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."
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?
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
There's no need to port all that stuff.
.Net-to-ActiveX. There's a tiny amount of support for COM interop in the full .Net library. In case you don't know, COM is the mid-90's ugly-hack programming "standard" that Microsoft pushed for library (dll) programming.
.Net. It's going to be .Net-by-the-ECMA-standard instead of .Net-direct-from-R&D-in-Redmond. Which is basically Mono anyway. It wouldn't be wise for Microsoft to attempt to kill Silverlight after getting everyone to use it, either. Web designers and programmers move from one technology to another very quickly. Ajax already is losing ground to better stuff. Perl isn't as popular as it once was. Neither is PHP. Nor Tomcat. And since much of the Silverlight development for non-Windows platforms is done by the Mono project, I'd guess that Microsoft has minimal control of whether or not updates are issued. And that's ignoring the fact that it's all based on a published standard.
ActiveX is dead. Microsoft doesn't do anything with it, and there certainly isn't an interoperability push for
DirectX is simply "the Windows graphics API". Microsoft has stopped trying to make it more than that. Once upon a time, they wanted to go up against OpenGL, but when they realized they'd have to play nice on other platforms and give up some "superiority" in the gaming market (read: the only thing people "need" Windows for), they dropped the idea and moved on.
Silverlight is a subset of
I don't think Microsoft can get away with the same shenanigans they pulled in times past.
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
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.
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.