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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."
1. Insure all your Linux DLLs (*.dll) are in your PATH statement.
2. type make
3. ???
4. profit!
Well they've always done a good job at their Macintosh ports and keeping them up to date...
Oh, hold on a second while I minimize this window of IE5 for OSX. I have to open Outlook for OS9 to reply to an e-mail.
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
yup, MS Silverlight is their planned attempt at killing off not only Adobe Flash but also all this AJAX stuff. If they can kill off Flash, they'll make sure developers use Silverlight for browser application development and move as many as possible away from AJAX. In time, they'll start breaking AJAX components in their browser to harm those who stick with AJAX and we're back at web applications which only run on Microsoft Windows and which is ultimately controlled by Microsoft at the API levels. This sticks it to Google too. Because 'Google Must Die' is another Microsoft concept these days.
Read your history books folks, it's all in Microsoft's history. Who needs a crystal ball?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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?
MS Silverlight is their planned attempt at killing off not only Adobe Flash but also all this AJAX stuff
Killing off Flash and AJAX? So, you're saying we should LIKE Microsoft now?
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.
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