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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.