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MS To Push Silverlight Via Redesigned Microsoft.com
Marilyn M. writes "It looks like Microsoft is getting desperate about the dismal rates of Silverlight adoption by consumers and developers since its release earlier this year. According to NeoSmart Technologies, Microsoft is preparing a fully Silverlight-powered redesign of their website, doing away with most HTML pages entirely. With over 60 million unique users visiting Microsoft.com a month, Microsoft's last-ditch effort might be what it takes to breathe some life back into Silverlight. The article notes: 'At the moment, very few non-Microsoft-owned sites are using Silverlight at all; let alone for the entire UI.'"
that they haven't made it one if its 'critical updates' or even the proverbial forced 'back door' updates that no one knows about until you suddenly find it on your machine. The idea of Silverlight seems pretty cool since I'm a .Net junky myself, but still like the ubiquity and semi-platform independence of Flash.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Company tries to spur adoption of their technology by actually using it themselves! The ultimate act of desperation!
Film at 11.
Seriously? Wouldn't it be a bit more suspect if the *didn't* use it?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
TBH though, I am a .Net developer, so I may have a bit of bias. But the power and ease of development that Silver Light gives you is very impressive. It's not the right tool for every job, but for multi-media intensive, widely distributed apps, from the tools I've seen, it definitely has some great advantages.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Silverlight currently only supports Firefox of the Gecko browsers - it blocks all other Gecko-based browsers even though they'd be completely compatible. One has to wonder whether explicitly supporting only Firefox is an intentional move to limit competition in the browser market.
As a developer, I'm waiting for Silverlight 2.0 so that I can use .Net languages instead of that heap of crap which is Javascript.
In 1995, everyone was running Netscape.
Microsoft's plan is to replace Flash as the Flashy web UI of choice. As a UI developer, I am ambivalent. I fail to see how being in Adobe's pocket is any better or worse than being in Microsoft's. Actually, I prefer Silverlight as it does not require that hideously expensive Flex dev environment.
Microsoft makes more than computer OSs. There are plenty of reasons to visit Microsoft's site other than downloading the latest security patch. There is this little thing called the XBox.
Wether Microsoft likes or not, the world isn't all Windows anymore; and no, running on Windows and OS X is only 'technically' cross-platform. HTML/Javascript/Ajax IS cross-platform. I do a lot of my surfing on my iPhone, many people now do that on their PS3, or using mobile Opera. Make technology that doesn't work on all mobile platforms at your own peril, IMHO.
Still, it's a problem. I rarely run Windows myself, and pretty much never use IE. However, I support both Windows XP desktops and Windows 2003 servers, so I often have to use Microsoft's Knowledge Base. The KB already breaks a little in non-IE browsers (which is insanely stupid), but if they put it in Silverlight, it will become inaccessible to me.
I think this is a shitty thing to do to your customers. They're going to punish me for using some of their products but not all of their products. Since I'm not going to use all of their products, this is exactly the sort of move that makes me want to get rid of them entirely, and run a completely Linux/OSX office.
I thought the same at first , after a couple of my co workers showed me how well and easy silver light is , it got a little of my attention. I dislike it because it is a microsoft product , but it is pretty sleek at the moment. When 2.0 comes they said it will have better language options.
I really don't like Ms but I do like silver light , especially their promise of it running well on linux and well on every platform. Java at times can get heavy and slow down even the biggest servers.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
>As a developer, I'm waiting for an open-source solution, so that I'm not restricted to .NET languages, a single platform to develop on, etc.
Miquel de Icaza is working on an open-source version of Silverlight for Linux. See here.
Microsoft plans to use its website to push Silverlight technology adoption.
I remember when MSDN and other Microsoft sites were available only with IE. This was bad for who worked on Linux or used Netscape/Firefox but had to support Windows hosts. They finally changed their sites to be standard compliant (or at least, closer to that).
Now that they're losing market to Firefox and they're having to go standards compliant on HTML, they'll try to push a "better" technology to try to make HTML irrelevant and keep their monopoly.
If you look at it, OOXML is just the same, its integration with Sharepoint is another try to make HTML irrelevant and keep their monopoly on the web.
In the end, it doesn't matter if Silverlight is cross-platform and supported, because Microsoft will always own the format, lead its development, and introduce new incompatible features. Everyone will have to keep following them forever, not to mention that probably they'll start adding patented features or DRM. They've been doing this with every program and file format they have.
Microsoft developed frontpage server extensions for apache on linux many years ago, they were binary only and broke if you updated apache, and they were full of security holes.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"Good point. People on /. should stop trying to talk about how great Linux and MacOSX are. I mean, if they were so great they would be dominant already."
If Microsoft's dominance had anything to do with software quality and not with barely legal tactics of coercing OEMs into bundling their and their software only, sabotaging Windows so it would not work properly with DR-DOS, and generally abusing one monopoly to create more monopolies, your comment would have some measure of correctness.
WFWG made obvious (to Novell's disgrace) people didn't want file servers - they wanted to share files and printers. Excel was respectable. Word (first on Mac, then on Windows) was decent. Multiplan and Word were even honest products on DOS and on Macintosh. Windows brought some GUI multitasking for those who couldn't afford to run Unix and X. I did a lot of Applesoft BASIC code during college.
Unfortunately, the real world is not like that. This Microsoft is not the same company it was on the 70s, 80s and early 90s.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Flex is substantially easier to work with, had a ubiquitous install base, and transports easily to full desktop applications via Apollo.
We went to a full-day demo on Silverlight, given by a Microsoft developer. What they did in about 500 lines of Silverlight code was a pretty nice picture slideshow with smooth image transitions. What we did in about 500 lines of Flex was equivalent, but supported images of any size, allowed you to zoom in, supported a film strip mode, and carousel mode, as well as the standard fade-in, fade-out image transitions. Ours also is able to attach to ANY other language that is capable of delivering web services in a wide variety of formats (XMLRPC, SOAP, WSDL, flat XML, etc), and it only requires 1 line of code to change (or a switch statement if we wanted to support them all at once). Ours is more featureful, easier to read, understand, and maintain than the very best that Microsoft could produce in the same amount of code. It also performs better.
Seriously, I have seen both of these things in action, Silverlight is a long, LONG way away from being able to compete with Flex on both an install base perspective as well as an ease-of-development perspective. There is a reason people aren't adopting Silverlight, and install base is only a small part of it (though of course it itself is significant).
Microsoft is doing their usual bang-up job of supporting the minimal features to look competitive, then cramming it down people's throats until they forget there are better options out there. And well they should, they should be scared silly. Flex is poised to overthrow the desktop monopoly in a way that AJAX and Google Apps can't (wouldn't be surprised to see some Google apps on Flex in the future). To boot, you can convert these browser-based apps to offline desktop apps with about 30 minutes of work, and an Apollo redistributable.
Nothing has been this big of a threat to the desktop monopoly since Java. And Adobe has the gumption, power, and pocketbook to follow through. This is the source of the recent interest in Flash 9 on Linux. They don't care whether Linux users can view pretty animations, they care whether Linux users accept Flex, and being given access to Flex is the first step toward acceptance. They are also courting the open source community more and more (notice that the Flash Remoting spec was recently opened, which is actually a pretty big deal since it enables features that only they are able to deliver today), realizing I think that a lot of these Linux geeks are also IT decision makers.
Adobe is working on a version of Photoshop for the web, which from what I understand will be a combination of HTML/Ajax, Flex, and server-side processing. They are bringing levels of desktop functionality to the browser never before possible, and it has Microsoft bricking in their pants.
Over the coming months, expect to see Microsoft cramming Silverlight down your and anyone else's throat as rigorously as they are able to. It will be hidden in Windows Update files, it will be required to do various things on the Microsoft website, it will be bundled with software. They will make many applications in Silverlight which are better suited to other existing technologies (for example, the Microsoft website!!), because they want to make it as mandatory as they can without hitting anti-trust legislation.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Your argument of deliberate X11 incompatibilities is nice (though difficult to accept at face value), but ignores the fact that 90% of my rant centered around the craptactular development environment that is shipped as "Mono".
Mono isn't a development environment, it's a runtime and a compiler. The development environment for Mono is called MonoDevelop, and in my experience, people have a much easier time getting started with it than XCode, Eclipse, or NetBeans.
On a system where Java is installed, [blah blah blah Java is wonderful blah blah blah]
So, why do you think people are using Mono? I'll tell you: just about every Mono developer knows Java and found it wanting. That's why people are developing in Mono in the first place. Maybe Mono isn't going to "win", but there's no going back to Java for many people; personally, I'd rather program in plain C.
While MonoDevelop currently isn't comparable to MS Visual Studio, I very much hope that it will be in the future. Mostly because developing in VS is a breeeze compared to everything else I've tried, and I really don't want to run Windows anymore. Also, part of MS Windows popularity has to be because of the comparatively easy-to-learn programming tools that have always been coming out of Redmond, and thus generated droves of home-hacked apps with at least somewhat nice user interfaces. Maybe a something similar could happen to Linux if the set of available development tools were better.