silverlight will be much, much faster to execute. Javascript implementations are pathetically slow.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I do a lot of pseudo-developing myself...
.NET, and Linux/Firefox/Mono people will be struggling to catch up.
But I'm at least consistant, and I think you've got a strawman here. Has anyone on Slashdot complained about anything going cross-platform?
It's not that we don't want silverlight to be cross-platform. It's that we're looking at it from every possible angle, trying to figure out why MS would be giving us something like this, because every time they've appeared to give us something in the past, it eventually led to us being screwed over.
It's that we're afraid that Linux and OS X will adopt it, we'll have Silverlight all over the place, maybe Silverlight on my cell phone powered by Mono... and then MS will move from the Embrace phase into Extend and Exterminate. They'll start adding features that aren't in the spec, people will start using them, and before long, you'll see half the Silverlight apps are only meant for Windows/IE with actual
They've done it before.
When someone kicks you in the balls enough, you get scared of them. It's only natural.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's basically resulted in the same situation that we've always had: If you can run your servers on Windows (for web-based stuff), and/or your app will work being windows only (for rich client stuff), then
No torture necessary. Heck,
it is not a surprise that some Microsoft product/tech/whatever is successful, I know people who wouldn't touch Java basically because it wasn't from Microsoft. When Microsoft failed to abide by Sun's Java license and keep their implementation to the specs and then came out with .Net as a replacement, these people were all over it. So their use is not that great of a surprise.
..... choice, why on earth would I want to think for a minute that yet another Microsoft replacement for a partners product is good for me, customer, mom, etc? It is not and it is not a win/win when the only choice is Microsoft. Microsoft plays to keep control of developer API's and therefore, .Net was born to take away Java developers from Sun's API's. Microsoft was very successful in harming Java and they are winning some hearts and minds with .Net and because .Net has patented Microsoft IP in it, touching it on Linux or anything would be an idiotic move. They could have worked with Sun to make Java better but they NEVER do that because Java runs on other platforms and Microsoft does not control the API. OpenGL was handled this way, cross platform C++ framework vendors where handled this way and the list goes on and on.
And because of the Windows-only nature of EVERYTHING Microsoft does limits my choice and my customers choice and my mothers choice, my
You can only play with Microsoft if you only play on Microsoft and you are completely controlled by Microsoft via platform ownership and control. That is it. It does not matter if you find one pin prick which seems like fun, like it's cool, etc. It is fucking limiting and 20+ years of Microsoft business practices show this if you are willing to actually look at them out from under their rose colors glasses.
Sorry, I'm getting really tired of this thread. Do some reading on how bad Microsoft is and realize many of those who wrote the pages have been burned by Microsoft one way or another. A freak'n Federal Judge threw the book at them for wrong doing and ordered them split up! It is not a conspiracy theory that they do bad things, it's on the record and there is 1000 times more off the record.
LoB
What I'm getting at is that because of how Microsoft has done and continues to as business methods and practices, their products should be regarded as something to stay away from. Obviously, if you have no possibility of ever doing anything exciting, innovative, or just plain fun and only care if it works on your Windows box, there is no way you'd agree that supporting a company and it's products because of how it damages choice outside that world
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You can only play with Microsoft if you only play on Microsoft and you are completely controlled by Microsoft via platform ownership and control. That is it. It does not matter if you find one pin prick which seems like fun, like it's cool, etc. It is fucking limiting and 20+ years of Microsoft business practices show this if you are willing to actually look at them out from under their rose colors glasses.
Thats interesting, because I dont seem to suffer from these same limitations. I do some things on the MS stack where its smart, and some elsewhere where its smart. We've got clients that do everything from enterprise financials on java to a pure .net/ms stack on windows, with a smattering of Macs.
Many of the smaller clients stick pretty much to windows, because its just usually easier and cheaper in the long run, and things tend to 'just work'.
And you know what, the single biggest challenge we face with microsoft 'business practices' is challenges in activating older systems that are rebuilt. But that only comes up when people other than us were doing their systems before, and not doing things in the smartest way.
I'm not sure what happened to you that you go so horribly burned by them, but I just dont see that kind of thing in the real world. They're just another business to deal with. Just like I wouldnt put all my trust and faith into Sun, I wouldnt into Microsoft.
But there's no mystical magical trap that you fall into when using their systems. Sure its easier to keep using their systems once you're on them, but duh, they're a business. Of course they're setup that way. It doesnt take much intelligence and planning to make sure that you dont get dependent on them. If the cost/benefit of MS ever swings to the negative, you simply move on.
It's really not that big of a deal, and I dont see why you make it into such a religious thing.
Obviously, if you have no possibility of ever doing anything exciting, innovative, or just plain fun and only care if it works on your Windows box, there is no way you'd agree that supporting a company and it's products because of how it damages choice outside that world.
Well, I dont know what you're doing that is letting some other business damage your choices, but I dont experience that problem. And just like elsewhere in the world, there is some damn interesting stuff coming out of MS.
.NET are a compelling platform. Would they be more compelling if there was a 100% compatible stack on all the other major platforms, sure! But given that 95%+ of the systems (desktops) we encounter are windows, and the other 5% are Mac, this really just isnt a problem.
.Net or Java on the backend for the heavy lifting. And the choice of .Net or Java is really going to depend on the staff in place in the org. They're both fine, the costs arent that much different, and both are incredibly powerful.
C# and
If/when MS loses their hold on the desktop, and it becomes a more heterogenous environment, then we'll adapt. It's just really not that big of a deal. Just requires a little bit of thinking ahead, and you can maximize your opportunities now, and minimize risks later.
But for the moment, C#/.Net with Linq and some of the XAML/WPF tech stacks are quite compelling. If MS can manage to not shoot themselves in the foot and create a situation where the Silverlight client is ubiquitous, then they may stomp the alternatives. If I'm given the choice to develop an app on one of these kinds of stacks, and my choices are C#/.Net/XAML or Flash/Javascript? Well, thats an easy damn choice. I'll take a real compiled language and a modern layout system anyday of the week than trying to build real solutions in Javascript.
Right now, the sexy space is, in my ken, a fast dynamic sytem like Ruby or Python plus the appropriate toolkit for web apps (RoR, Django, etc), plus
I think you just need to think about
Currently, the only thing that comes close to an application development tool on the OS X platform from Microsoft is VBA which resides in their office suite. They have made it clear that with the next release of Office that VBA scripting will no longer be supported. The excuse given is that they are afraid to make any more patches to VBA for OS X because they believe that further modification might lead to a buggy monstrosity. Who wrote that buggy piece of code that is not worth updating? This was the same excuse used by the IE7 team for their lack of standards compliance. If they changed it to meet the standard it would break and the time since IE6 to IE7 was too brief a period (what a laugh) to start over and rewrite it correctly. Give me a break. This is as lame and transparent as the BS coming from a really bad politician.
I don't believe that it is a stretch to say that Microsoft will never release an application development tool for any OS other than Windows. The only way that this could possibly happen is if they release one that gives Microsoft a better choke hold on the market. They are in the business to primarily sell software where that software is acquired by buy-out of another company or generated in a half-assed manner so that customers can buy bundles and licenses from a single source.
I've been in the software development business for more than 25 years and have watched Microsoft practices, with amazement at times, as this company lucked out when IBM stumbled with its "PC" and got the foothold it needed, machines in businesses that would only buy IBM. The next thing they knew and IBM abandoned those businesses and they were stuck with "DOS", a rip-off of CP/M (from Digital Research).
All this is not to say the development tools in Visual Studio are bad. But even still they reflect the same corporate focus and that is to make nothing that might assist a competitor. This is exemplified by J++ and C#. This allows them to not only own code but they own the language it's written in.
Oh, and one last thing. TFA was written by John Carroll who: has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2005, he's been a Microsoft employee. (Emphasis mine)
Be as you would have the world become.