Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers

ericatcw writes "At its Mix08 Web development conference, Microsoft said that its Silverlight rich Internet application platform is downloaded and installed an average of 1.5 million times every day; Microsoft has a goal of 200 million installs by midyear. But Silverlight is at the beginning of a long slog towards gaining traction. Computerworld did a quick analysis of job listings at nine popular career sites and found that an average of 41 times more ads mentioned Adobe's Flash than mentioned Silverlight. As expected only 6 months after Silverlight's introduction, the number of programming books carried on Amazon.com was also heavily skewed in favor of Flash."

Comments

Why switch?

[TheSpoom]

Why should I, as a Flash developer / animator, move to a less stable, less well-known, less-compatible platform from one that is stable, has many developers, is cross-platform (mostly), and can do, if I'm reading right, everything the other claims to be able to do already?

Not that I am a Flash developer (at least, I haven't been for a while), it's just a hypothetical.

I think the answer for Microsoft is "because we need you to help us create another hook to keep people on Windows." Linux beta, eh? I'll believe it when I see it.

Re:Why switch?

[kurokaze]

I think more to the point is that Silverlight has been out less than a year, and yet Computerworld somehow thinks that there's going to be lots of books and job demand for it?? Oh brother.

What's a job posting going to say? Wanted: Experienced Silverlight Developer, must have 3+ yrs experience even though the product itself has been out less than a year.

Re:Why switch?

[TheSpoom]

Wanted: Experienced Silverlight Developer, must have 3+ yrs experience even though the product itself has been out less than a year.

Common enough on job boards anyway. ;^)

Re:Why switch?

[Piata]

Because the internet needs more redundant technology!

Flash is already seeing it's market steadily eroded by the trend toward html/css/javascript development that is much easier and more flexible to build and maintain. Pretty much the only thing Flash is good for these days is games and serving up audio and video.

Re:Why switch?

[SanityInAnarchy]

can do, if I'm reading right, everything the other claims to be able to do already?

Well, if I'm reading right, Silverlight lets you program it in pretty much any .NET language. That's something Flash doesn't do -- yet -- although they are coordinating with Mozilla to develop a common runtime which would make JavaScript fast, and also support other languages.

I would much rather see both of them go away, though. SVG and JavaScript, please.

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

Well, last I heard Flash can't do HD streaming. From my point of view, why would I use Silverlight 2.0? Because I'll be able to build a SL application exactly as I already build Windows or Asp.Net applications. Same tools, same languages and most of the same library (SL will use a subset).

Also, SL is supposed to be cross platform. We'll have to see, but SL 2 is supposed to be a huge step forward.

Personally, from what I know of Flash is that it's a scripted OO hacked together language. No thanks. That's why i'm not even bothering with SL 1, because it requires using Javascript, also a bad hack of a scripted OO language. Bleck.

Re:Why switch?

[slugabed]

That's right! Wow people still use Flash? Streaming games and videos on the internet? Who would ever want that!?! Yes, also I prefer my videos and games the old fashion way: slowly downloaded to my PC in very platform specific formats. Those young kids and their crazy Youtube, when will they ever learn that it's all just a fad! ;)

Re:Why switch?

[Joe U]

Why should I, as a Flash developer / animator, move to a less stable, less well-known, less-compatible platform from one that is stable, has many developers, is cross-platform (mostly), and can do, if I'm reading right, everything the other claims to be able to do already? Wait, I thought flash already worked with acrobat!?

Seriously, maybe because it's an Adobe product now, that alone should make you run screaming into the night. Acrobat reader is an excellent example of a long time Adobe project. Now, as the Macromedia developers move to greener pastures, they will be replaced with Adobe's team and quality standards.

(Microsoft should have just bought FutureWave when they had the chance.)

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

Heh. When the number of Linux distributions is critisized, it's good to have competition, because no one distro can fill everyone's needs. Yet when MS puts out a competitor to Java, and now Flash, it's "why do we need more than one?"

Competition is good.

Re:Why switch?

[Xiaran]

This is going to show my age, but I recall the same argument for MS Visual C/C++ versus Borland. I was one of the Borland people... if youll excuse me I have to get back to Visual Studio 2008 :)

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read the post you are replying to?

Re:Why switch?

[PeterP]

The Linux Beta can be downloaded here:

http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

Microsoft has not released the media codecs yet (In the pipeline as we speak), but otherwise you should be able to look at any Silverlight site you want.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will agree as soon as someone finds a way to build both a Flash and Silverlight application from the same source code, makes almost all websites provide both and the users can choose with a browser setting which one to use. Then the issue is at least close to comparable to Linux distros...

Re:Why switch?

[sm62704]

This Dilbert cartoon and this Dilbert cartoon are the perfect illustrations for your post. Look at those links in order, one follows the other.

"Candidate must have an IQ of 300, two centuries of Unix experience and a track record of wining Nobel prizes."

Re:Why switch?

[dougisfunny]

There is a difference though. The various versions of linux are all going to be roughly compatible. As in you can compile code for anything as long as you have the source and build utilities.

This would be more similar to introducing a new OS, completely incompatible to linux than introducing a new distro.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

More to the point, why should anyone who has a website develop content for Silverlight instead of Flash? Flash is already well deployed, and Adobe has an interest in maintaining Flash players for multiple operating systems. Silverlight is not only barely deployed, but would seem that Microsoft would have an interest in developing players that run only on Windows, and perhaps only on Internet Explorer, once Silverlight becomes popular.

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

I'm afraid you are comparing apples and oranges here.

Various linux distributions are pretty much application compatible. It's mainly just the packaging and the configuration tools that make two distributions look differently and maybe one or two specific drivers.

Silverlight vs. Flash or .NET vs. Java is something completely different. Those are competing technologies, incompatible with each other, and also not available on the same platforms (Flash & Java pretty much everywhere, .NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit).

Don't kid yourself - the reasoning behind Silverlight has nothing to do with Microsoft striving to make the Web a better place. It's all about gaining more control of a medium they never had much to say with (apart from the dominance of the IE, which is now being chewed at by Mozilla/Firefox)

Re:Why switch?

[SharpFang]

Because Flash can't do 3D.

At least, can't do sufficiently advanced 3D with sufficient performance.

Is it worth it? I don't know, really. But it's easy to miss the point when a technology turns from 'mature' to 'obsolete' and from 'experimental' to 'cutting edge'.

COBOL programmers kept smirking at JAVA developers too.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

A different compiler for the same language is one thing. Silverlight is like a completely new language. This is like Microsoft introducing C# when we already have C++ and Java.

Re:Why switch?

[phase_9]

PaperVision 3D and Away3D spring to mind.

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

Various linux distributions are pretty much application compatible. It's mainly just the packaging and the configuration tools that make two distributions look differently and maybe one or two specific drivers.

You're glossing over a pretty big detail here. Pretty much compatable != compatiable. How many projects work on RH, only to be discovered that, opps, it doesn't install right or compile properly on Deb? How about a distro that only installs KDE by default, but not Gnome? Are those helpful to the end user? Ya, you can make it work... just like you can port Java to .Net, and visa versa.

Silverlight vs. Flash or .NET vs. Java is something completely different. Those are competing technologies, incompatible with each other, and also not available on the same platforms (Flash & Java pretty much everywhere, .NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit).

I would say the incompatibilities are the benefit of competition. If both sides are totally compatable, what's the point of choosing one over the other? Ya, you can switch easier, but neither has any really good features that are compelling when choosing one. So Sun and MS think of features to add that the other side doesn't have, thus improving their product. Java (supposedly) works on any major platform; .Net has features like explicit interface definitions, delegates, eventing built in, etc. Java has checked exceptions, cross platform capability, dynamic class loading, etc. Eventually (I hope) each side will incorproate some of their competitors features, thus pushing Sun and MS to think up new features.

Don't kid yourself - the reasoning behind Silverlight has nothing to do with Microsoft striving to make the Web a better place. It's all about gaining more control of a medium they never had much to say with (apart from the dominance of the IE, which is now being chewed at by Mozilla/Firefox)

Well, AMD isn't stiving to make the CPU world a better place, they are trying to beat Intel. AMD would love to get all of Intel's marketshare, I'm sure, and Intel feels the same way. What exactly is wrong with that?

Re:Why switch?

[TheNetAvenger]

Why?

1) Performance features - for example an application in silverlight that pulls HD image formats in small chunks, allowing you to zoom into 100mb images instantly. (This is just one example)

2) HD Video - that is VC1 compliant as well. Also the ability to support live and multi-cast streaming of HD Video (great for lowbandwidth servers hosting live events, and still providing an HD video of the event.)

3) Easier - By the nature of how Silverlight is designed it is easier to design for and work with. You are basically just managaging Vista type XAML from WPF. No secret formats, etc.

4) Agnostic programming - Silverlight you not only get a rich vector/bitmap based environment, but it is completely language agnostic and you can use anything from C# to VB to Python.

5) Web Page interoperability - Silverlight is designed to within the context of the Web Page. For example you could hvae 10 Silverlight buttons on the page, and they are all separate from each otehr, but tied together via common code in JScript. This would be 'heavy' to do in Flash, and it wouldn't be easy to split the buttons apart, so you would ahve to design all the buttons in one Flash control, consuming the page with Plash, instead of just working with the page. Think of Silverlight as a cool new picture type that is also programmable, handles events, and animation when used like this.

6) Features - Silverlight 1.0 is on par with Flash in terms of features, and has several Flash just cannot do. Silverlight 2.0 brings in a whole set of .NET controls, etc that surpass anything Flash can do.

7) Back to Performance - Flash is a dog on non-Windows OSes. So far Silverlight is showing to be semi-equally fast on Windows and OS X, with low memory consumption on both. The same Flash applet running on Windows could use a couple of MB and running on OS X jump to 30MB and peg the CPU. Flash is NOT as crossplatform as developers would like to lead people to believe because of performance issues like this.

8) Security - Silverlight is more secure than Flash (see recent Flash updates), the reason Silverlight is more secure because it runs inside an additional sandbox and is also managed code, it is .NET based.

9) Structure XAML - The nature of how Silverlight is designed is based on Vista's WPF/XAML system. Vista uses XAML from everything from on screen display to printing (XAML is like OS X's Display PDF but with a chunk more features.) This means that Windows developers can easily move from Windows programming .NET 3.0 to Silverlight or the other way around. The XAML construct is also very intelligently designed, as it is more than just a graphical description format, as it has inherent events and animations, where Display PDF (or SVG as some like to compare) is inherently a static graphical format with no concept of advanced layers, animations, hit testing, events, etc. (As printing technology moves to eInk that is dynamic, XAML is ready to print to and produce output on these devices already, even though this is a years off concept.)

Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps, and Microsoft is also fully producing the OS X version as well as supporting as many browsers as they can at the same time, including Firefox, etc. So if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only, instead it has potential to be far more crossplatform than Flash. (Microsoft also just announced Silverlight for non Windows Mobile phones to be an alternative to Flash Lite.)

Re:Why switch?

[KeyserDK]

I think you mixing formats into the discussion. Flash players still suck. Yes the old embedded media players (realplayer/windows media player/(totem)) sucked even more (since they forced a certain UI). But today they are better at handling streaming than any flash player i've met. They probably rely on the same code from flash itself ;). Flash based video get out of sync, has horrible time-scroll(bar?) handling and sucks even more on anything that isn't windows. Flash is not the future. It's the same as if everybody had to use the same browser.

HTML5 video element is probably our best hope. But i hope firefox developers don't get trapped in "we can handle streaming ourself" and avoid using platform libraries (Gstreamer,Directshow,quicktime). Or maybe gstreamer as an option on all platforms since it's cross platform and can already handle these issues very well ;).

Somebody else mentioned it. html/css/js/js-canvas/svg/html-video-element should be the way forward. Lets hope that combo wins ;).

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

Well, AMD isn't stiving to make the CPU world a better place, they are trying to beat Intel. AMD would love to get all of Intel's marketshare, I'm sure, and Intel feels the same way. What exactly is wrong with that?

Nothing. But because Microsoft is a monopolist that has in the past abused their monopoly power, I would be wary of new technologies the produce. What if they stop making the player for operating systems other than Windows when Silverlight becomes popular. What if they stop making a player for browsers other than IE? Remember, embrace, extent, extinguish.

Re:Why switch?

[misleb]

Offtopic, but that got me wondering. Who is more evil. Catbert or Dogbert? I'm going to say Dogbert because he seeks to rule world. Catbert seems far less ambitious in his evil.

Re:Why switch?

[blincoln]

Those are competing technologies, incompatible with each other, and also not available on the same platforms (Flash & Java pretty much everywhere, .NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit).

In all fairness, that is true of nearly all competing products. For example, the PS3 is incompatible with Wii software and hardware. Honda engine components are generally incompatible with Ford engines. A flathead screwdriver is incompatible with Robertson screws. 4000-series CMOS ICs use logic levels that are different than 7400-series TTL ICs. Etc.

Even within the Linux world there are subsets of incompatibilities - GTK+ versus Qt, and so on.

Obviously Microsoft's intent with Silverlight is to try and crush Flash like they crushed Netscape (and like they failed to crush PDF with XPS). But I do agree with the grandparent that competition is good - otherwise the dominant company or companies in a particular market end up becoming complacent, stagnant, and arrogant (e.g. Cisco, Microsoft themselves in many cases, Bell Telephone, etc.).

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

So if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only, instead it has potential to be far more crossplatform than Flash.

If I were trying to lock people in, I would develop the technology for all popular platforms at first. After it became very popular, I would slowly drop support for platforms other than my own, first Linux, then Mac, then non-IE browsers.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you want to deliver advanced 3D over the web, and not just in a client-sed application?

Re:Why switch?

[oliderid]

I'm involved in e-marketing campaigns and public web sites and rarely for intranet project.

first: I'm not a mac fanboy nevertheless I can't see myself selling a web site totally incompatible with Mac....What can justify that you may lose +/- 5% of your audience (and potential sells) because of this technical choice? On the marketing/communication side there is no justification.

Another example: I work for communication agencies as a technical subcontractor...They almost all have Macs instead of windows. So practically...If I send them a link to check the web site under construction....How could they approve it?

If Microsoft shows support for the mono port...And If downloading silverlight is as simple as flash (on Mac and why not on Linux); if the support looks like a long term strategy: Then silverlight looks quite promising (technically speaking) in two years or so. If they don't, I won't "learn/sell" it. It will be useless for my job.

I also think that a succesful silverlight may help Adobe/Macromedia to get more decent prices for their products (some prices are simply insane), I'm more than open to help a true free market.

Re:Why switch?

[Mongoose Disciple]

What if they stop making the player for operating systems other than Windows when Silverlight becomes popular. What if they stop making a player for browsers other than IE?

The market fixes this problem itself very nicely, if not immediately.

If Microsoft does those things, there's suddenly a golden opportunity for another competitor or competitors to get going -- they'll be able to gain mindshare and traction much more easily from nothing, because they'll be providing something Microsoft isn't.

Witness the way that Microsoft won the browser war and stopped work on IE, only to have Firefox emerge and provide strong competition. I know this is slashdot and it's free software uber alles and all, but realistically, if Microsoft had kept working on IE as hard as they were when they were trying to beat Netscape, there either never would have been a Firefox, or basically no one outside of slashdot-like communities would care. They didn't do that, and so a lot of people that in the continually-improving-super-IE alternate world wouldn't even be looking for a Firefox or who wouldn't want to work on improving a Firefox or who wouldn't want to make plug-ins for Firefox were primed for it.

So in short, yes, Microsoft could do what you're saying if Silverlight crushed Flash, but it wouldn't last for long.

Re:Why switch?

[hummassa]

I will agree as soon as someone finds a way to build both a Flash and Silverlight application from the same source code, makes almost all websites provide both and the users can choose with a browser setting which one to use. Then the issue is at least close to comparable to Linux distros... Plug OpenLaszlo...

Re:Why switch?

[JCSoRocks]

*sigh* Silverlight IS cross platform. It works in Opera, FireFox, IE on PC and Mac (don't know about Linux). As to the "why" of switching - the next version of Silverlight is going to contain the .NET CLR which will make running client-side code in it quite fast. You'll also have access to a good portion of the .NET framework. So, if you're already a .NET coder and you don't want to learn ActionScript, I'd say it's a decent alternative.

This is a ridiculous article anyway - what're they expecting, dot-com-boom ads? Where'd you see "Must have 5 years HTML 4.0 experience" 1 year after it came out? And books? Of course their are more Flash books. Don't be ridiculous. Flash has been around for years and Silverlight just came out. That's like being shocked that there are more games available for PS2 than PS3 - duh.

Re:Why switch?

[slugabed]

Yes I was pointing out the absurdity of saying "Flash use is going down" then saying "It is good for video and games" in a tongue-and-cheek manner. Both of those uses have skyrocketed Flash use. Chill out Mr. Anonymous.

Re:Why switch?

[nine-times]

When the number of Linux distributions is critisized, it's good to have competition

The reason it's good to have many Linux distributions (IMO) is not really for the competition. It's for the customization. Most Linux distros can do the same things and interoperate with each other, but some are more optimized for some situations and some for others.

No in that vein, if Microsoft was releasing their own Flash development suite that serviced a different group of developers, I think fewer people would be complaining, and more people would see value in it.

Re:Why switch?

[Mongoose Disciple]

This is like Microsoft introducing C# when we already have C++ and Java.

And yet, despite having years of experience with all three of those languages, I prefer to work in C# when possible. I also believe that competition from C# is pushing Java to become better now in a way that it wasn't when it had no real competition for the kinds of applications for which Java is a good choice.

Probably in 5 years Java will have improved to the point that it's my choice for most business applications again. In a world without C# it'd still be the choice by default, but it'd be a lot crappier of a language to work with.

Re:Why switch?

[ImTheDarkcyde]

"7) Back to Performance - Flash is a dog on non-Windows OSes. "

It's a dog on windows os's too, xp or vista. Why is it my computer should have trouble with its core duo, when all it is doing is playing some derivitive tower defense game with a lot of particles. Flash makes the SNES look like a powerhouse.

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

Well, you can argue Flash has a monopoly now for more interactive sites. What if they stop making a plugin for FF?

As far as Silverlight goes, the Moonlight project is GPLed so someone could continue to make the plugin for Linux, and they can reverse engineer further changes to Silverlight.

Keep in mind, they aren't embracing anything here, they're making a new competiting standard. For your EEE thing to work, shouldn't they be building something compatable with Flash, then when their implementation becomes the most common on, extend it?

Re:Why switch?

[Tablizer]

Who is more evil. Catbert or Dogbert?

Which uses emacs and which uses vi?

Re:Why switch?

[TheNetAvenger]

If I were trying to lock people in, I would develop the technology for all popular platforms at first. After it became very popular, I would slowly drop support for platforms other than my own, first Linux, then Mac, then non-IE browsers

Ok, first, lol...

Actually the main reason Microsoft is assisting with the Linux Mono development of .NET and Silverlight for Linux is to help keep it 100% OSS on Linux.

If MIcrosoft developed it themselves, it would be a conflict of licensing issues. However, by MS just 'helping' with the project this ENSURES that it will remain 100% OSS on Linux and can be distributed through any OSS License as the authors see fit.

If they wanted to give and take away as you suggest, then the Linux player for Silverlight would be internally produced, and released as closed source so they could discontinue the project down the road, and instead they are working to keep it 100% FOSS so that it can't be killed by any one party.

Re:Why switch?

[MadnessASAP]

Catbert uses emacs becuase as the director of HR he enjoys taking a long time to do things in a overcomplicated hugely roundabout way.

Re:Why switch?

[NormalVisual]

But you totally missed the GP's point. Things that *used* to be done in Flash like interactive web UIs and such are increasingly being done more cleanly and using fewer system resources with non-proprietary tools (i.e. AJAX). No one is arguing against Flash still being the primary means of delivering web games and streaming media, and that wasn't the point he was making.

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Actually, I said "pretty much compatible" where I could have said "compatible". Personally, I NEVER had a program compile and run under one distribution and not compile and run under another. Give me a few prominent examples, and I'll give you half a point, if you wish. :-) And Gnome vs. KDE ist actually just bells & wistles. Nothing really important. I have UBUNTU here, which is actually GNOME only. Nevertheless, there are KDE packages for that as well, which were a snap to install. Way easier than to port .NET to java - even if you actually had the source.

Regarding AMD vs. INTEL, you seem to be forgetting that those are instruction set compatible. When I buy the one or the other, I guide my decision based solely on the current capabilities and price of the two, nothing else. Pretty compatible, if you ask me, and still a competition.

I'm all for competition, as long as it's carried out at least in a half-way fair way and if it can actually bring the benefit to MYSELF, the CUSTOMER. So far, I have experienced ZERO benefit from MS penetrating any place. Actually, during the browser wars, I experienced a real set-back, as the lemmings among web designers (and their bosses, to be fair) decided IE is the only browser worth supporting. I don't want to see that happen again.

Re:Why switch?

[Zadaz]

Web based 3D has been tried and failed many times. I should know, I have been asked to participate in at least three major "3D web" implementations, all of which where hyped initially (Most as "Web 2.0") but have all gone down the digital drainpipe.

I suppose that it could just be my fault, but seriously: Leave 3d to the game developers. They have the resources, experience and tools, and even they can't get it right most of the time.

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

And in the mean-time, waiting for the market to fix itself, I suddenly wouldn't be able to access my bank account or to make a seat reservation in the cinema because my browser/OS is not supported by Microsoft. Again.

Besides, the original question was not whether MS crushing Flash would our would not alter the place forever. The original question, as I remember it, was why competing linux distros are fine, but this kind of competing technologies is not.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

Well, you can argue Flash has a monopoly now for more interactive sites. What if they stop making a plugin for FF?

Then web developers will stop using Flash, as it doesn't work for more than 20% their visitors. Then Adobe loses their monopoly and their power.

On the other hand, if Microsoft stops developing Silverlight for Firefox, will people stop buying Windows? I just don't understand how people still don't get it. Microsoft has a monopoly in the desktop OS market. They abuse that monopoly in other areas, for example, attempting to lock people in to office suites (Office), browsers (IE), languages (C#), servers (Windows server and Exchange).

Re:Why switch?

[slugabed]

I think video sync issues are universal. Right now I am watching the iPhone sdk announcement. This is in quicktime format directly from Apple, the creators of quicktime. It is descynced. I have far fewer descync problems on Youtube, and if I do it is a per-video issue. That means it is more likely a transcoding problem (or just broken original videos). I don't think that having it built into the browser is going make it go away. Speaking as a developer using "Ajax" every day, I pray that the future isn't MORE javascript. Silverlight allows developers to code in managed C#.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

I never said Microsoft should have come out with Silverlight, or that competition is bad. That would be silly. I was just making the point that Silverlight is incompatible with Flash at the source code level. It's not like a different compiler or a different player for the same language.

Re:Why switch?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Catbert's evil is more personal. Dogbert hates people; Catbert hates *you*. Dogbert doesn't hate you specifically; you're just unimportant, there strictly for his own amusement or usage. Catbert, on the other hand, hates you. He might never have met you, but when he does, he'll hate you. And he'll want to hurt you. Specifically, you.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plug OpenLaszlo...

I'm pretty sure the antlions already plugged him and opened him... you go on without me, there's something I gotta do.

Re:Why switch?

[MickDownUnder]

I've been developing .NET since day 1 (as in reading the white papers to using the first betas). I can tell with absolute certainty that Silverlight is not just an after thought add on to .NET for Microsoft. The basic constructs and security architecture leveraged by Silverlight have been in place since the first beta of the .NET Framework back in 2001, its a technology they have always planned to introduce, before Silverlight they released many browser deployable .NET applications, so the delivery and security mechanisms are well tested and already main stream.

I think you also need to think about the huge API available to Silverlight developers. Since the release of the framework Microsoft has been hooking .NET into every part of it's server and desktop platform. .NET is everywhere throughout every piece of Microsoft Technology, from ERP systems, accounting to gaming consoles.

Did you know .NET is on the XBox 360? Can you create flash content for a the XBox 360? Or any other gaming console for that matter?

Microsoft ships the .NET framework on mobile devices as part of the ROM. Does flash ship on ROM chips?

So in summary the demand is already there as huge amount of development goes on in .NET today and all of these companies will be able to leverage their existing code base through Silverlight far easier than what they could through Flash.

But that doesn't mean there's any reason to switch, I think Flash will be around for many years to come and will probably continue to dominate the more traditional Flash areas such as marketing. I think Silverlight will get some penetration in this area, however, I believe it'll more commonly be used for implementing clients for more sophisticated business systems that are looking for an easier way to deliver rich client browser based apps than developing them in HTML/AJAX.

So basically if you're sick of the sort of light on development you typically have with your average Flash marketing project and are looking to get into more serious project development, you might consider Silverlight as a good stepping stone into that arena.

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

There are incompatibilities in areas where they are just not avoidable, that's true. Having Honda build different motors than Ford is beneficial for the customer, because the customer can chose between different makers to find the car that best suits his needs.

On the other hand, there are also incompatibilities in the basis infrastructure, which are NOT good. To remain with your car analogy, imagine a road demanding you to drive a Honda. Bought a Ford? Well, tough luck, no go. And there's no other way to reach your skiing resort, sorry for the inconvenience.

Before you say it's far-fetched: I *still* can't make a seat reservation for most movie theaters where I live without resorting to ie4linux.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

And what happens when they come out with an incompatible new version of Silverlight and don't release the documentation and don't help with the development of the FOSS version? From what I've seen, developers are still leery of Microsoft's recent "Interoperability Initiative".

Re:Why switch?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Besides, the original question was not whether MS crushing Flash would our would not alter the place forever.

My point isn't that it wouldn't, but that it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing even in the worst of all cases.

Re:Why switch?

[Julian352]

So on Ubuntu you had to install both Gnome and KDE libraries to get the code running. In your example that would be like installing JVM and .Net runtime on the same machine. At that point, both Java and .Net become "compatible".

And you must have never tried to do low-level programming for a specific chip. Although the general instruction sets are compatible, each one has special extensions. There's 3DNow, MMX, different special instructions to find chipsets, etc. So the CPUs are not completely compatible, but the OS and compiler just target the middle ground usually. When you work on trying to get most performance out of a chip (ie. games), you often need to create different assembly for Intel and AMD.

As far as benefits - you only have to look back at Netscape's behavior when it was the only fish on the internet. There was little innovation between N2 and N3. It was the competition with IE that fueled the rapid improvement in both. It also caused each browser to attempt to extend the standards to make themselves look like a better platform. Most people have forgotten netscape extensions, because they died out with Netscape, but they were there.

In general, lack of competition leads to stagnation, because there's little reason to innovate. Competition, on the other hand, requires you to differentiate from your competition. That may result in attempts to create extensions to a common base standard.

Re:Why switch?

[Locutus]

and the reasons why Microsoft came out with MS Silverlight, MS .Net, MS Direct3D, etc was all because they wanted to provide customers with a better products and competition? Hey folks, we got a newbie here! FYI, pretty much all of what Microsoft comes out with is about making something which is NOT cross platform and only runs on Microsoft Windows. If that doesn't work, the next best thing is something which runs half-assed on the other platforms.

And off the top of my head, the earliest signs of this was when they went after cross-platform C++ application frameworks in the early 90s. OpenGL is cross platform, Java is cross platform, Netscape was cross platform, Flash/Flex is cross platform, and the list goes on an on. Too bad it really isn't about competition cause that would be a good thing for sure. And remember, there is only One Microsoft Way and it is a curving road to a one way street you can't escape from. IMO.

LoB

Re:Why switch?

[jez9999]

Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps

Doesn't Mono exist so that, once MS have locked enough people into .net, they can pull ther support out from underneath it and make all *nix/.net solutions come crashing down?

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

There is no .NET for Linux, apart from Mono, which is not a viable alternative. There are also no plans from MS to provide .NET on Linux, Solaris or BSD. Therefore no chance for me to just "install the libraries".

Low-level programming for specific chips is what I do for living. And before I started to work where I work now, I was programming a compiler. However, low-level differences in single chips have nothing to do with closing parts of the internet for people not willing to use Windows, does it?

Re:Why switch?

[Julian352]

You are missing the point that just creating a competitor in another area is NOT abusing monopoly. Abusing monopoly is when you force a new technology by bundling it with your monopoly.
I'm not sure how you can claim that having a client-OS monopoly makes MS somehow able to dictate Windows Server/Exchange. Windows client OS has no problems talking Linux Samba, Linux DNS/DHCP servers, running thunderbird against google's IMAP server. All of those areas have competition with MS products.

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Well, for you, maybe making Internet Windows-Only wouldn't be a bad thing. For my part, I would be pissed.

Re:Why switch?

[MickDownUnder]

Wow can't remember the last time so many pro Microsoft technology posts were made on Slashdot, and were actually positively modded !!! I think that alone is proof that Microsoft must have got something right with Silverlight (a rare thing, but it does happen occasionally), either that or something really scary has happened to Slashdot.

Aaaah, but look up the top... we can all sleep easy, hell hasn't frozen over, despite being shown the error of his ways 20 times over in numerous replies to his post our friend at the top with his ignorant rant is still rated +5 Insightful.... It's still the slashdot we all love.

Re:Why switch?

[benwaggoner]

Silverlight has always been cross platform Mac/Win. Every beta and full release has been Mac/Win day and date.

Linux is coming via Moonlight.

Re:Why switch?

[mccrew]

"Flash players still suck"

+1 Adhering to the Slashdot groupthink regarding Flash
Like it or not, Flash is the established de-facto standard for internet video. Works well for me on Linux, by the way.

"HTML5 video element is probably our best hope."

So you are saying that something which doesn't even exist yet except as a pie-in-the-sky proposal is the "best hope?" That doesn't pass the snicker test. Sorry, this proposal fails because it requires everyone, everywhere, to change all at once.

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

You have interesting answers, I notice for one you explain what developers would do, and the other you try to explain what you think users would do. What the users do however is irrelevent.

If MS stopped making SL for FF, wouldn't DEVELOPERS also abandon SL, since it doesn't work for more than 20% of their visitors?

What OS the user is on is irrelevent, what matters is developer support.

Re:Why switch?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Well, for you, maybe making Internet Windows-Only wouldn't be a bad thing. For my part, I would be pissed.

We differ, then, in that I don't see this as a realistic possibility.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what happens when they come out with an incompatible new version of Silverlight and don't release the documentation and don't help with the development of the FOSS version?

They reverse engineer it?

The Moonlight devs were reverse engineering Silverlight up to and beyond their first demo at last year's MIX conference. The Gnash and SwfDec guys are reverse engineering Flash... (they can't read the specs because the Flash specs forbid anyone from using them to implement a Flash alternative).

You, sir, fail at convincing anyone with your FUD.

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

You are correct that if Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight for Firefox, developers would abandon Silverlight. However, developers wouldn't be able to switch overnight, and in the meantime Microsoft would be making money by selling Windows to users can use IE and Silverlight to view the sites that still use Silverlight. Similarly, many sites (especially intranet sites) work only in IE. Microsoft is still making money by selling Windows to those pour souls who still have to access IE-only sites, even if no developers are developing new sites to work only in IE.

Re:Why switch?

[jellomizer]

It is less about keeping people off alternative OS, It is about trying to keep Developers Useing Microsft Products.
If you use primary Microsoft tools to program you will tend to change your way of thinking systems are designed like Microsoft has them. If you are a Unix/Linux Developer you tend to think of problems differently.

With people writting code in Open Standards or in Closed Standards but widly available on differnt platforms it makes sure they are not writting code with Microsoft tools. And worse all the Apps a universally compatible without Microsofts say on who should be supported and not.

Re:Why switch?

[segedunum]

Well, if I'm reading right, Silverlight lets you program it in pretty much any .NET language.

The notion of a common runtime that supports different languages is bogus. They are all .Net languages, and the main two are C# and VB.Net. Even VB.Net developers question why they use VB and why they don't just learn C#. Porting Perl, Python or any other language as a .Net language is pointless as they cease to have the differences that actually made them relevant. They are .Net languages that differ only via syntax. Another approach is to implement a language on top of .Net, like IronPython, but that's not the same thing.

Re:Why switch?

[ianare]

Flash & Java pretty much everywhere, .NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit Flash everywhere, huh? Ask a BSD user, I'm sure the anwser will be interesting! The truth of the matter is Flash is propriatary and is only available where adobe feels like it.

I'm no MS lover, far from it, but silverlight is more open than flash, and there is a linux version for it, less than a year after it was released. How long will it take for adobe to allow independent implementations of flash?

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

Bundling is certainly one way to abuse a monopoly. Another way is limiting interoperability. It's especially powerful when the two are used together. The ability to share calendars in Outlook requires Exchange on the server side. By bundling Outlook into Office and trial versions of Office with Windows, users get exposed to Outlook. Then they find out they need to run Exchange to share their calendars, which requires a Windows Server. By default, Exchange uses MAPI to communicate with email clients, so all users who connect to the Exchange server find they need to use Outlook, which requires Windows on the desktop.

Similarly, Microsoft bundling IE with Windows caused the usage of IE to go so high that some developers wrote sites that work only in IE. To access those sites, users now find they need to run Windows to run IE so they can access those sites.

You're woefully naive if you think Microsoft is in the business of creating products that compete on a level playing field with products from other companies. They are well skilled at using bundling and limiting interoperability to lock users into other Microsoft products. I note that Silverlight is not compatible with other multimedia players and will be bundled with Windows. Hmmm...

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

You're presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. That's just absurd.

Businesses are unlikely to switch no matter what; we still have some Win98 machines. They are working, why replace them? The fact that IE only intranet sites still exist seem to prove this as well, but your assertation that such sites are STILL making MS money is absurd as well. If the business wanted to switch (an expensive proposition), switching the site becomes an option as well.

Re:Why switch?

[Snover]

You've written a nice list, but I just don't see anything on it that's really, well, valid.

1) As far as performance in general is concerned, ActionScript 3 is extremely fast. Though I definitely wouldn't say the same about ActionScript 2, it's not fair to compare an old version of Flash against a recent version of Silverlight.

2) Flash Player 9 Update 3, which was released in December of last year, supports H.264 and HE-AAC.

3) Flex uses a similar XML-based format called MXML for describing applications. Of course, "easier" is relative -- I'm sure if you've been working as a Windows programmer forever it's easier, but maybe not for someone that isn't used to how Microsoft does things. Also, what's a "secret format" that Flash has? The entire SWF specification is open (well, except to use to build a Flash player, which is pretty stupid), and ActionScript is based on the ECMAScript specification.

4a) Flash has a "rich vector/bitmap based environment" (whatever that means -- it can draw on bitmaps and do transformations and effects, and it can draw vector shapes), and has since forever. How is this any worse than what Silverlight has (speaking as someone that has not used Silverlight)?

4b) No, you can't use any language you want, but I don't necessarily see this as a huge advantage, since it adds an amount of additional complexity that could easily be problematic. You can't ask for "a Silverlight" programmer, now you have to ask for "a Silverlight programmer that also knows Python/C#/whatever" -- this will really narrow your potential hiring pool.

5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".

6) Have you even looked at what Flash provides lately? ActionScript 3 is an extremely capable language. Without giving any specific examples of features that don't/can't exist in Flash, but that do in Silverlight, it's hard to respond to this. Provide an example and we'll talk.

7) I've not personally experienced performance issues with Flash applications on OS X, but YMMV. Since I don't use Windows, it's hard for me to say if something runs more slowly than it would on a Windows box, but I never ran anything that seemed slow or that pegged my CPU. I've heard that it's slower on PPC architectures, but Windows never ran on PPC to begin with, so who knows how Flash would run on Windows if there were a PPC version. I've never ever run a Silverlight application, so I can't confirm your allegation that it works better, either.

8) Can you provide a specific example of how the security model of Silverlight is more any more secure? Flash code runs in a sandboxed virtual machine ("managed code" for non-Microsofties out there) too, and has since the beginning of time. Saying "see recent Flash updates" just says to me that Adobe has addressed potential security issues that may have existed, and hardly damns the platform as being somehow tragically insecure. (And, in fact, the recent security updates to Flash are nothing more than hardening against some potential XSS attacks.)

9) Sounds like MXML, again. Don't repeat yourself, you already mentioned XAML once. ;) Talking about "Display PDF" as if it were some markup language makes no sense, too, since Display is an application for viewing PDF files -- nothing more.

Now, I'm certainly no Flash apologist -- up until about a month ago I refused to touch it, and ActionScript 2 is unbelievably shitty -- and certainly if we were comparing against Flash 8 or earlier running ActionScript 2 you'd have some valid points, but nothing on your list actually seems to me to be a valid reason why Silverlight is better than Flash here and now. And again, despite your protests that Microsoft is developing an OS X version of Silverlight, and is working with Mono to develop a Linux version, they have not been above releasing software for platforms and then dropping it without cause in the past, and I haven't seen them changing their colours.

Regards,

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

No, I'm not presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. I'm conjecturing that if Microsoft wants to abuse their monopoly, they might make SL work in Windows only, and then people would buy Windows specifically to view some SL only sites.

I agree that switching a site from IE-only to working in other browsers is expensive. Any time you need to switch from one technology to another, it's very expensive and risky. That's why businesses continue buying Windows machines instead of switching to Linux. Switching to Linux would mean having to run a browser other than IE, an office suite other than Office, an email client other than Outlook, etc. Making each of these switches has interoperability problems, because of the proprietary extensions in IE, and the proprietary nature of Office and the Outlook/Exchange protocol. It's called vendor lock-in, and it makes MS tons of bucks. If MS products used and adhered closely to standards, they wouldn't have the lock-in that they do now. Silverlight is yet another proprietary technology that can be used to induce yet more lock-in.

Re:Why switch?

[ConceptJunkie]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who wonders why a dual core 1.8GHz processor should be pegged running games like we used to play on a 386.

Re:Why switch?

[Trails]

I couldn't disagree more.

Flash's market share is definitely changing, I would even go so far as to categorize it as evolving (intelligently designed?!?!).

Less and less do I see the annoying flash "site intros", and full flash sites have plateaued, I'd hypothesize they are weighed down by the increased maintenance costs, but flash has found increased usage with youtube and the like, as well as newgrounds and the like.

I realise you mentioned these two points, but here's what you missed: Flex/ActionScript 3 is getting serious attention from the Enterprise Application space.

For those who don't know, Flash's scripting language underwent essentially a rebuild recently; it's now fully ECMAScript compliant and to devs who speak C++ or Java, it's not that hard to learn. (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript and read about the current version). The thing about doing stuff with CSS, javascript, HTML, AJAX, etc... is that enterprise devs, who've learned mostly Java or C++, and not had to deal with one piece of code doing wildly different things on one platform vs. another, etc... have a hard time adapting to the non-standards compliant and divergent browsers. Also, many enterprise app owners would like to do things that are difficult/impractical in the AJAX models, e.g. charting (don't tell me SVG, good luck getting that to run on IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari).

Nothing has hit the public mainstream yet (I'd bet good money google's cooking up some sexeh stuff), but the new flash platform has definitely garnered attention in spaces where it used to be perceived as a technology for making ad banners. I believe their market share is increasing, not decreasing. Flex is, in the parlance of our times, hot shit.

Re:Why switch?

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

Nope, it isn't, because Mono is developed by Novell and they have guaranteed that they will get all the relevant licenses from Microsoft (if they haven't already with their infamous covenant) to ensure that Mono works well with published ECMA specifications.

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

No, I'm not presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. I'm conjecturing that if Microsoft wants to abuse their monopoly, they might make SL work in Windows only, and then people would buy Windows specifically to view some SL only sites.

I disagree. People get Windows, for the most part, as part of their computer purchase. I don't think whehter to not they can view SL sites enter into it, anymore than IE only sites do. People aren't avoiding Linux because they can't view some sites. People by and large don't know what Linux is, don't know people using it and don't care. Those that do care enough to look at both aren't basing it on one point of focus, they'll look at the larger picture.

I agree that switching a site from IE-only to working in other browsers is expensive. Any time you need to switch from one technology to another, it's very expensive and risky. That's why businesses continue buying Windows machines instead of switching to Linux. Switching to Linux would mean having to run a browser other than IE, an office suite other than Office, an email client other than Outlook, etc. Making each of these switches has interoperability problems, because of the proprietary extensions in IE, and the proprietary nature of Office and the Outlook/Exchange protocol. It's called vendor lock-in, and it makes MS tons of bucks. If MS products used and adhered closely to standards, they wouldn't have the lock-in that they do now. Silverlight is yet another proprietary technology that can be used to induce yet more lock-in.

I can say the same for Java / Linux; moving my Linux based shop to all Windows is expensive as well. Am I locked into Java / Linux because it's expensive?

Re:Why switch?

[sremick]

"Flash & Java pretty much everywhere, .NET and Silverlight only where Microsoft sees fit"

How is this any different than Adobe? I use FreeBSD. Adobe doesn't "see fit" to produce a Flash player/plugin for FreeBSD. As a result, we are forced to hack on the Linux ones, which (due to a number of fundamental OS differences) are prone to numerous problems and incompatibility. The only Flash we can get working mostly on FreeBSD is Flash 7 but that's becoming more and more useless as more sites start requiring Flash 8 or Flash 9.

Just because Adobe "sees fit" to produce Flash on a handful of more platforms than Microsoft does with Silverlight doesn't mean Flash is innocent on this point. I consider Flash to be evil in this regard the same as Silverlight. It's just Silverlight is more-so.

Re:Why switch?

[wall0159]

"if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only"

No. It would start out being cross-platform and ubiquitous. When it gained market-dominance, it would become Windows and IE only.

What's the saying?: "if there's one thing we can learn from history, it's that we don't learn from history"

Re:Why switch?

[bunratty]

I see what you're saying. Yes, most people do not decide to buy Windows, but simply buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows. But many people do specifically buy Windows computers as opposed to a computer with Linux. MS makes money off those people.

Of course, but you can get Java compilers, JVMs, and Linux distributions from multiple vendors for free. You must pay Microsoft if you want to run Windows, IE, Office, Outlook, Exchange, ASP, etc. That's why it's called vendor lock-in, because those products are available from only one vendor.

Re:Why switch?

[Blakey Rat]

5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".

I can't comment on the rest of your post, because I don't have enough experience with Silverlight, but this part of it I have worked on, and let me tell you that Silverlight is better than the current Flash solution.

Silverlight media resides in a DOM that is 100% accessible by from the web page's DOM. And it works the other way, as well... the page DOM is accessible from Silverlight code. It's a brilliant and simple solution, and it's a lot better than Adobe's equivalent.

I know nobody's going to admit it on Slashdot, but Silverlight is plain better than Flash. And even if you don't agree, you have to agree that it's about goddamned time that someone competed with Flash, since it sucks in many, many ways. Competition will make Flash better, even if you never even think about using Silverlight.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

You really are very naive, aren't you. This is Microsoft we are talking about, doubtless they have patents on everything to do with Silverlight - at the very least it runs under Mono, which is under constant patent threat by MS.

In short, if MS pulls the Linux version, and somebody else tries to fill that gap, MS can sue them out of existence.

You are correct that the a *free* market would correct this in time, but where MS and software patents are concerned, there is no free market, only a monopoly.

Re:Why switch?

[Mongoose Disciple]

And yet that hasn't happened with web browsers or office software or 50 other things.

If not wearing a tinfoil hat is naive, so be it.

Re:Why switch?

[cpiazza]

agreed. ms too often thinks they can make things so by the sheer force of their will.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, the Moonlight project is not GPL'd, it will be available as a binary only plugin, and only from Novell.

As for somebody else writing a competing plugin, doubtless the silverlight technology has been heavily patented by MS, and they can sue any competitor out of existence the moment they feel like it.

Re:Why switch?

[fwarren]

Heh. When the number of Linux distributions is critisized, it's good to have competition, because no one distro can fill everyone's needs. Yet when MS puts out a competitor to Java, and now Flash, it's "why do we need more than one?"

To be blunt. I don't know of one linux distro who's goal is to "fucking kill" another distro.

When Slax, or Puppy, or Knopix, or Ubuntu were put out there, they focus on doing something a bit different than some other distro. What they do, can be borrowed by other distros and improved.

When Microsoft puts out something like Silverlight. There goal is to own 100% of the market. The want to "Fucking chock off Adobe's air supply". Once Flash is gone, so is the Silverlight player for Mac and Linux. After all, with no flash out there, they can "leverage" Silverlight to lock people into Windows.

Re:Why switch?

[plague3106]

I see what you're saying. Yes, most people do not decide to buy Windows, but simply buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows. But many people do specifically buy Windows computers as opposed to a computer with Linux. MS makes money off those people.

I agree with that, I just don't think that "well, I like site abc.com and it requires SL, so I have to choose Windows." I doubt most really know what SL or Flash is, just that it's "required."

Of course, but you can get Java compilers, JVMs, and Linux distributions from multiple vendors for free. You must pay Microsoft if you want to run Windows, IE, Office, Outlook, Exchange, ASP, etc. That's why it's called vendor lock-in, because those products are available from only one vendor.

Well, those companies are still vendors. Are all JVMs, Java compilers and Linux distributions 100% compatable though? I'm willing to bet the answer is, as I've said, "not quite." So the fact that the software costs nothing doesn't mean switching is free, hense there's still the aspect of lock-in.

Re:Why switch?

[fireboy1919]

Even VB.Net developers question why they use VB and why they don't just learn C#. Porting Perl, Python or any other language as a .Net language is pointless as they cease to have the differences that actually made them relevant.

While you're right about the difference between C# and VB (negligible), you're wrong about .Net in general. Try Boo or Scala. They don't work at all the way that C#/VB do.

Re:Why switch?

[Haeleth]

You're glossing over a pretty big detail here. Pretty much compatable != compatiable. How many projects work on RH, only to be discovered that, opps, it doesn't install right or compile properly on Deb?

I don't know - you tell me. You do have the figures, right? I'd hate to think you were spreading FUD or anything.

(Speaking anecdotally, all the Linux code I've ever written has not only worked perfectly on every version of Linux I've tried it on, but also compiled with only minimal adjustments on Solaris and several flavours of BSD. So there is clearly a very significant difference indeed between that and Silverlight, which does not even pretend it's going to try to be remotely compatible with Flash.)

I would say the incompatibilities are the benefit of competition. If both sides are totally compatable, what's the point of choosing one over the other?

Price, performance, security, support, and design, just to name five things off the top of my head. "Compatible" doesn't mean "identical"; it just means that things designed to work with one also work with the other.

Well, AMD isn't stiving to make the CPU world a better place, they are trying to beat Intel. AMD would love to get all of Intel's marketshare, I'm sure, and Intel feels the same way. What exactly is wrong with that?

Nothing at all. It's good. But one of the reasons it's good is that, you will observe, AMD's products are pretty much compatible with Intel's products, in exactly the way that varieties of Linux are pretty much compatible with each other, and in exact opposition to the situation with Silverlight.

You know your argument is in trouble when even your own examples are undermining it.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is great for cross platform animation. So is Silverlight, but it brings a whole lot more to the party:

. choice of languages (C#, VB, IronRuby, IronPython, Javascript)
. XAML
. data binding, styling, templates
. REST, sockets for cross domain comms
. LINQ -- two lines of code to make a database query
. boatloads of controls, available under an open source license
. mobility -- Windows Mobile, Nokia platform
. managed code

If you want to do more than just graphics, or interoperate with other sites, or use a mobile platform, you should consider Silverlight.

Disclaimer: I am an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft, and it is my job to get the word out on MS technologies.

John
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde

Re:Why switch?

[Haeleth]

AFAIK, the Moonlight project is not GPL'd, it will be available as a binary only plugin, and only from Novell.

It's more complicated than that. Moonlight itself is free software licensed under the LGPL. However, support for Microsoft's anti-free audio and video formats will indeed be binary-only and restrictively licensed.

Re:Why switch?

[Jojie_T]

I thought that the web was all about watching videos and playing games. There are other uses? :b

Re:Why switch?

[edalytical]

I would much rather see both of them go away, though. SVG and JavaScript, please.

I think we all would much rather see open standards on the web. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I don't see any point at all for Silverlight, JavaFX, Flex, XUL, Curl, etc. In fact Flash and Curl have been around forever and despite a few high profile sites like YouTube using Flash, these technologies are becoming irrelevant.

Developers know that content on the web should be built with open standards. Developers also know that you don't need proprietary technology for "rich" web apps anymore. Anything you want to build will be better supported and a better experience if we stick to the standards. All you will need is:

• HTML5/XHTML2
• CSS3
• JavaScript
• SVG
• MPEG-4/H.264 (or whatever w3c recommends in the future)

W3C take on Silverlight etc.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you have a look at the job market or the prevailing trends in web technology then i'm not sure that you would make such a statement about ajax & flash. for the purposes of training and e learning (my field) if you were to suggest ajax to most clients, you wouldn't have much luck i'd imagine.

apart from anything else, i'm not sure how ajax can be called clean - its three different technologies hacked together and the chances of it working cross-platform and cross-browser and close to nil for this and other reasons. ajax sites tend to be a quagmire and the results seem a bit clunky and second-rate, at best.

you're actually probably better off with silverlight than ajax in this respect. it's fit for purpose like flash, but unlike flash it isn't ubiquitous or cross platform.

as for flash and system resources i don't see how they come into it - unless you're using an iphone, which is another debate :)

flash, together with flex and air, is going from strength to strength. i'm not aware of any compelling reason why people would want to switch away.

Re:Why switch?

[jeffstar]

I have troubles with flash widgets always appearing on top of other website elements like menus. Do you not have this problem? I googled and it appears to be an issue people just live with

Re:Why switch?

[JackAxe]

I would much rather see both of them go away, though. SVG and JavaScript, please.

No thank you!

Spend some time using ActionScript 3 via Flash CS3 or Flex and you'll see why JS + SVG is such a limited-slow-solution with inconsistent support across browsers and platforms. I guess if you like the limitations and headache that JS + SVG causes, than by all means support it.

I personally will stick with JS + Flash Player for my rich-web-development.

Flash Player is not all about vector BTW. You should look into it before assuming SVG is even a competent replacement.

I don't know if this speaks for your, but I find it ironic that people who are usually for SVG and against Flash Player, are against Adobe, one of the primary supporters/developers of SVG early on.

<]=)

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Performance features

This is true, Silverlight performs better than Flash.

2) HD Video - that is VC1 compliant as well.

Flash supports HD video in h.264 which is better than VC1. Silverlight has no advantage here.

3) Easier

I haven't used either, but Adobe has years of experience making a tool that is very designer-friendly. I don't think Microsoft is going to come in instantly with something better, especially when you consider all the familiarity people have with Flash. I have played around with Expression Blend and the Visual Studio XAML designer, and I wouldn't call either "intuitive".

4) Agnostic programming

... but everyone uses C#. .NET is written mostly in and for C#; you can use other languages but all the libraries were designed for C#. Not that C# is bad; certainly it is better than Javascript.

8) Security

You can't know how secure Silverlight is because it hasn't yet been really tested. Every part of Flash was designed from the ground up for running inside a sandbox; parts of Silverlight were developed with native applications in mind.

9) Structure XAML [...] This means that Windows developers can easily move from Windows programming .NET 3.0 to Silverlight or the other way around.

Except that hardly anyone uses XAML to develop Windows applications yet. Maybe 5-10 years from now that will be an advantage; right now XAML is still unproven.

Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps

If Microsoft really cared about Silverlight under Linux, it would be done already and maintained in parallel with simultaneous release. If Novell's management ever decides to stop throwing money at Mono development then Mono will be quite dead, and Silverlight on Linux with it. Microsoft has no real commitment to cross-platform development.

Re:Why switch?

[Froboz23]

Catbert uses neither emacs nor vi. He only knows Microsoft Powerpoint. As the director of HR, that's all he needs to know.

Dogbert is proficient with both emacs and vi. However, if you tell him you prefer one, he will tell you he only uses the other one, and then give you a detailed and accurate explanation of why you are an idiot for using the obviously inferior editor.

Re:Why switch?

[Knuckles]

We differ, then, in that I don't see this as a realistic possibility.

You can't gloss over the fact that the market does not fix itself overnight. It can take years. How long had people accessing bank sites et al. before FF was able to generate enough pressure for change to happen? For this time span, GP is right.

Re:Why switch?

[Knuckles]

You're presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. That's just absurd.

That's certainly not absurd. Count Windows license running in virtual machines and there surely are still people who do this to access certain sites, or at least did so until not more than a year ago.

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

I actually never said I like Flash. In fact, I don't like it AT ALL. And I hate to see web pages relying on Flash.

It's only that it seems to be a "lesser evil" compared to the MS controlled SL, which is not even available on Linux, let alone on even less visible operating systems.

Re:Why switch?

[Haeleth]

Microsoft is also working to get the Linux version of Silverlight going by working with the Mono peeps, and Microsoft is also fully producing the OS X version as well as supporting as many browsers as they can at the same time, including Firefox, etc. So if this was MS trying to lock people in, it would be Windows and IE only, instead it has potential to be far more crossplatform than Flash.

Funny that you should mention IE. See, if you remember, back when IE was new, that was cross-platform too. It was great - Microsoft was making this free browser that ran on Windows, Mac, Solaris, even HP-UX!

And yet, strange to say, for some reason you don't seem to be able to get IE for anything but Windows any more...

Re:Why switch?

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Sorry, I didn't realize there is no Flash for BSD.

Anyway, as I already said in one of my previous posts, I have a strong dislike for Flash *and* for web sites that demand Flash. However, Adobe is a devil we know and we learned to live with. That devil at least offers me SOME confidence that they do care about me.

And talking about SL for Linux: I don't yet see it being there. Where can I download it? You don't mean that Novell Moonlight thing, do you? The one you still have to get from the svn repository? Here the quote from the project's web site:

Currently Moonlight is not packaged as it is still under heavy development

I don't call that "there is a linux version".

Re:Why switch?

[Knuckles]

Urgh, I misread "SL" for "IE". Seems that "SL" has even entered my acronym vocabulary it.

But if you replace SL with IE in my post it serves as the analogy to a possible (likely?) future SL situation that I intended it to be:

"That's certainly not absurd. Count Windows license[s] running in virtual machines and there surely are still people who do this [pay for Windows to run IE] to access certain sites, or at least did so until not more than a year ago."

Sorry for the mess :)

Re:Why switch?

[raddan]

Yeah, exactly. Maybe Silverlight will light the fire under Adobe's collective ass and make them go, "SHIT! We need market saturation, like, NOW. Let's open-source this biatch! We need UNIX fanatics on our side!"

I definitely look forward to running Flash natively on my OpenBSD machine. I know, wishful thinking. Adobe's solution will probably be to ratchet up the price and require that you hang a dongle out your ass-- as if it wasn't piracy that essentially established their competitor's dominance in the DTP industry. Funny that people fail to see that piracy is only the next best thing compared to open source if you want to see your product become the standard. But it's this whole proprietary mindset that's the problem...

Re:Why switch?

[pizzach]

You answered your own question. When MS puts out a competitor, it tends to eat the other competitors alive so there are no more competitors.

Given MS's past, I can see them suddenly stopping support for Silverlight if it gains real traction. They've done it with IE, WMP, VBscript in office...etc etc. I do NOT want to have to rely on the Mono/Silverlight group like the WINE group. In the case of flash, we would be trading a devil for THE devil.

Re:Why switch?

[pizzach]

The market fixes this problem itself very nicely, if not immediately.

If Microsoft does those things, there's suddenly a golden opportunity for another competitor or competitors to get going -- they'll be able to gain mindshare and traction much more easily from nothing, because they'll be providing something Microsoft isn't. Two to three years is not "immediately"...as that is how long it takes to develop a fresh new product to maturity on average.

Re:Why switch?

[TheNetAvenger]

1) As far as performance in general is concerned, ActionScript 3 is extremely fast. Though I definitely wouldn't say the same about ActionScript 2, it's not fair to compare an old version of Flash against a recent version of Silverlight.


Ok, there is more to performance than the scripting, especially when you are dealing with vector and animation drawing.

The part you also omit for the viewers is that ActionScript 3 is 'faster' which MOST people and sites do not use yet. The older Flash 8 and earlier standards are significantly slower than JavaScript, and this is ALSO not a comparison of the native code speeds of Silverlight that use .NET.

The Flash 8 will remain the industry standard until Flash Lite is brought up to Flash 9 standards, and by that time SilverLight will have just as much of an opportunity to entice developers, especially Windows developers that can take existing code sets and existing WPF/.NET applicaitons and build for Silverlight.

You are also dismissing the importance of Silverlight using 'standard' languages. ActionScript is is a hack on hack of a animation scripting language and in no way compares to even JScript let alone running native C# or even VB code.

2) Flash Player 9 Update 3, which was released in December of last year, supports H.264 and HE-AAC.

Why yes it does, but it still DOES NOT SUPPORT multi-cast Streaming. There is more to HD support than just providing the VC1 codec and rendering it properly, there is the bandwidth and server side issues as well. And again, this is with Player 9 only content as this is the first version of Flash to try to offer accelerated Video playback, something Silverlight already handles easily as it was designed around HD VC1.

) Flex uses a similar XML...

You really need to go look up more about the Flex - Flash confusion people like to add to this argument. The flash format is not as open as you seem to think it is, nor is Flex fully interoperable as well.

4a) Flash has a "rich vector/bitmap based environment"

This is kind of scary... Silverlight also uses Vector/Bitmap etc... Who said it didn't? The key differences here are what is available in terms of drawing and animation abilities. Even with Silverlight 1.0 being a subset of WPF/.NET the drawing and animation abilities are more advanced not only in terms of abilities, but in final quality output, in addition to size of content and client side rendering.

Silverlight is closer to Display PDF in terms of graphical abilities, can you honestly argue that Flash is that advanced with their simplistic rendering of vector and bitmaps that in final output has no concept of layers, and defaults to bitmap rendering to not lose the presentation?

Technically WPF/.NET/Silverlight is even ahead of PDF and Display PDF in several areas, as it is based on the WPF specifications and does understand complex alpha layering and other graphical composition effects that PDF is forced to render to bitmaps to maintain.

5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".

Really? It has low level DOM access, seamless integration, can pass through PHP or ASP filtering as well to be modified, and you can load 30 Flash controls on one page without any performance concerns.

You really don't get this do you?

)6) Have you even looked at what Flash provides lately? ActionScript 3

Again, this is not an argument that ActionScript is horrible, this is an argument that people would rather stick with what they know, like JavaScript, and C#, VB, C++, etc. Even in moving to AJAX models (as Google and the XML11 movement is on) people will not want to abandon JScript or learn a new scripting syntax to deal with page elements.

7) I've not personally experienced performance issues with Flash applications on OS X, but YMMV. Since I don't use Windows

Then you would be shocked

Re:Why switch?

[pizzach]

And what happens when they come out with an incompatible new version of Silverlight and don't release the documentation and don't help with the development of the FOSS version? Then the FOSS version starts mimicking the development style of WINE. And given how well that goes I am not very excited.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://beta.playdo.com/games - Pork Racer. I won't say it was easy, but real 3D on the web is by all means possible, with technology from 2001 (2004 for physics) nonetheless. Just a test race this time though. And now that Adobe is getting back to Director, it may be time to look closely at that technology.

Re:Why switch?

[ianare]

True, it is a major pain to get silverlight installed on linux, if the instructions I've seen for it are any indication. Way too much of a pain for me to try it :-)

But my main point was that silverlight is a little more open than flash. There is a reference spec for .net, which silverlight is based on. And MS has released public specs for SL, as well as more details to novell, which in turn has released moonlight as open source.

So definitely not as nice as sun GPL'ing java, but certainly more open than Adobe's "you can't use our specs to create a flash player"

Re:Why switch?

[oliderid]

Thanks.

Concerning stupid things, occasionnally I say intelligent things too ;-)
SO I guess i should give a try now.

Re:Why switch?

[SanityInAnarchy]

The notion of a common runtime that supports different languages is bogus.

What do you call x86? Or a modern OS?

The difference is, things like Silverlight are designed to be more portable. Or at least, are designed with technologies which should make them more portable -- I'm not at all sure Microsoft intends to do that.

They are all .Net languages...

IronPython, IronRuby, Windows PowerShell, JScript...

Another approach is to implement a language on top of .Net, like IronPython, but that's not the same thing.

Erm, WTF?

By that measure, C# is also "a language on top of .Net" -- the fact that IronPython isn't included in that ginormous download off Windows Update doesn't make it any less of a .Net language.

Or would you care to tell me in what way it is "not the same thing"?

Re:Why switch?

[SanityInAnarchy]

inconsistent support across browsers and platforms.

And you're not helping.

a limited-slow-solution

Give me a faster, open one, and I'm all for it.

Flash Player is not all about vector BTW.

No, it's also about replacing open, working, fast movie and audio plugins with one gigantic, closed plugin-to-end-them-all, which is also far slower at playing video than any of the alternatives.

Oh, and there's a script engine. ActionScript any good? Because JavaScript is good enough for me, and the Flash script runtime has been donated to Firefox, I think.

are against Adobe, one of the primary supporters/developers of SVG early on.

Oh, I'm all for open Adobe things -- like PDF. Because PDF is open, I now have several kick-ass PDF readers to choose from, aside from Adobe's bloated one. But I can't even get a 64-bit Flash player.

Re:Why switch?

[segedunum]

Try Boo or Scala. They don't work at all the way that C#/VB do.

There are no features that Boo has that couldn't be trivially added to C#.

Re:Why switch?

[segedunum]

What do you call x86? Or a modern OS?

A .Net language that compiles to the same IL has fairly strict rules as to what it needs to support to be a .Net language, and for a Boo, VB.Net or a Python .Net component to be reused in a C# using application. That's what we're talking about here. It compiles to the same compatible IL and bytecode.

By that measure, C# is also "a language on top of .Net" -- the fact that IronPython isn't included in that ginormous download off Windows Update doesn't make it any less of a .Net language.

No, you don't get this at all. A language that adheres to the CLS is completely different to an implementation of a language like IronPython running in a .Net environment. You can use some .Net features and parts of the framework, obviously, but in order to actually make it Python it has to trade off some .Net features and quirks in order for that to happen. That makes it a non-compatible .Net language that doesn't adhere to the CLS.

Re:Why switch?

[ozmanjusri]

OpenLaszlo's cool, and one of my favourite tools, but it doesn't do Silverlight, and I suspect it's unlikely to, given SL's dependence on .NET.

Re:Why switch?

[leabre]

RE: 4) .NET was not written for C# primarily. Granted, C# is the predominent language, there are many .NET CLR features C# does not support and that only C++/CLI supports. Yes, the libraries are written in C#, C++, and I've seen a few in VB.NET, of all things. .NET is supposed to be a language neutral platform that any language and plug into and be compatible with. However, with .NET 3.5 and the future, more and more features are being implemented as language compiler features and not CLR features which means at somepoint absolute compatibility between languages is going to diminish, but that's not the point you were making.

RE: 8) Silverlight was not designed from the ground up with native applications in mind, at least, not in the context that you put it, as in: flash designed to be sandboxed, silverlight designed to be native. Silverlight is designed to be sandboxed *AND* be a superior platform for building applications that don't have the intrinsic quirks that HTML has and AJAX. With Silverlight, you can do all Flash can do and much better. I'm not saying Flash can't do it, too. It's just far easier to accomplish applications in Silverlight 2 than Flash, at least for me, anyway.

RE: 9) It's hard to know. Xaml is so new. Once more people start doing things with it others will follow. The trends I see now is that it is being used more in social type applications than desktop type applications. Although with the announcement of www.textglow.net it appears there might be a office productivity app in the works and very capable on Silverlight. The only question remains is whether MS will IP-restrict our use of Silverlight to not create an office competitor. I'm almost 100% certain that a verion of Office will be released on top of Silverlight in the future. When I look at its capabilities, I can nearly see how it is designed with Office in mind.

RE: 10) The fact that MS is working with MONO folks and and least of which, encouraging their efforts, leaves no bad taste in my mind but no certainty of their Linux commitment, either. But then, I'm not a Linux fanatic so it doesn't affect me in any way whatsoever for the time being.

Thanks,
Leabre

Re:Why switch?

[The Cydonian]

Silverlight 1.1 Alpha has been out only for a few months, and is still not recommended for use in production systems. If anybody was wondering, v1.1 is where it really became usable, with its C# codebehinds and such; v1.0 merely had clunky calls via JavaScript. In short, it's too early for any meaningful comparisons with Flash; just wait till June or so, when the usual Microsoft developer-advertising channels ("TechEd") kick in.

(Fair disclaimer: for reasons I can't explain on a public Internet thread, I'm professionally involved with Silverlight.)

Re:Why switch?

[endquotedotcom]

As a Flash developer, you shouldn't switch. You should be aware of and work with both technologies, know which is best for which project, and become a more valuable and sought-after developer because of it. At least that's what I do.

Re:Why switch?

[Stan Vassilev]

Because Flash can't do 3D.

Silverlight doesn't support any of the 3D subsystem of .NET's WPF. It's 2D only, and software only.

For Flash, there are some fairly advanced 3D engines like PaperVision3D, which comes complete with such features like cell shaders, bumping and reflection map effects, rich material and scene handling API-s, support for 3DS and Collada objects and animations and so on.

Demos here. Check the rhino and Earth demo too :)

What does Silverlight have to compete with this? Nothing. Maybe one day Silverlight will outdo Flash, and I'll gladly use it's suitable for a scenario. Right now, Flash beats it in almost all categories, including, yes, 3D.

Re:Why switch?

[Snover]

Ok, there is more to performance than the scripting, especially when you are dealing with vector and animation drawing.

You said "Performance features", and then you mentioned an example that LOADS RASTERISED IMAGES. Why would I even think of the speed of the vector and animation drawing engine when you were talking about a Socket/URLLoader and Bitmap implementation that has zero need for vectors and virtually zero need for animation? Now that we've clarified it's the animation library you're talking about, can you provide an example of an animation that works really slowly in Flash but is smooth in Silverlight?

The part you also omit for the viewers is that ActionScript 3 is 'faster' which MOST people and sites do not use yet.

As opposed to Silverlight, which is used by so many more sites right now, right? Oh, wait...

The older Flash 8 and earlier standards are significantly slower than JavaScript, and this is ALSO not a comparison of the native code speeds of Silverlight that use .NET.

Really? The way you wrote it originally certainly made it sound like a comparison. I guess I was confused.

The Flash 8 will remain the industry standard until Flash Lite is brought up to Flash 9 standards, and by that time SilverLight will have just as much of an opportunity to entice developers, especially Windows developers that can take existing code sets and existing WPF/.NET applicaitons and build for Silverlight.

What does market share have anything to do with performance features? Why are you even mentioning this when we were supposedly discussing the improved performance of Silverlight over Flash?

You are also dismissing the importance of Silverlight using 'standard' languages. ActionScript is is a hack on hack of a animation scripting language and in no way compares to even JScript let alone running native C# or even VB code.

Wait, wait. ActionScript, a language designed from the beginning around animation (since that's all that Flash did back when it was first introduced) is a "hack on hack of a animation scripting language [sic]", as opposed to JavaScript, which is designed for providing basic scripting functionality and Web page interactivity?? Excuse me for being incredulous, but.. this is a ridiculous statement.

Why yes it does, but it still DOES NOT SUPPORT multi-cast Streaming. There is more to HD support than just providing the VC1 codec and rendering it properly, there is the bandwidth and server side issues as well.

Yes, I agree that Flash doesn't support multicast. However, before you can multicast video over the Internet, you also need to get ISPs to support multicast, and... a whole heaping lot of them don't, which makes support for this particular feature rather irrelevant at this stage of the game. For what it's worth, Flash doesn't support UDP either, which is far more important for real-time video streaming.

And again, this is with Player 9 only content as this is the first version of Flash to try to offer accelerated Video playback, something Silverlight already handles easily as it was designed around HD VC1.

Only the 2007 version of Flash offers features in the... 2007 version of Silverlight? Wha?

You really need to go look up more about the Flex - Flash confusion people like to add to this argument. The flash format is not as open as you seem to think it is, nor is Flex fully interoperable as well.

Bloody hell, mate. I need to "look up more about the Flex - Flash confusion"? What? I certainly didn't say that the SWF specification was open without caveats, but you've yet to say what exactly is the "secret format" that Flash has that Silverlight does

Re:Why switch?

[ultranova]

There are no features that Boo has that couldn't be trivially added to C#.

There are no features in any Turing complete language which couldn't be added to any other.

Re:Why switch?

[ultranova]

So basically, Silverlight is a bit like SVG, only tied to a convicted monopolist and notorious malefactor. Oh, and Firefox implements SVG + Javascript off the shelf with no need for plugins.

Re:Why switch?

[ultranova]

The XAML construct is also very intelligently designed, as it is more than just a graphical description format, as it has inherent events and animations, where Display PDF (or SVG as some like to compare) is inherently a static graphical format with no concept of advanced layers, animations, hit testing, events, etc.

Your statement about SVG is factually incorrect. SVG not only has declarative animation, but also programmability through Javascript, and SVG groups combined with filters allow any kind of layering mode imaginable.

Re:Why switch?

[Ilgaz]

Which competition? To do Silverlight development, you need Windows while Adobe even started to ship complete open source SDKs for Linux.

I wished MS woke up from their monopoly attitude and release Silverlight SDK for XCode, Linux, FreeBSD (even 64bit versions) along with a complete cairo accelerated plugin for all.

What they did instead?

Lets say you are a multimedia developer who is at very high level to decide for your company. You got Adobe/Macromedia who supported Mac in its darkest days, released software while people were arguing about Chapter 11 and you also got Microsoft who had to get paid by Apple to release a WEB BROWSER for Mac. They also can't be bothered to update windows media player for OS X while popularity of Apple is literally exploded after Intel switch.

Flash needs a real rival, not some spoiled rich kid saying "If you don't play with me, I buy my own toys"

Re:Why switch?

[segedunum]

There are no features in any Turing complete language which couldn't be added to any other.

Sorry, but no. That's crap, and I'm afraid you probably know it. CLS .Net languages have the same language features, the same data types and the same object oriented features in order to keep them compatible. Ergo, they're all the same language, fundamentally. You can't just arbitrarily take language features and data types from one language and start using them in another.

Re:Why switch?

[Julian352]

And Flash was cross platform from the beginning? What player is Flash compatible with? You are comparing apples and oranges if you want to compare Silverlight to VLC/WMP/Quicktime. I don't remember having a flash player compatible with Linux FF for a long time.

I am not going to defend the bundling of IE with Windows, but programming just for IE is about as "normal" as programming just for Netscape that was common before IE became popular. Neither of the browser followed the standards, so it was common to just pick a specific browser to optimize for. IE6 has sat around without updates for a browser (FF/Opera) to come out that followed the proper standard. Now it makes more sense to program to the standard when you have browsers that follow it. (ie. Netscape didn't do much better than IE back in the days)

As far as Outlook extensions - that has long been true in all industries. iPod works only with iTunes, KDE apps can only copy/paste to KDE apps and not to Gnome unless you used the Xserver's clipboard(until Linux got unified clipboard that was better). FF extensions only run on FF and not on Opera/IE. Quicktime video can only be written by Apple software.

Yes, MS has abused the monopoly to improve bundle their software and get better OEM deals, but interoperability is not a requirement from a monopoly. Standard Oil was not forced to make sure their rail was the same size as everyone else. (Bells weren't forced to allow other phone providers - I don't see any local phone providers in the area) Interoperability is a business decision and is always used by the front-runners to prevent others from entering the market. Pre-IBM PCs were never compatible, apple PCs couldn't take non-Apple approved parts, etc.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Fair disclaimer: for reasons I can't explain on a public Internet thread, I'm professionally involved with Silverlight.)

I read that as I work for Microsoft.

Re:Why switch?

[darrinallen]

I am not familiar with the silver light platform

Re:Why switch?

[RiotingPacifist]

Yet when MS puts out somebody else's Java bad typo you had there, as MJVM was pretty much stolen code and thats why it died

Re:Why switch?

[rocket22]

I believe the great thing here is:

Making silverlight truly multiplatform: I mean, not it runs on Windows and MacOS, and it will run on Linux too thanks to mono

Being able to develop rich cross-platform GUI apps in C# (ok, any .net based language) which is actually a pretty nice high-level language...

Ok, you can say "I have it in Java", and yes, you're maybe right, but I think silverlight puts together the best of Flash plus using a wellknown "classic-like" language (I'm not a Flash expert but I don't like how it looks like).

Re:Why switch?

[SharpFang]

Silverlight has the ambition to be "Flash with 3D". Something known, with bits that are new, cool and easy.

The others were "3D with small bit of Flash". They had a steep learning curve, offered 3D and little else, and if what I'd seen of them is representative to the whole, they were real crap, clunky, ugly, very slow and lacking all the cool shaders and features of nowadays 3D graphics. You could argue that all of 3D was like that back then and I'd agree, but that only means maybe 3D gfx wasn't mature enough for this market back then.

OTOH Silverlight may appear another in the row of failures, but don't say it's dead before it really is.

Re:Why switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a lot to say, but nothing to back it up.

I hope for the best for Silverlight, because competition in this environment is rare.

But saying it's superior to Flash in almost every way is a bit retarded.

Maybe one day, but until then, just eat cakes or something.

Re:Why switch?

[msromike]

Do you have a citation to support that it is less stable? Or is that just a given because this is Slashdot?

Re:Why switch?

[TheNetAvenger]

designed from the beginning around animation (since that's all that Flash did back when it was first introduced) is a "hack on hack of a animation scripting language

You take offense and then argue and repeat EXACTLY my argument not even realizing you are arguing my point.

There is more to XAML and SilverLight than Animation, and combined with additional languages like JScript and native C#/VB, etc it is a full range environment.

ActionScript was originally a 'scripting' ONLY language and has been 'hacked' and 'hacked' to try to be more THAN ANIMATION in terms of trying to provide an application framework. This is why it is a hacked animation scripting language pretending to be an application language, when it was DESIGNED for animation scripting, and outside of animation scripting is nothing but hacks upon hacks.

So I agree with you, but you don't get it, and think it is a good thing that ActionScript is a native animation language hacked to try to do UI, media, and application programming.

If you don't get this basic concept or even the fact you are arguing what is wrong with ActionScript as being 'good' then there is no reason to even try to respond to rest of your post point by point.

Silverlight is not perfect, but it is better designed to fit into today's web design constructs. It also has a strong design background, as it is a subset extension of the Vista WPF framework, that is far more rich than even the best PDF or press page description concepts, let alone competing with cute animations on the Web.

You can't bill Flex and Flash as even close to Silverlight in functionality unless you stick exclusively to simplistic animation properties, and there are very few that Flash has any advantage.

When my designers export their SWF project and half the animation layering is rasterized in the SWG, or the bit code of the file format does incredibly stupid things like support drawing constructs of line/left-fill/right-fill types of processing, it is time for Flash to pony up and kill the legacy crap and define a 'real' graphical animation UI platform, or just become graphical animation and leave it at that.

(Go look up SWF to XAML converters, the process is insane as the way Flash handles basic graphical drawing and animation, when the same concepts in XAML (Silverlight) are so simple and light it show how 'old' the animation concepts Flash uses internally and how Flash is aged kludge.)

Then go look at PHP and ASP and AJAX interoperability that is just native to Silverlight and you don't have to dive into XML Remote Connectors, AMFPHP, or other solutions for dealing with binary image stuctures of Flash. Silverlight could provide a simple XAML based interface, graphics, and animations and dynamically be changed via PHP or ASP without any code even existing for the Silverlight Interface, truly as easy and can even be worked like a right CSS site, that can change the entire look on the fly with simple stylesheet changes, and yet you are changing a complex animated drawing and RIA UI that is extremely light and no actionscript, hacks or remote ties ins to change any and all elements, behaviors, etc.

Finish off your trip with indexing and bot/crawling problems with Flash, that is a concept designed into Silverlight so that Google and other search engines see Silverlight content as easily as basic HTML and don't have to try to decode strings and tag resources inside a Flash binary.

Flash needs to completely retool to catch up on these very simple things that have KEPT it from becoming a viable RIA for the web that Silverlight looked at and was designed specifically to fit into the XML/HTTP world seamlessly with endless amounts of integration possibilities from pre-processing to client side communication.

Flash isn't junk, it just has not yet addressed some of the major aspect that keep hard core developers from adopting it in situations it should have been ruling 5 years ago. Even look at most SlashDot users, they hate Flash for t

This is a surprise??

[kurokaze]

NewsFlash!! Brand new technology has less presence in market compared to entrenched, established technology!

Holy Cow! Stop the presses! This is big news!

Freakin' Troll of a story if I've ever seen one.

Re:This is a surprise??

[BasharTeg]

Seriously, this story exists to point out the obvious: There is currently more Flash than Silverlight. ZOMG the shock!

Now lets all take this opportunity to knock our least favorite monopolist, Microsoft, and espouse our loyalty to our favorite monopolist, Adobe.

Re:This is a surprise??

[rucs_hack]

Is Adobe a monopoly? Don't think so.

And anyway, what is the problem with them. They produced some hugely successful technology, we use it all the time, willingly.

Oh wait, their PROPRIETARY!!!!!11111one

Yeah, because no proprietary company ever produced anything worth using....

[koff] Blizzard] [/koff]

Re:This is a surprise??

[sm62704]

It isn't needed, AFAICT it offers nothing whatever that older stabler products (Flash) have.

The big news is that they ever sold (or even gave away) a single copy. Nobody but Microsoft would be able to.

Re:This is a surprise??

[nahdude812]

I went to a Microsoft-hosted Silverlight introductory seminar a couple of months back, and I've used Flex periodically since the Flex 1.5 days (back when its IDE was still in the husk of Dreamweaver).

I can say that based on the examples Microsoft gave us of its own product, and based on my functional (but nowhere near expert) experience with Flex, that Flex is by far the more elegant solution.

In 500 lines of code, Silverlight had a nice photo slide show with automatic fading transitions and image captions which reads entries from a CSV file.

In 500 lines of code, Flex had a nice photo slide show with fading transitions, image captions, zoomable images, thumbnail mode, carousel mode, user-controllable navigation, and it could read entries from a CSV, WSDL, SOAP, or REST based web service.

In the mean time, the flagship demo application for Silverlight, when I last looked a few months ago, was the same exact crappy flagship demo application that it was well over a year ago, that plane trip planner application with that amazomging animated plane! I can't tell you how underwhelmed I was when they spent a full 20 minutes at the seminar showing off this app that I'd grown bored with on their website last year after playing with it for 5 minutes and realizing that yes, I really had discovered all of its features in the first 60 seconds.

You can do anything you want in Silverlight, but it will take you at least twice as long, the controls will be half as customizable, and support at least half the features. Also it'll be supported on 1/50th of the computers which your Flex app is, while your Flex app will, with one piece of code, be able to be run on cell phones and other embedded devices, web browsers, runtime off of CD's or thumb drives, and as stand-alone self-updating desktop applications via Air, on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Also your Flex app will require a runtime install for the user of around 1.5 meg, which the user is automatically prompted for in-browser, plus a page refresh (though most users have had it installed already for years). Meanwhile the Silverlight one will require a runtime of something like 5 meg as a separate stand-alone installer plus a browser restart, unless you don't already have the right version of the .NET runtime, in which case it's another several dozen megs plus a 10+ minute install on older hardware, plus an OS reboot.

Silverlight is Microsoft's "oh crap" response to realizing that Flex is both poised to make operating system choice a matter of preference rather than of necessity, and also is being backed by a company with the financial cahones to stand up to Redmond. It is the single most significant threat to the desktop monopoly Microsoft has ever faced, and they're trying hard to put spit and polish on Silverlight to make it look like it doesn't suck. Their pants were down, and they are trying hard to pull them back up before anyone notices.

Incorrect headline

[ArhcAngel]

Here, let me fix that for you

Little Demand Yet For Silverlight

There! that's better.

Re:Incorrect headline

[The End Of Days]

Just for kicks, I'll spin it the other way:

Demand For Silverlight On The Rise

Re:Incorrect headline

[Renderer of Evil]

I can spin too:

Supply Outstrips Demand for Silverlight
Undownloaded Installers Prove Problematic for Redmond Giant

Re:Incorrect headline

[swb311]

Did somebody finally use Silverlight for something? I seriously thought Microsoft just developed it for their own website. Kind of the microsoft.com version of "plz to download my custom mouse pointers"

Re:Incorrect headline

[Locutus]

how about:
Market share quickly being purchased for growth of slow starting Silverlight!

LoB

if these downloaders are anything like me

[rucs_hack]

Like me, many of these 1.5 million are people who where breifly confused into thinking they needed silverlight in order to access the microsoft site. I took advantage of their dreamspark initiative, and encountered a 'you need to install silverlight' message. Turns out this was for a small silverlight animation, nothing to do with the main content.

Since then I've not been back. Nor would I intentionally seek to develop for that platform. Why bother? There's javascript and flash already.

Re:if these downloaders are anything like me

[BasharTeg]

How many hundreds of millions of sites do the same thing with Flash? Install Flash to power this ugly animated page header! Neat.

Re:if these downloaders are anything like me

[AKAImBatman]

How many hundreds of millions of sites do the same thing with Flash?

Not many. Unless you think that users are upset by being able to watch Youtube.

Of course, not many users install Flash anyway. It ships pre-installed on most computers these days.

Re:if these downloaders are anything like me

[vtscott]

I downloaded it for the free t-shirt.

Re:if these downloaders are anything like me

[garett_spencley]

Why bother? There's javascript and flash already.

Yeah but those technologies don't help Microsoft improve their position in the market place.

Won't somebody PLEASE think of Microsoft !

Re:if these downloaders are anything like me

[Locutus]

Of course, not many users install Flash anyway. It ships pre-installed on most computers these days. I've love to see the internal emails which show when Adobe Flash became a target on the Microsoft Death Dartboard. Was there a threshold in the distribution channel which triggered it? Was it when they added video playback and the YouTube.com platform arose from it? Or was it when they added the Flex backend system to provide both a frontend client and backend server platform/system? Or was it the support level for other platforms?

Whatever it was, I'm sure there are some fascinating emails and some great quotes from Balmer, Gates, etc. Oh well, I'm sure we'll be finding out in a couple of years in the next anti-trust case either in the US or in the EU. IMO.

LoB

Re:if these downloaders are anything like me

[R22B]

Why bother? If Apple would have said that when considering the iPod, it never would have came out. Why bother to improve things at all? Why bother to improve safety features in a car? Why bother looking for faster processors when the ones we have work? The fact is that without competition, software/hardware stagnats. Case in point: Flash. Its sloppy, power hungry and so on. Even if Silverlight fails, I'm sure it will get Adobe moving again.

Because it's beta

[parvenu74]

Of course there isn't much demand yet: it's still a beta technology! Moreover, the technical evangelists don't seem to be in agreement if Silverlight is toolkit for building media applications to compete with Flash/YouTube or if this is a toolset for building line-of-business applications (ala Java Applets, only without the hideous UI and slow performance). I personally believe that Silverlight will only be a big thing if it is positioned as something for building line-of-business apps and marketed as the perfect hybrid between the power of a desktop app with the convenience of install/update of a web app.

Re:Because it's beta

[RAMMS EIN]

``ala Java Applets, only without the hideous UI and slow performance''

Is it "without the slow performance" or is it just that computers are 100 times faster nowadays?

Job Sites

[kellyb9]

I think they are generally looking in the wrong places. I never really found CareerBuilder or Monster to be all that useful when job hunting.

Re:Job Sites

[AKAImBatman]

Maybe you don't, but I got most of my job offers on my last job search through Monster. I had my resume up for a day and a half, after which I had to take it down because I was getting too many calls!

The scary part is that I still get calls and emails from recruiters, even though I've happily settled into a job and haven't been on the market in half a year.

Re:Job Sites

[kellyb9]

Yeah - I get a ton of calls, but the jobs are generally pretty undesirable.

Re:Job Sites

[geminidomino]

I got plenty of calls too, but the sites were still worthless.

Every call was from some shmuck headhunter who is apparently incapable of reading the "Not willing to Relocate outside (list of cities)".

Poster is Astroturfing?

[TheSpoom]

Check out ericatcw's previous Slashdot stories:

"Google Apps Slow to Replace Competition"
"Firefox Struggling to Compete as Corporate Browser"

Hell of a coincidence that they're all pro-Microsoft.

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[Westley]

Um, in what way is *this* post pro-Microsoft? You can't very well argue that "Microsoft technology hasn't yet taken off" and "Non-Microsoft technology hasn't yet taken off" are *both* anti-MS subject-matters.

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[TheSpoom]

In that nobody gives a shit about Silverlight except Microsoft and this is bringing attention to it.

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[Westley]

And is the same true of Google apps and Firefox then, in your view? After all, the previous posts were drawing attention to those, weren't they?

You gave examples of three posts (including this one) which are similar in flavour ("technology X hasn't taken off yet"), and tried to use that as evidence that the poster is pro-Microsoft. Your logic is blatantly inconsistent.

(Oh, and just because you may not care about Silverlight doesn't mean no-one else does. I'm watching it with interest, but without any commitment yet. We'll see what happens...)

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[sm62704]

Maybe, but maybe not. If you look at my submissions that were accepted last year you might think I worked for New Scientist, since more than half of those submissions link to it. But I don't work for them; I only surf their site often.

Perhaps the submitter genuinely likes Microsoft? I don't know why anyone would but that's just me.

-mcgrew

PS: haven't got a single story posted yet this year =(

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[wizardforce]

*yet* being the key word here. never mind that silverlight has nothing worth noting that flash doesn't, or that it is not cross-platform, MS doesn't need any of that, just for marketing to say how fantastic and "innovative" it is. either that or find a way to make it appear critical [like others have noted about microsoft.com]

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[Westley]

From my personal point of view, Silverlight 2.0 *will* have something that Flash certainly doesn't - the ability to develop for it in C# 3, including LINQ etc. Likewise it will give me the ability to use familiar WPF techniques for developing a UI. I'd rather not learn Flash unless I really have to - but being able to deploy reasonably rich client-side apps via the web (not just using ClickOnce) is attractive.

Of course, most of that appeal is irrelevant to someone who doesn't already know a .NET language - but there are quite a few people who do.

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[Blakey Rat]

This is stupid for two reasons:

1) This headline is pretty much the opposite of what you're saying... how is saying that Silverlight has yet to attract a following pro-Microsoft exactly? It sounds anti-Microsoft to me.

2) Editors choose the stories, idiot. For all you know, inbetween those (chosen) pro-Microsoft stories are 500 (rejected) anti-Microsoft stories. It's not like ericatcw can control which of his submissions get published on the site.

Re:Poster is Astroturfing?

[gad_zuki!]

>Hell of a coincidence that they're all pro-Microsoft.

Maybe he's just a contrarian. The lowest common denominator (or Friends Sitcom View) of technology is OMG MS IS EVIL AND BAD AND THIS IS THE YEAR OF TEH LINUX DESKTOP.

People are sick of the bias and predictable kiddies. Reality is never this simple and polarized. I like seeing things mixed up. Hell, I also get accused for being an MS ad executive around here. This bullshit "burn the witch" attitude isnt helping.

Consiering this guy just posted a piece about how silverlight isnt doing so well and all his entries are approved by slashdot editors, well what exactly are you saying? Perhaps you saying that your little reality tunnel cant take any criticism so you lash out and scream 'Conspiracy! Burn the witch?'

In other news..

[Rob T Firefly]

..there seems to be little demand for the programming language I invented the other day while I had the flu, and a frightening lack of instructional books on Amazon for it. That's a real shame, because after some chicken soup and a good night's sleep I no longer remember how the goddamned thing works, and was really looking forward to cookbooking it.

MS moving too quickly

[TheRealMindChild]

It also doesn't help that Silverlight is BARELY just making it onto peoples machines and they are already releasing betas of Silverlight 2.0

You can't expect people to jump onboard if your product is a moving target. No one wants to be left in the dust.

Re:MS moving too quickly

[kurokaze]

Good point! You gotta give book authors more time to play with your tech to be able to write some good material on it. That process could take months. Moving forward with another release is sure to displease these people.

Re:MS moving too quickly

[RingDev]

I would agree, but having used the initial version, and the beta of version 2, it is well worth it to make the jump. Silverlight 1 to me really feels like a proto-type. Nothing about it struck me as a 'flash killer' system, heck, it barely even registered as a 'flash competitor'. But 2.0... There were huge improvements, all managed code under the pretty graphics, a good deal of the .Net 3.0 framework is exposed, the tools, VS.Net 2008 and Blend are much improved. Now it is starting to look like a really nice product. I haven't check out the initial release of 2.0 (just came out earlier this week), but one of my co-workers is already playing with it, and I've been working with the beta for a few months now.

It may be MS, but I like seeing some competition for Flash. Especially if that competition leads to improvements being made in both solutions.

-Rick

Re:MS moving too quickly

[darthflo]

Silverlight 1.0 is flash competition hurried to production. It has it's advantages and disadvantages but few things really worth noting.
The 2.0 release changes lots. Real integration with the .NET languages, LINQ, ... It's where flash gets kicked into the lower back several times before being handed it's testicles on a silver(light) platter. If you're going to dislike the release schedule, hate 1.0, not the good stuff.

Re:MS moving too quickly

[Dragonshed]

Alot of people have been waiting to see what 2.0 looks like before jumping on board. 1.0 had many limitations and deficiencies that most didn't want to deal with. The entire programming model has changed from Javascript in v1.0 to C# (or any .NET language, with assemblies, debugger support, etc) in 2.0. It is also possible to use IronPython, IronRuby, and VB, but I haven't yet experimented with any of those.

Silverlight 2.0 draws many parallels to .NET as it contains a fully fledged .NET CLR while running on both Windows and MacOS X, sporting an API similar to WPF (Xaml visuals, Storyboards and Animations, Templated and Styled Controls, databinding, etc) and yet is still a nimble 4.3 meg download to end users.

Based on the demand for MIX tickets and Sessions, and on conversations I've had with various people, I think there will be a substantial increase of interest in the 2.0 beta compared to 1.0. Anyone that has produced a site in SL1 knew 2.0 was coming, it was just a matter of the form and function details.

Lastly, Miguel de Icaza was at MIX showing Moonlight on linux running a few SL1.0 samples. Just as with any major Mono project, expect a lag time of up to a full product cycle behind MS's releases.

1.5 million times every day ?

[pembo13]

How is that even possible? Only geeks, I would think, know about it. Not everyone who knows about it wants it. And Not everybody who wants it has Windows to even be able to run it. How can that subset maintain 1.5 x 10^6 a day??

Re:1.5 million times every day ?

[apdyck]

The answer to this question is simple. I did a fresh install of Windows XP last night (for a client), and my third round of Windows Updates (after the Windows Installer and the bulk of the updates, including IE7), one of the updates was for Silverlight. To be fair, it was considered an optional update, but the average computer user sees update and thinks "I need that for increased security" or some such. Long and short, it's on Windows Update, and that's why they're getting so many downloads.

Re:1.5 million times every day ?

[bvankuik]

I did a fresh install of Windows XP last night (for a client)

Suuuure... last night I lighted a smoke -- for a friend, of course! ;-) I also pretasted his whiskey, just to make sure it was alright ;-)

Re:1.5 million times every day ?

[apdyck]

lol well, the computer WAS for someone else, although I do dual-boot myself.

As bad as flash

[dbuttric]

Silverlight and flash are two evil things on the web.
Time after time, I download the software, and run the installer, only to have NOTHING HAPPEN.

Either that, or the plugin does not install into all my browsers, just the dominant one for that OS - it installs into IE, and Safari, but not Firefox on either platform.

What good is this type of thing anyway? Sure it provides a framework for fewer roundtrips to the server, but if it doesn't work, you're right back where you started.

Frustrating.

Waiting for 2.0

[Westley]

I suspect many developers have been waiting for 2.0 as the "real" Silverlight. It feels to me like 1.0 was mostly a stake in the ground to make it clear that MS is trying for the same market as Flex etc - but it wasn't enough to build proper applications.

2.0 should (if it lives up to hype/expectations) be much more useful.

Given that beta 1 has only just been released, it's not at all surprising that there isn't a lot of demand for developers in the marketplace yet, nor books available.

Re:Waiting for 2.0

[JcMorin]

I agree, as a developer in the .NET platform since it release, the silverlight doesn't seems reader. Most tool and application are still beta or alpha. It's sort of Visual beta studio out of a alpha editor with version that still change.

I'm not the type of guy who is afraid to write part of my html code by hand, but XAML code by hand is not my first choice to start...

Here is my tips for Microsoft to get more dev:

- Give us a final build of Silverlight (currently: Silverlight 2 Beta 1!!!)
- Give us a final build of Visual Studio 2008 (still CTP)
- Give us a final build of XAML (Expression Blend beta and Expression Blend 2.5 preview doesn't fit as final for me)

Re:Waiting for 2.0

[siamesepurr771]

I didn't RTFA but they should have added in job listing for "Flex" since it's a Flash technology, but many listings for Flex developers don't mention "Flash". The difference would have been even more striking, I bet.

Re:Waiting for 2.0

[sootman]

No, no, no... with MS it's not good until version three. And just to be sure, I myself am waiting for Silverlight 3.11 for Workgroups.

Re:Waiting for 2.0

[blackdoor]

You are absolutely correct. I was burned with ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 (ASP.NET 2.0 was what 1.0 should have been). I will not make that mistake with Silverlight or with any product from MS again.

Stupid choice of metrics.

[cow ninja]

Stupid choice of metrics. There are more Windows 3.11 books at my local library than there are Vista books. So there must be more demand for Windows 3.11.

How many books were on the shelf six months after Flash was released? How about job postings? Compare those numbers with Silverlight if you must use a stupid metric like this.

Troll article.

Re:Stupid choice of metrics.

[blind biker]

So there must be more demand for Windows 3.11. It wouldn't surprise me all that much.

Re:Stupid choice of metrics.

[cmburns69]

Given the (lack of) marketplace acceptance for Windows Vista, I'd suggest that there may, in fact, be more demand for Windows 3.11.

Cross-platform, or not?

[dalleboy]

I'm still a bit concerned about the supposed cross-platform-ness. Is the Javascript file Silverlight.js still used to initialize the Silverlight object in Silverlight 2? If that is the case it will never be truly cross-platform.

If you aren't running one of the platforms supported by Microsoft (Windows (IE, Firefox) and Mac OS X (Firefox, Safari)) you will get redirected to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=92800 (or similar), regardless if you have a Silverlight compatible plugin installed. Using the Silverlight.js file is the defacto standard way of initializing Silverlight, at least in previous releases.

It will be the responsibility to each web-developer to update their copy of Silverlight.js in order to get Silverlight to run on other platforms than the ones directly supported by Microsoft. This will never happen, except perhaps for a small portion that are Moonlight enthusiasts.

Re:Cross-platform, or not?

[Chester K]

I'm still a bit concerned about the supposed cross-platform-ness. Is the Javascript file Silverlight.js still used to initialize the Silverlight object in Silverlight 2? If that is the case it will never be truly cross-platform.

Silverlight initializes and runs just fine with just an <object> tag in the page with type="application/x-silverlight". There's no lockin here preventing a third-party implementation like Moonlight from registering the MIME type and handling it themselves.

Silverlight.js is just a helper script that adds some additional checks to verify that you have the required version of Silverlight and to display the install prompt HTML if you don't. In the end, it just generates that same <object> tag (with that same MIME type) and inserts it into the DOM.

Millions?

[The Aethereal]

Of those millions, how many are like me and have downloaded and installed Silverlight, but can not make it work? When I browse to a Silverlight page, it just says that I need to install Silverlight. So I uninstall it, redownload, and reinstall. Nothing changed. I believe this is in IE and Firefox.

.net

[hey]

However, sadly, there are lots .net jobs.
Microsoft's clone of Java.
So maybe in a couple years there will be demand for Microsoft's clone of Flash.

Re:.net

[Micar]

Why is this sad? The .NET platform has its quirks, but Microsoft did a lot right. As a new developer, I found it extremely easy to learn because of its uniform implementation, extensive documentation, and large community. No, it's not the only platform that has this, but it certainly helps. Now I can market those skills to a large base of employers and be confident that I can adapt to related technologies (WF, WPF, Silverlight) with ease. Again, why is this sad?

Re:.net

[roaddemon]

It's sad that gp was modded as insightful for such a petty dig. DotNet is one of the best platforms available, is a massive improvement over vb6/com, has a very good support network and good to great tools available. Yet calling it sad is insightful. Soviet Russia Overlord supports Beowulf cluster window$ sucks mindless groupthink.

Re:.net

[CodeBuster]

How was this post moded insightful? Has the poster even used .NET? You could just as well argue that Java ripped off C++ and that C++ ripped of C and so on all the way back to Algol which could be argued to have ripped off previous languages. All programming environments and languages owe a debt to the ones that have come before. However, even putting that part of the argument aside the major innovation of .NET was the the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the Common Type System (CTS). The IL assembly idea was implemented in Java as well, but Java was limited to well Java and although there were attempts to compile other languages into Java assembly byte codes they were a limited success at best because of the lack of a common type loading and description mechanism which made it difficult to reproduce types that could be reused in a Java program at the programming language level (i.e. it might run in the VM even though you wrote it in Eifel and compiled it to Java bytecode, but try adding that compiled library back into your Java solution and using the "classes" and "methods" in Java code and you will see the potential shortcomings). It was not enough to have a common virtual assembly. In order to achieve meaningful cross platform and cross language programming there needed to be a common type description and initialization system built on top of the virtual assembly language and that is the idea that .NET brought to the table.

Re:.net

[initdeep]

noooo....
not possibly

not on /.

they never groupthink here......

Re:.net

[Locutus]

Why is this sad? It is sad because it locks out a larger portion of the market. It is sad because it locks in developers and customers to one platform. It is sad because it was designed to do both these and so many are ignorant of this. It is sad that so many are fooled into the belief it is not sad and therefore exclude many from the products and services they provide. To name just a few reasons it might be sad.

LoB

Re:.net

[dlim]

It is sad because it locks in developers and customers to one platform. I think you're either a little off or exaggerating. If I build web applications (or more on topic, Silverlight applications) using .NET as a platform, does that mean users on Mac OS X / Linux / mobile devices / etc can't use my application? No. Does that mean I have to run my application on Windows Server w/ IIS? Probably. Was I unaware of that when I designed my application? No. While I will agree that vendor lock is generally something to avoid, it's never the only consideration when building an app.

It is sad because it was designed to do both these and so many are ignorant of this. It is sad that so many are fooled into the belief it is not sad and therefore exclude many from the products and services they provide.

You seem to have some idea in your head that .NET developers are unaware of Microsoft's business practices. Or that we're gullible to develop in .NET. I've got years of Java and .NET experience. Some projects call for one, some the other. When I design an application, I consider the advantages and trade offs of each one as it relates to the project and I make a decision.

In my opinion, what's really sad is platform zealots who make broad generalizations without providing any useful information.

Re:.net

[JesterXXV]

It is sad because it locks out a larger portion of the market.

If you're talking about the OS market, you're correct that MS never wrote (or like will write) a Linux or Mac port of .NET, but they never stopped the Mono dudes from doing their thing. Also: who cares? What obligation are they under to provide this product, or any other, to every known platform, no matter the costs or difficulties associated with that kind of scope?

Also, they're not locking anybody out; if you need cross-platform functionality, use something cross-platform. As soon as they show up at your doorstep and remove all traces of Java, Python, Ruby, Boo, Mono, gcc, g++, Pascal, PowerBuilder, Haskell, AspectJ, FORTRAN, bash, COBOL, Lisp, Delphi, ML, Erlang, PHP, Perl, GW-BASIC, Tcl, Lua, Ada, and any other non-MS language or framework from your life, they're not locking anybody into or out of anything. To imply so is disingenuous.

It is sad because it locks in developers and customers to one platform.

Again, it's not locking anybody into or out of anything, because that implies a lack of choice. You're free to choose any tool you want to program new apps. There is no proverbial gun to your head.

It is sad because it was designed to do both these and so many are ignorant of this.

You know what it was designed to do? Make Microsoft money! Horrors! Which is the same reason Sun made Java, and it's the same reason they're going (or have gone) open-source with it: because their potential profit of that decision outweighs any other disadvantages. Obviously Microsoft doesn't perceive it that way, for better or worse. Whether these decisions make sense from a profit standpoint is up to future historians to figure out. But it doesn't make sense to treat MS as something like an oppressor when you're perfectly free to avoid them, and free to encourage others to do so as well.

Re:.net

[Locutus]

I think you're either a little off or exaggerating. If I build web applications (or more on topic, Silverlight applications) using .NET as a platform, does that mean users on Mac OS X / Linux / mobile devices / etc can't use my application? No. Yes it does unless somehow, hell has frozen over and Microsoft has changed it's course after 20+ years. It might it work on day one, two, or even three on those non-Windows platforms but then it will break sometime later.

You seem to have some idea in your head that .NET developers are unaware of Microsoft's business practices. Or that we're gullible to develop in .NET. I've got years of Java and .NET experience. Some projects call for one, some the other. When I design an application, I consider the advantages and trade offs of each one as it relates to the project and I make a decision. You are in the minority. I also understand that many many Microsoft platform developers are stuck using tools their managers dictate and many Microsoft platform developers are happy just waiting until Microsoft provides them with a tool to do X, Y, and/or Z. There are many reasons but the one thing I find most common is that they have little clue of how Microsoft has for 20+ years honed its marketing techniques and business practices such that the best tool for the job is not and option to the Microsoft platform developer. Their tactics are not visible by looking at a small moment in time or at single steps or releases. They take time and if you do not know or watch what they do you have no understanding of how bad 99% of their tools are for software freedom of choice.

In my opinion, what's really sad is platform zealots who make broad generalizations without providing any useful information. I'm getting really sick and tired of educating you guys on how Microsft has destroyed companies, products, peoples lives over the last 20+ years. Platform zealot huh? For some reason the phrase "Jane you ignorant slut" comes to mind. Sorry but my comments come from seeing Microsoft play games with the market and instead of creating choice, they continue to destroy choice. Learn your history, you just may be repeating it. IMO.

LoB

Re:.net

[Locutus]

If you're talking about the OS market, you're correct that MS never wrote (or like will write) a Linux or Mac port of .NET, but they never stopped the Mono dudes from doing their thing. Also: who cares? What obligation are they under to provide this product, or any other, to every known platform, no matter the costs or difficulties associated with that kind of scope?

Sherman Antitrust rules for operating under a monopoly for one. Are the selling these tools/products for the cost of developing them? Are they paying companies to use their tools over others on the market? And the Mono guys are fools for thinking that having a half-baked late to market lame ass copy of Microsoft's patent encumbered software is good for the development community.

Also, they're not locking anybody out; if you need cross-platform functionality, use something cross-platform. As soon as they show up at your doorstep and remove all traces of Java, Python, Ruby, Boo, Mono, gcc, g++, Pascal, PowerBuilder, Haskell, AspectJ, FORTRAN, bash, COBOL, Lisp, Delphi, ML, Erlang, PHP, Perl, GW-BASIC, Tcl, Lua, Ada, and any other non-MS language or framework from your life, they're not locking anybody into or out of anything. To imply so is disingenuous.

Right, paying companies to use their product is all about choice. I remember there was once a company called Netscape who had a web browser. You had a choice to use Netscapes product or any of the other products/browsers on the market. At that point, over 80% of the market picked Netscape Navigator. Then Microsoft started paying people to use their browser. They threatened OEM systems providers if they did not pre-load Microsofts browser, they bought out contracts Netscape had with ISPs and yes, paid them to use Internet Explorer. Where did that choice go? Where did Netscape go? What browser has the most marketshare now and what choice do users know they have? So are you saying that if there is one tiny speck of a choice then anything Microsoft does to gain its marketshare for its products is fine and a good thing for everyone? I call bull shit on that one. And if you think Microsoft has to send people to peoples doorsteps to limit choice you're probably too simple minded to understand the concepts of choice, the tactics used to limit choice, and operation under the Sherman Antitrust Act for monopolies.

Again, it's not locking anybody into or out of anything, because that implies a lack of choice. You're free to choose any tool you want to program new apps. There is no proverbial gun to your head.

Tell that to the companies and developers who once thought that because Microsoft was promoting and licensing Win32 source for cross platform UNIX applications. Oh wait, they are all gone. And what happened you might ask? Once those developers ported their UNIX apps to Win32, Microsoft pulled the rug out from under them and eliminated the cross platform support. BANG, no more UNIX version of those applications. BANG, choice is gone at the whim of Microsoft. Know your history before you shoot your mouth off and talk about choice in regards to any Microsoft product, tool, etc.

You know what it was designed to do? Make Microsoft money! Horrors!

Where is the profits from this? They are freaking paying people to use this stuff and they are likely willing to lose billions doing this if that is what it takes to eliminate choice or atleast get developers tied to Windows instead of being cross platform with Flash/Flex.

Which is the same reason Sun made Java, and it's the same reason they're going (or have gone) open-source with it: because their potential profit of that decision outweighs any other disadvantages.

Sun does not and did not have a monopoly position do leverage and they didn't have the resources to pay people billions of dollars over years to make sure Java won the market. Speaking of Java, Microsoft went on a tear back then and was purchasing up Java compan

Re:.net

[JesterXXV]

Are attempting to discuss things rationally, or just rant, and insult anybody who doesn't take your arguments at face value? Maybe there's a very good reason nobody listens to what you're saying: you come off like an asshole who doesn't care that his message is garbled by its embittered delivery.

I sure as hell am not going to take you or your views seriously when you think I'm "mouthing off" or clueless just because I don't agree with you. Because that makes you a troll.

Re:.net

[dedazo]

I'm getting really sick and tired of educating you guys

If you spent half the time you spend on this annoying and arrogant "evangelism" drive of yours on actually doing something of value to reduce the amount of dependency people have on Microsoft technologies, the world would be an awesome place indeed. Alas, 15 years of bitching has produced exactly nothing of value as far as I can tell.

All you armchair advocates are the same. People pay attention to what you're saying and understand your opinions if you are honest, humble, mature and truthful. They don't have to be forced to believe.

Re:.net

[Locutus]

Did you even look to see if anything I had said was documented or available via a search engine before you questioned my comments in public? There are thousands and thousands of pages worth of information backing what I said and I don't have the time or inclination to educate you on this when there is enough available at your finger tips. Unless you are too lazy to look and why should I spend the time educating you when you seem to know better than I?

And you better believe it that I get riled up about this since ignorance to history in the same industry one makes a living is pathetic and way too common. But I will admit that I answered your reply after another which did attack my merits and intentions. I brought some of that over to your reply and I should not have. For that, I apologize.

LoB

Re:.net

[Locutus]

how true, how true. And you know, I can probably only count a handful of people who even had the interest to look into what I had said, see the story as it was, and then make changes to how they helped financed the Microsoft corporation. But you know, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of software is not going to stop Microsoft from continuing to destroy choice. Writing software is not going stop Microsoft from paying people to flood standards committees so their own self controlled document format becomes a ISO standard. It is not going to stop Microsoft from publishing threats of patent infringement or the like.

Just over 15 years ago, Microsoft used the press to spread its FUD via monthly printed tech journals and when it was exposed, they would print tiny retractions a few months later. They'd make statements which stalled companies sales by just putting out a press release and pretty much end the companies income and put them out of business. Those days are over for Microsoft and the way news and information is published today is the best thing to use against their threats to choice. I should hold my tongue more often than not and should consider that those on the other end may actually be as naive as they appear. But there is no way I will stop trying to expose the anticompetitive practices of the Microsoft Corporation because beyond illegal means, there is no other way to stop them from continuing their rampage on software choice.

I will consider changing my tactics though because no matter how soft or how loud I am, people don't get it. So maybe, if I just point them to all the existing data still available from other sources and they get off the asses and actually read those sources, they just might believe what I had originally said.

LoB

Re:.net

[dedazo]

Fair enough. Just one thing though -

Just over 15 years ago, Microsoft used the press to spread its FUD via monthly printed tech journals and when it was exposed, they would print tiny retractions a few months later.

Keep in mind this is no different from the barrage of FUD being thrown at Microsoft every day from sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc. Slashdot in particular has turned Microsoft bashing into a profitable business model. This article is just one of the thousands of examples of that. Do they report the bad things accurately? Sure. That doesn't mean they don't spend the rest of their time exaggerating and misreporting everything else in order to generate more page views and mode ad revenue.

FUD is that, FUD. Lies are just that - lies. It doesn't matter who is responsible for them. Just because you've managed to be disingenuous enough to claim the moral high ground or convince yourself that your opponent is "evil" doesn't mean it's OK to stoop to the same level as them.

Re:.net

[RAMMS EIN]

``However, sadly, there are lots .net jobs.
Microsoft's clone of Java.''

It wasn't a Java clone, it was Java, but better. Only after Microsoft released .NET did Sun get off their asses and added things like a decent type system to Java. Java is a whole lot less horrible now than before .NET, and I think the competition from Microsoft is an important reason for that. I thank Microsoft for that, even though I hate to program in either Java or C# (and yes, I've done that and more).

Re:.net

[JesterXXV]

Did you even look to see if anything I had said was documented or available via a search engine before you questioned my comments in public?

I certainly did not. Claims require evidence, which the claimant (you) must provide. People claim all sorts of shit every microsecond on the Internet. What makes you so special that I should give you that kind of time?

Further, how dare you label me as ignorant of my industry, or anything else? No, I do not follow the legal ins and outs of Microsoft's every move, as you appear to, but that's hardly the breadth of the history of software. I'm far more concerned with the history of languages, object-oriented design, various programming paradigms, artificial intelligence, information security, various visionaries from Babbage to Turing to Knuth to Stallman, the Jargon File, the Game of Life, etc. Then there's the thousands of other interests I have - simple things like the philosphy of science, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, the study of evolution, linguistics, and world religions. So I'll admit with utter anguish that the courtroom dramas of Redmond are pretty goddamn low on my list. Consequently, if that makes me "pathetic" in your eyes, you'll forgive me if I think that says more about your myopia and pretension than my intellect.

Oh, and I accept your half-assed apology.

Re:.net

[Locutus]

So you don't follow them but feel qualified to protect there position when someone else writes of their historical position and consistent acts to deny competition? wow.

LoB

Re:.net

[Locutus]

but you know, if someone does not know their history, does not know their nature then alot of what is said on /. sounds like lies and FUD. But hey, a post from some schlub sitting in an easy chair with his/her laptop does not quite have the teeth to call it FUD. Can a /. post cause anybody to fear anything? Sure there are exaggerations and such but these are from individuals and not a multi billion dollar corporation with so much power they can destroy multi million dollar corporations and put thousands out of work and have done just that. You might use the same 3 letters but they just don't mean the same thing.

I do not claim any moral high ground but I do claim a level of understanding which comes from a couple of decades of experience and observation. The level of understanding which is not only often rejected but also claimed as religious and false by those who don't even have 1/10th the exposure to what has gone on in the tech sector with regards to Microsoft and their business dealings. No moral high ground and I will not lie, cheat, or steal to get others to understand why things like MS Silverlight are bad.

I will say that human nature is funny. People believe what they want to believe and without doing their own research, they often deny acceptance and credibility of those who seem to want to shake their beliefs. No matter how shallow the foundation of those beliefs. Human nature is funny and Microsoft is in a nice position in that regard. And they must know it too or they wouldn't have spend millions purchasing up parked web sites to make sure their web server numbers didn't drop below ~40%.

Believe me or don't, but the facts are all just a search engine away. There's the Java saga, the Netscape saga, the Dimension X saga, the Coopers and Peters saga, the OS/2 saga, the ISO-MS-OOXML vs ODF saga, theres the Mainsoft / Bristol /Unix saga and dozens more which all point the fact that MS Silverlight is not about competition or building a better product. It is about keeping developers tied to the Windows platform. It means there does not have to be profits from this project because its value is protecting the profits from Windows. bla bla bla. And when you figure it out, try telling it to someone and see what kind of look or reaction you get when you tell them how bad Microsoft has been. Or just walk away and do nothing like so many do. After all, it can only be FUD if you don't understand it.

LoB

Re:.net

[JasterBobaMereel]

The problem is yes .NET is nice but once you start you tend to get locked in .NET means you program in C# most of the time
  you program on Windows most of the time
  you use IIS
  you program in Silverlight
  you email with Outlook
  you have an exchange server
  you have a sharepoint server

and since these all interact so easily and have a common codebase then switching between them is easy, and switching to anything else is difficult, in the same way using the MS solution is easy and trying to replace any part of that solution with anything else is overly difficult

None of this is a problem until MS jack the price of one essential part up or on a whim decide to stop supporting one part (as they have done many times in the past) and you have to replace it with their next big idea ...

Contrast this with non-MS systems that most parts can be replaced relatively easily because they are all produced by different people anyway and so have to interact via well known and documented interfaces that anyone can use, so there are likely to be several alternative applications to any one part of the solution

Mono on Linux is a red herring, and Silverlight on OSX is the same, development/assistance by MS will stop as soon as they have enough market share not to care anymore, and since much of the code is patented they can shut down any opensource efforts they no longer want to continue ...

kdawson

[El Lobo]

kdawson. What a surprise!

Re:Why switch? Because Flash drops the ball?

[King_TJ]

I'm not preaching that Silverlight holds the answers, or anything remotely like that. But in MANY people's opinions, Flash technology has really "dropped the ball" when it comes to keeping up with the times.

When I first remembered it gaining in popularity, people were simply fascinated by the new-found ability to make web sites look more sophisticated and polished. You could do photo-realistic animations with your menus, have 3D fonts moving about the screen without having to render them ahead of time, trying to scale/size them for the page you were going to paste them in, etc.

In the present, most people take a "been there, seen that" attitude towards Flash-heavy web pages. They look for the "skip" button as soon as one opens up, because they know the real "content" isn't going to be found in waiting for the bar graph to finish loading to 100% completion, only to hear some techno music playing behind a big video with the corporate logo spinning around. The places where I see Flash used today tend to be interactive games, such as the children's games developed for sites like pbskids.org or nickjr.com.

In this arena, Flash may still be "king" - but it sure isn't giving a stable experience! I have a 5 year old, so I know! She loves playing the mini-games on these web sites, but I'm constantly hearing, "Dad!! Help! It stopped working!", only to go over to the PC and find it frozen up, or the arrow keys unresponsive in the game. Usually, I have to refresh the whole thing, losing her position in the game. Sometimes, the whole browser has to be closed and restarted.

It's even worse if you're not using the "preferred platform" of a Windows box running Internet Explorer 7.

Adobe long ago dropped support for their Flash player for classic MacOS, for example. Sure, it's an "outdated" platform, but an awful lot of old iMac G3's and G4's are still out there being used as "kid's computers", so this is a place where a current Flash player would still get a lot of use! They still have no Flash player developed for Apple's iPhone either, and that's an example of a NEW device they should have been on top of from the start.

They're certainly making a great case for themselves that somebody ELSE needs to come along with a competing product!

1.5 mils?

[ztcamper]

Must be all the desperate people taking Vista quiz to win a polo shirt...
http://www.microsoft.com/australia/vistafacts/fact.aspx

Silver WHAT?

[bobs666]

Ya I had to look it up.

Oh, that's not the web.
Microsoft is not the web.
Why would I down load Silverlight to see some MS page.
Anyway, I am Betting it will not work on my KDE desktop.
M$ tends to expect you to run there OS...
So its not the interoperable thus is not the web.

MS get a life.

Re:Silver WHAT?

[SQLGuru]

Actually, there's a Linux version of Silverlight.....it was linked in a post higher up, so I won't re-link here.

Layne

Re:Silver WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya I had to look it up .... I am Betting it will not work on my KDE desktop.

A word to the wise: when you don't know anything about what you're talking about, it's time to stop talking.

Re:Silver WHAT?

[bobs666]

A word to the wise: when you don't know anything about what you're talking about, it's time to stop talking.

I hear your pie hole flapping.

You just enjoy while the rest of the world passes you by.

SD West

[heffrey]

Here at SD West this week there have been a handful of talks about Silverlight, but nothing about Flash. I guess that's because Silverlight is new and everyone already knows how to do Flash.

file under 'the sun also rises'

[jscob]

what else would you expect 6 mos after release?

next you'll be telling me that almost 3 mos after winter solstice the days are still getting longer but still not as long as they will be when summer solstice occurs...

why does this crap make it on slashdot? Ericatw should be banned from submitting posts after yet another crappost.

Re:Why switch? Because Flash drops the ball?

[tupletuple]

Why anyone would expect silverlight to work well with anything but the "preferred platform" of a Windows box running Internet Explorer is beyond me. No, not in the first 2-3 years, but when there is any kind of market saturation. How long before any support for Mac or linux is limited (or any FF plugins for it, for that matter), if not dropped. Granted, I haven't found the fabled linux support at all, but even if it comes, Microsoft has an interest in making it less functional/stable/usable for any non MS platforms, the same would be true of any mac version. Even a community driven version will be broken because MS won't really tell of all the changes to their "new" update/upgrade. You can argue, but MS has already shown a propensity for this behavior in the past. Many, many times.

Is this really surprising?

[awjr]

A technology that requires you to be running Windows (there is a nod towards delivering a Linux runtime at some point) and inside a browser.

In comparison, you have a Adobe's Flash runtime which pretty much permeates the browser 'sphere', the release of AIR which completely discards the browser (which is a hugely significant for business), and Flex which can be considered a mature development environment seeing as they've now hit version 3. Adobe have also committed to not use anything other than Flash 9 for the Flex SDK until at least version 4. So we are talking about a 4 year stable build environment and Flash is always built backwards compatible.

I really can't see why a business would choose Silverlight as a delivery technology. There are too many OSs out there to bet everybody I want to deliver my apps to are running Windows.

I will evaluate Silverlight when I can see it as *cross-platform* and not a *cross-browser* solution. Until that day arrives I'll poke it with a stick to see all the sparkly bits, but I'm not investing my time on a single platform technology. I realise the same could be said for AIR, however they already are in Beta for Linux, and I believe they are testing OS X as well. I don't see any of this type of effort coming out of Microsoft.

Now if Adobe could commit to releasing AIR for PDAs/Mobiles at some point, then I think we may have complete ownage.

Re:Is this really surprising?

[ashridah]

Uh. You mean these cross platform files? Don't know what you're seeing, but there's a MacOSX link there. Admittedly, the Linux version is a ways off yet, but it's getting there, and is getting help from microsoft, so it'll get there eventually. (patent issues nonwithstanding)

So... evaluating it yet? Or do you have another excuse?

Re:Is this really surprising?

[awjr]

Those Mac Intel only cross platform files?

Lack of time is a big factor. I have to choose a technology that is mature, cross platform and deliverable now. More importantly I have to have the perception that it's *important* to the business strategy of the company. Adobe are pressing all the right buttons for me (even open sourcing the SDK).

As a caveat I am a Coldfusion developer and was able to hook a Flex reporting app to our servers in a matter of minutes. More importantly the Flex Builder plugged into my current Eclipse installation seamlessly so I had very little downtime. Are these the right reasons? Probably not.

Do I think Microsoft have a lot to do to catch up with Adobe Flash 9? I think so. With Silverlight 2 in beta already 5 months after the release of 1.1, it's almost like they are racing against Flash. I would expect at least 18 months between versions. To MS advantage, Adobe have dictated that Flex will run on Flash 9 for the next 4 years so they have time to play catch up and do funky stuff with graphics etc.

I think, however the real point is being missed. Adobe have sorted there runtime environment out a long time ago. What they are now doing is removing the need for a browser with AIR. From a business point of view, this is where it gets very useful.

I honestly think when Silverlight hits version 3 (which should be within a year based on current release schedules) I might look again but not now. Not with what they did with Vista, or IE on the Mac, or Java 1.1 IDE. There is unfortunately a certain level of mistrust here.

easy formula for domination

[Locutus]

Leverage the monopoly and wait til success arrives.
If it does not happen too quickly, start paying for a quicker uptake.

Success using this simple technique has been quite good for Microsoft. Failures are all but guaranteed when they can't find a way to leverage the marketshare of Windows.

This silverlight software is all about the Windows desktop, is their response to Adobes position such that they are also pre-installed on close to 100% of the computer which are pre-installed with Microsoft Windows. Couple that distribution capability with the Adobe Flash/Flex capabilities to tie into backend services for a very rich client experience and Adobe is as much of a threat to Microsoft as Netscape once was.

BTW, Microsoft is out purchasing uptake for Silverlight at this moment. We've already heard about the US Library of Congress deal and there's a few more I can't recall specifically. Oh and with web pages so often relying on a plugin feature like Flash, I think Microsoft figured out that they no long need to keep proprietary HTML extensions in the browser to lock in developers to Windows, they have the above formula and Silverlight. Another nice lockin technology. IMO.

LoB

Becasue Actionscript Sucks Balls?

[N8F8]

Seriously.

Why Silverlight?

[bhima]

OK I confess I don't really pay attention to Flash and I thought that Silverlight was a competitor to Flash. But now there seams to be a legion of competing software development platforms that do things I didn't think people did with Flash. So if Flash is for making things like that "Badger, Badger, Badger, Snake!" Animation (the last thing I remember seeing in Flash). Is Silverlight another animation application? And how are all of these things related to Adobe's Flex and Air?

Thanks slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I get to hear that dev on the Silverlight team bitch loudly about this all morning long...

Re:Why switch? Because Flash drops the ball?

[korbin_dallas]

Yup. Reminds me of the early web pag days remember, when a 'site' had a 'Entry tunnel' and a 'Exit tunnel'.
And everyone just bookmarked the important 'site' page that had the relavent info?

Same thing, except these days when a site informs me "Flash is Required to View this Site"
I backspace to Google and find a 'Less Stupid' company.

Oh look, theres another BRILLIANT idea for Google....they could mark site 'Flash Only' in the summary, then I could avoid them all together.

Fawlty Towers

[RationalRoot]

The company that my brother is currently working for, the Fawlty Towers of the software industry, have decided to go with silverlight. I think the CTO read an article about it in a magazine. Not the first change of technology direction, but however. 1) You can't get developers with experience 2) You can't get contractors with experience 3) You can't get good books. 4) You can't get libraries. Remind you of c# when it came out ? The power and money of the Borg may well be enough to make a success of it..... Remember, they can put it on the vast majority of PCs in the world. You still have to download flash. Watch this spa ce.

JavaFX Script footprint even tinier

[ewg]

Had to check JavaFX Script out of curiosity: it does register on the top employment sites, but at an order of magnitude smaller than Silverlight.

Not invented here..

[LingNoi]

Microsoft's not invented here syndrome, flash style.

Hmm...

[neowolf]

So, an obscure Microsoft-centric platform isn't getting attention from developers?

Maybe it is because Web developers want to write applications that can be used on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Probably because the people who are PAYING said developers want that.

Just a thought.

it'll get popular

[pak9rabid]

I'm probably going to get trolled for this, but here goes. As long as there's people using Visual Studio, there will be a demand for Silverlight Apps. I'll have to give credit to Microsoft when it comes to Visual Studio's ability to integrate lots of different technologies in one easy-to-use platform. I hate Microsoft as much as the next person, but my least painful experience with them was using Visual Studio back in school. As soon as they integrate this stuff into Visual Studio (maybe VS 2008 already has this?), people will start using it.

Update

[hpavc]

Only reason its downloaded would be the update feature.

US government forces citizens to use Silverlight

[walterbyrd]

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/web_services_browser/what_3_million_buys_silverlight.html

Silverlight does not work with Linux, and offers only limited support for Mac. But the US Library of Congress took a $3 bribe from msft to force the US to only use msft products. If you want access to public documents, you have to use microsoft - nothing else will work.

Clearly msft will force this standard on everybody, just like msft will force OOXML on everybody. Once Silverlight is deployed everywhere, developers will start supporting it.

I don't trust Silverlight

[Denis Lemire]

The only thing I see in Silverlight is yet another attempt to create a platform that ties people to Windows. Sure there is currently an OS X port and a Linux port in the works, but how long will the non-Windows implementations be maintained once Silverlight is entrenched throughout the web?

It is no different then Microsoft discontinuing Windows Media Player for OS X. The ports are there now to entice us into accepting the platform. Once every one is dependent on it the ports for alternative platforms will fall behind and receive little maintenance. Once they've fallen sufficiently behind, to the point of incompatibility with the Windows implementation, they will be silently dropped.

Microsoft has a track record of this kind of behavior. I see no reason why Silverlight will be any different then any of their past endeavors. I for one don't trust them with the web. Silverlight will never be installed on any of my computers, period.

Sure, Flash support has been less then perfect on non-Windows platforms, but at least its not developed by a monopolistic operating system vendor with a hidden agenda and a long history of vendor lock-in technologies.

In the mean time, any site that requires Silverlight will soon be receiving hits from me at their competitors site.

Re:I don't trust Silverlight

[Shados]

The difference is fairly big: the customers here aren't the people using Silverlight to use the applications. Its the developers and content providers. If MS stops providing it cross platform, it becomes useless to the developers. And that is more troublesome.

Little piece of info: Silverlight was originaly WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere), a subset of Windows' new UI framework, but crossplatform. The developers who liked WPF (especially the XBAPs, which are WPF applications that can be served through a browser, with zero HTML and stuff...), but figured it would be totally useless on the mainstream web (its useful internally for business apps though), pushed very hard on WPF/E (Which is now Silverlight 2.0. The first Silverlight has very little to do with the WPF/E previews) to have as much as possible included in it, so they could serve WPF on Windows and Macs (at the time, Linux wasn't in the picture). People also pushed a lot to have it elsewhere, thus MS' indirect support for Moonlight.

Assuming it catch on (and it will: the problem is that Silverlight 1.0 is NOT what developers have been pushing and hyping... Silverlight 2.0 is... 1.0 was just released to help make its name, but it has very little to do with WPF/E, unlike 2.0. Crossplatform web-deployable .NET development will be part of 2.0, which a lot of .NET developers are drooling over), MS will simply not be able to pull the plug on it. The developer push is too strong.

Thats again, fairly different from things like IE and WMP for Macs. MS isn't supplying a product to people who wish Microsoft didn't exist. They're supplying a product to the people who live and breath Microsoft: .NET developers. And those developers request cross-platform support. (And I'm not talking about the average forum dweller. I'm talking about the corporate customers here, the big cash cows). In those situations, Microsoft has mostly always delivered. Crap products sometimes, but they never dropped support. (Before pointing out VB6 and COM, keep in mind COM/COM+ interop is a fully supported part of .NET)

Shooting themselves in the foot?

[nobodyman]

I seem to remember that Silverlight was unveiled around the same times that Steve Ballmer ran his mouth off about all of those mystery patents that linux was infringing upon. I really think that this ended up turning off the audience that they were trying to engage.

41 times is not a lot

[Saint Gerbil]

When you compare that Silver light is a 6 months old beta vs a 10 year old app of course the market will have many many more flash jobs than Silverlight. I'm almost astounded that its as little as 41 I would expect it to be nearer 100. As for browser penetration Silverlight isn't there yet which is why theres not a lot of demand but 1.5 Million a day is a much faster up take than flash.

Silverlight is dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Amazon confirms it.
That's pretty much what this article is saying, and yet it got past the same editors who would happily mod a similar comment into oblivion.

Downloaded or Pushed onto?

[crovira]

I am always leery of anything Microsoft claims.

The "downloads" may in fact be automated requests and the downloader may not even be aware of his download.

hmm

[jason777]

I'm surprised there is any demand yet considering its not even out. The 2.0 beta 1 version was just released a few days ago, which is the version that the developers are really excited about since you can build silverlight apps in managed code. I'm not sure why people are already writing off silverlight.

.NET != Java Clone

[fyrie]

As a programmer who has done both Java and .NET development I can say that .NET is not a clone of Java. Sure there is some overlap, but they are largely different. I don't think people understand the purpose and strength of .NET/Mono in open source development and in development in general. I keep seeing people talk as if it is an alternative to Java. The design goal of the Java language was to provide a single language that could run on any hardware that had a JVM ("Build once, run anywhere"). The .NET Framework on the other hand is about multiple languages targeting the same platform/runtime. The real power of the platform is that one developer in one part of the world can write libraries and frameworks in one language, and then a developer on the other side of the world can use/extend those libraries/frameworks with another language. That bit is not that visible right now because VB.NET and C#.NET look similar and there is are very few idioms that don't exist in both languages. There are other .NET languages coming down the pipe (F# for example) which look drastically different than C# which will allow developers to solve problems using a drastically different mindset, but the code will still run on the CLR and will be able to be used/extended by other developers using other languages.

Re:.NET != Java Clone

[LDoggg_]

Oh, I get it. So it's kind of like bytecode for the virtual machine that supports other languages.

Really cool of microsoft to come up with that. And it was also really cool of them to come up with a totally new a innovative language like C#. I mean, C# uses "base" whereas Java uses "super". C# uses "using" whereas java uses "import". Totally different, and in no way related to a 2 billion dollar lawsuit for trying to embrace and expand the 1.14 JVM to include MFC classes.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Re:.NET != Java Clone

[fyrie]

From the wikipedia article: "Contrary to the .NET Framework, the JVM was initially designed to support only the Java programming language. However, as time passes, more and more languages were designed to run on the Java platform." So yes, it was cool for MS to come up with that ;).

Re:.NET != Java Clone

[LDoggg_]

Jython was available back in 1997. The .NET CLI wasn't around until August of 2000.
So no, it was cool for the JVM to have multiple language support almost 3 years earlier.

"Flash can't do 3D" is a prevarication

[LinDVD]

To expostulate, if you have a computer with a Pentium 4 or newer CPU, as a Flash developer you can use the high performance Papervision 3D, or if you want max details, there is Away3D, and then the original Sandy. When you say "sufficiently advanced" that's a very subjective term, as some of the websites using these 3D API's are quite advanced compared to other websites built in a different technology, such as Java or Microsoft's Silverlight. If you had said "sufficiently advanced" and compared it to something like 3D done by modern computer games or a video game console such as the Sony Playstation 2, then yes, Flash is still a ways off, but these 3D engines for Flash 9 combined with the JIT compiling that Actionscript 3 uses, is what I would call sufficiently advanced compared to Actionscript 2 (interpreted), for example.

two fight, third wins

[javy_tahu]

that is flash and silverlight and... SVG! (with JavaScript :)

Flash Books?

[FredMastro]

THere were no Flash books when flash came out for years. I remember using Flash ver 2 and there was no such flash books. Flash is in version what? 9? 10? now.

Sliverlight just came out, I would expect lots of books until version 4 or 5

JavaFX?

[peter303]

Is a scripting language fully integrated in the Java environment and JVM. No more clunky 2nd and 3rd languages and glue.

Supposedly this platform will be Flash-interoberable before Silverlight, Android, or iPhone SDK.

And why we need it anyway?

[spectro]

I don't mean this as a flame or anything but I think we are going the wrong way about all this anyways. The only reason Flash and now Silverlight exists is to cover the need for a UI experience HTML cannot provide.

IMHO, HTML (XML, and anything else ending with ML) have done their jobs. Now we are at the point adding more features to it is making it overly complicated so we need to say goodbye and create a new simpler markup language that allows for these rich UI features instead of stuffing more tags into HTML.

We need a new standard with new browsers and all. We could use the opportunity to patent it by a non-profit and license for free to anyone who wants to implement it. The only restriction should be not adding any "extensions" to it (to prevent embrace, extend, extinguish tactics).

Re:And why we need it anyway?

[psbrogna]

Isn't that exactly what MS and Adobe are trying to do?

MOD POST UP she's right about B & the Silverli

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent is essentially correct about Ballmer's offhand remarks about getting Silverlight onto the iPhone. He can't see a business opportunity for the sake of his big(small) sagging dick.

Damn.

[overcaffein8d]

When i read the headline, i was already getting ready to email this to my photography teacher....

.NET & Java (was Re:Why switch?)

[protected_static]

Not to pick nits, but to say that .NET and Java are incompatible with one another isn't true.

Re:.NET & Java (was Re:Why switch?)

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Oh, come on! :-)

We were talking about compatibility here, but the context was about the ability to execute a .NET program on a platform not supported by MS.

Re:.NET & Java (was Re:Why switch?)

[protected_static]

Whoops... I missed the context entirely. I've recently been immersed in a project requiring Java & .NET interop, so I've had it on the brain.

Microsoft Releases Too Much Stuff!

[ayjay29]

In the old days if you were on the MS platform you could get by with VB6 or C++, SQL Server, ASP and maybe a bit of COM.

Then came .net and it was a case of learning .net, which most of the MS (and quite a few of the Java) programmers could handle.

Now there is just too much suff to know if you are going to work on the MS stack:

Dotnet 3.0
Dotnet 3.5
LINQ
Workflow Foundation
Communication Foundation
Presentation Foundation
SilverLight
SQL 2008
VS 2008
Visual Studio Team System
Server 2008
IIS7, WAS
MOSS 2007
Office Development

We will have .net 4.0 betas out in the not too distant, many ppl i chat with (i work as a trainer and developer) are still on .net 2.0 and have never looked at 3.0, never mind 3.5.

Communication Foundation is a great technology, really nice architecture for building web services, trouble is not too many ppl have had time to look at it, and it takes quite a while to get your head around. If ppl had the time to focus on it thay would develop the compitence to build applicaitos with it and drive up the demand.

I've chatted with a lot of people regarding this and pretty much everyone feels the same, there's just not time to learn one technology before the hype shifts to something else. It's pretty much a full time job learning about the latest developments in a specific area.

Re:Microsoft Releases Too Much Stuff!

[Shados]

Of course, you're duplicating a ton of stuff in there. Workflow Foundation, Comm Foundation and Presentation Foundation are .NET 3.0. SQL Server 2008 isn't out yet. Visual Studio Team System is something developers don't need to worrie about (a few features of Visual Studio that should be 5 minutes to pick up if you have the 6000$ version of VS, and a server component that should be handled by infrastructure people), etc. LINQ is just a part of .NEt 3.5, nothing special. Silverlight 1.0 can be safely ignored, and Silverlight 2.0 is just Presentation Foundation with less features (but is effectively the same model). Office development is nothing new, and Sharepoint's been around for a long time.

So that really leaves a list of: .NET 3.5, the formerly known as WinFX stack (.NET 3.0), the 2008 stack of tools, Win Server 2008 (IIS7 is part of it really, there's been a new IIS with every Windows Server), and a new version of Office with its associated stack.

Virtually all of the serious Windows developers I know are already heavily familiar with 2/3rd of that list, and the rest is stuff they don't need for their work (most don't need to know about Office development, very few use Workflow cuz its a niche tool, SQL Server 2008 won't be deployed in most places for years, etc).

Very few people looked at .NET 3.0 because aside for Workflow Foundation (which is fairly high end, few .NET devs will ever touch it, though its wonderful by the way), it wasn't integrated in .NET 3.0, so for all practical purpose, no one did .NET 3.0 until 3.5. And very few people touched 3.5 because it just came out (especially if you don't have an MSDN subscription... the boxed product only recently become available. Its a bit hard to buy something thats not even available yet. It takes more than 3 months.

On our side, we ported our application to 2008 this week. It took... two days. Considering .NET 3.5 is fully backward compatible, expect people to switch as soon as time allows (or funds are allocated). Thats rare early in the year, but by summer, a large amount of projects should be shifted.

Raise your hand if...

[uxbn_kuribo]

You had never heard of Silverlight until it came with a Windows Update. I bet that's how Microsoft is meeting its download quotas.

Re:Raise your hand if...

[I'm Don Giovanni]

So what?
The reason that Flash applets killed of Java applets was that Microsoft bundled Flash with XP. So Flash has no right to complain about optional Windows Updates when they used the bundling train to displace Java.

nil market share

[mrops]

I'm not sure what Microsoft is trying to do, both with Silverlight and .NET in general. Although I see some scope for .NET however Silverlight is another story.

Take a look at HD DVD and Blu-ray, they were trying to capture the biggest market share, once it was apparent that Blu-ray is going to take the lead, HD DVD group gracefully retracted.

Now here is Microsoft, competing products already have the market, why do they even hope to compete. Its not like they have come out with something revolutionary, both .NET and Silverlight are copycat solutions to (maybe) better existing solutions that have already captured the market!

Re:nil market share

[Darinbob]

Now here is Microsoft, competing products already have the market, why do they even hope to compete.

Because this has always been their business strategy. Wait until some technology is developed and a market emerges, then invent their own alternative and leverage everything they have to make it succeed, then (step 3) profit. It doesn't actually matter what field this technology is in. If only Microsoft had created a dictonary where they could look up "core competency".

Re:nil market share

[rtb61]

Unfortunately for M$ this also required a level of trust in the development community that simply does not exist any more. So M$ sees a successful product, tries to copy it and claim it as their innovation and with sufficient advertising and promoting the imaginary benefits, people used to give it a shot but after consistently abusing those customer, those customer have simply stopped going there.

Example for silverlight, how many people read it is silverfish, those slimly scaly critters that eat your carpet. It is all just becoming a joke, most developers are just laughing at M$ as they introduce new MSN web sites that attempt to force people to use silverfish and people just ignore the website. So what next M$ tries to buy Yahoo and make Yahoo a silverfish only website, now that would have been really interesting to watch that market base collapse.

Re:nil market share

[darkpixel2k]

then invent their own alternative and leverage everything they have to make it succeed, then (step 3) profit

And 'leverage' apparently means constantly nag users on every single Microsoft web property about wanting to 'enhance' their experience with Silverlight.

STOP FUCKING ASKING ME IF I WANT TO INSTALL SILVERLIGHT DAMNIT!

Someone needs to invent a firefox extension that responds to every single silverlight install question by submitting a form post with a naughty word to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight-sucks-ass/

Re:Why switch? So, when it becomes SilverFlash

[davidsyes]

Will it have the bang of ammonium nitrate? (I'm sure only anyone not remembering chemistry and lacking an imagination will mod me troll...)

Thank you for improving the signal-to-noise ratio

[WebCowboy]

Detailed, accurate, sensible answer to the "why switch" argument. Nice to see such a post, even if it reads like a Microsoft brochure, because there seems to be a misunderstanding of what Silverlight is trying to offer. I'd like to provide some counterpoints, because ther are some important reasons why software architects may wish to completely avoid using Silverlight in their applications.

1) Performance features - for example an application in silverlight that pulls HD image formats in small chunks, allowing you to zoom into 100mb images instantly.

A lot can be done to move forward standards-based platforms without completely re-inventing the wheel Optimisations made in new browser releases can make Javascript run significantly faster, and Google has demonstrated the ability in its Maps app and elsewhere that quite adequate performance can even be rung out of currently-released AJAX clients.

2) HD Video - that is VC1 compliant as well. Also the ability to support live and multi-cast streaming of HD Video (great for lowbandwidth servers hosting live events, and still providing an HD video of the event.)

One would expect MSFT to support VC1 as it is their own invention. Kinda makes me wince though, because VC1 is kind of like Silverlight--invented by MSFT becasue they wanted to be in control of something, even though H.264 was already there and some might say is superior to VC1 (IIRC H.264 can produce video of the same quality with a slightly lower bandwidth requirement). In any case, when it takes 10 to 20 MbPS (or more) to stream at HD quality Id have to say it is a stretch to say this HD support could be very useful to "low bandwidth servers". I guess it's a bit of personal bias, but I've never considered VC1 to be a properly conceived standard.

3) Easier - By the nature of how Silverlight is designed it is easier to design for and work with. You are basically just managaging Vista type XAML from WPF. No secret formats, etc.

This is a welcome change from the way MSFT has done things since the introduction of Windows (from the API to DCOM, MSFT has come up with too many head-scratchers to count). My concern is that the ease-of-application is just nice juicy bait for the trap. What encumbrances are there to using "Vista type XAML"? Will MSFT demand a license fee if I use silverlight "commercially"? Are patents involved? Can I license my Silverlight apps using GPL? If I want to use it with Linux (Moonlight) without fear of legal reprecussions am I required to obtain it only through Novell? To me, the technical ease-of-use is somewhat offset by the legal complexities that might surround the use of this platform if you aren't exacly an ally of MSFT.

4) Agnostic programming - Silverlight you not only get a rich vector/bitmap based environment, but it is completely language agnostic and you can use anything from C# to VB to Python.

Semantics here, but Silverlight is NOT "completely" language agnostic. It is .NET CLR-centric, and thus you must use .NET dialects of all these languages. If you are not a .NET programmer you will undoubtedly still experience SOME learning curve. That curve isn't there for MSFT platform developers, but some people who do Flash and AJAX and Java in web-based applications do indeed work on MACOS X or other UNIX-like environments. To those people it is STILL presenting something new and unfamiliar.

7) Back to Performance - Flash is a dog on non-Windows OSes. So far Silverlight is showing to be semi-equally fast on Windows and OS X, with low memory consumption on both. The same Flash applet running on Windows could use a couple of MB and running on OS X jump to 30MB and peg the CPU. Flash is NOT as crossplatform as developers would like to lead people to believe because of performance issues like this.


I agree with you on this one. The elephant in the room is Moonlight (you do mot mention Linux--a rather glaring omission gi

going to be roughly compatible?

[sentientbrendan]

at some point in the distant future I imagine.

The point is that competition spurs innovation.

It ALL still sucks at the moment.

[WebCowboy]

Like it or not, Flash is the established de-facto standard for internet video. Works well for me on Linux, by the way.

What does flash's widespread use have to do with its suckage factor? Just because everyone uses it doean't mean it's good. Everyone used to smoke cigarettes--that doesn't mean they were any less harmful for you back then. Flash is to the internet as cigarettes are to the lungs--unhealthy, cancer causing, and laced with harmful toxins.

Flash works like crap on my AMD64 Linux box, by the way.

So you are saying that something which doesn't even exist yet except as a pie-in-the-sky proposal is the "best hope?"

I agree with you on one point--the idea that the HTML5 video element is our "best hope" is indeed laughable, chiefly because HTML5 as a standard is laughable (at least at this point, particularly its backers approach to building a standard). However I have to contend that our "best hope" is indeed something that does not yet exist. Flash is completely hopeless, and there are but the dimmest glimmers of hope in Silverlight, because prospects of it becoming a proper standard are still "pie-in-the-sky"

Sorry, this proposal fails because it requires everyone, everywhere, to change all at once.

Microsoft seems to hope that people will change "everything all at once". Meaningfully adopting Silverlight over existing technologies requires that kind of buy-in for most situations.

Re:It ALL still sucks at the moment.

[filbranden]

Yes, Flash still sucks.

It's not 100% stable on Linux, and you still don't have it for 64-bit platforms. Adobe should release the player as open source.

Considering Flash's popularity, by releasing the code Adobe would have several others (like Ubuntu, RedHat) fixing bugs on it for them. They would provide 64-bit versions of it as well. And they wouldn't have anything to lose, after all, the money they make is on authoring tools for it.

I hope Silverlight will make Adobe see the light and release it as open source, I really don't understand why they didn't do it yet.

Re:It ALL still sucks at the moment.

[Ilgaz]

You know why Flash became de-facto standard for video? Apple, Microsoft, Real Networks made it possible.

Microsoft Media Player: Zero multiplatform support for all features. OS X version got abandoned right after Apple moved to Intel which should make development a LOT easier (e.g. use same SSE acceleration commands, no endian issue). It is now living as a Quicktime codec and those IDIOTS are still distributing the old, PPC only, Browser stability killer, outdated junk. Why? To claim they are multi platform and also destabilise OS X via browser. Forget everything, the "player" is 24 MB.

Real Networks: Until the nerd coup happened and moved to open source, they did everything to make end user paranoid. They still do UI tricks to sell you "Plus" player via their site, the player is around 10-20 mb

Quicktime: Not just coding horribly for Windows Platform, they still ask a freaking e-mail while it is not mandatory, do 1990s tricks to bundle iTunes with it, asked for money for player to do fullscreen. Plugin STILL can't do "fullscreen" via right click menu, unlike Real Networks. The download is HUGE and Windows Users _HATE_ bundled software and getting asked for mail.

There comes Flash: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash explains all. Around 2 MB, no mail asked, ActiveX people can even get it auto downloaded, insanely multiplatform, can do fullscreen with a click of mouse in web page.

The answer to Flash would be Silverlight? That is a windows only thing. Half working plugin for OS X is just a player and we will see if "version 2" will have some "technical troubles" to make it late to OS X even as a plugin. I am betting on those "troubles" since MS is a company who will punish you in every opportunity for not running their OS. Adobe? They don't care, they release anything which they can make money or services over it.

.NET helped java advance

[sentientbrendan]

If you look at what was added to java 1.5 (generics, for each loops, enums) and the stuff planned for java 1.7 (closures, method references), it's obvious that in many ways java is responding to language enhancements made to c#.

The point is that this competition pushes the status quo, and forces everyone to play catch up. Without it, sun may never have reason to add features like generics.

I'm also looking forward to silverlight, not so much for silverlight itself, but because silverlight is designed to allow you to program your client side code in the same language you write your server side code. Thus, you can share common code between both sides, and talk between server and client with simple RCP. I'm hoping that this will eventually become standard for client side technologies in response to silverlight, even if silverlight isn't picked up en masse.

Yeah but we mean REAL competition!

[WebCowboy]

Yet when MS puts out a competitor to Java, and now Flash, it's "why do we need more than one?"

Silverlight is great! Silverlight is cool! It's a great choice! IS it a choice though? Can I run it on Opera yet? HOw complete is Moonlight on Linux? Can I see Silverlight apps on Firefox on Linux? What about Epiphany or Konqueror? What about 64-bit or other non IA32 architectures?

With Java, and with REAL standards, choice is encouraged. SUN invented Java but IBM builds great gobs of it and has its own JVM. It runs on my Nokia phone, and ran on my old Motorola. I have a choice of JVMs I can run on a choice of OSes and through nearly any browser and with any vendors products. .NET? Silverlight? Pretty limited choice there. There is a grand total of one implementation of .NET for Windows and one for Linux/UNIX (That being Mono--and it only implements a subset of what the MSFT .NET framework does). Their specs are not widely deployed, they are not "clean" intellectual property, their developer tools, while admittedly of fairly good quality, are limited in choice.

We already have a proprietary, de-facto pseudo-standard with spotty cross-platform support (ie. limited choice) in Flash. Why do we have to have more non-choices in Silverlight? We need a platform that a) doesn't suck AND b) enables us to have choices. Silverlight has its enticements around point a) but I remain unconvinced at this point about b).

Competition is good...

[klubar]

By the same theory why do we need both Macs and PCs? They pretty much do the same thing and you have to develop for each one differently.

By the same theory, why do we need both Firefox and IE...

Overall competition is good... it spurs new development and features.

It's too bad that there are any really whiz-bank siverlight sites... even the MS site doesn't use it for much.

FUD. Actually, it is the exact same thing...

[tpz]

Just because C# and VB.net have been largely in line in terms of syntax in the past (and this is becoming less and less so over time, if the introduction of things like VB.net's new XML Literals is any indication) it doesn't mean that VB.net and C# are implemented in a fashion that is at all different from how any other .net language is implemented.

VB.net, C#, IronPython, Boo, IronRuby, F#, Scala, and the list goes on. The are all implemented in the exact same way: by writing a compiler that targets IL.

Re:FUD. Actually, it is the exact same thing...

[segedunum]

I'm assuming you know what FUD really means?

Just because C# and VB.net have been largely in line in terms of syntax in the past (and this is becoming less and less so over time, if the introduction of things like VB.net's new XML Literals is any indication)

There are no features inherent to VB.Net or C# that actually make them unique and that you couldn't implement in the other - very trivially. There are no fundamental differences between them that you would find between languages such as Fortran, Ruby, Python or Perl that actually make them useful and different for different purposes. You could trivially add any support that C# has over VB.Net and vice versa. The differences are purely syntactic and completely artificial in many cases.

VB.net, C#, IronPython, Boo, IronRuby, F#, Scala, and the list goes on. The are all implemented in the exact same way: by writing a compiler that targets IL.

Not quite. Being a .Net language, and being able to write in any language, implies that you adhere to the CLS to keep things compatible. Languages like IronPython and IronRuby trade off their CLS compatibility by being complete implementations of Python and Ruby that run within the CLR. As such, you can't take something written with IronRuby and simply reuse it in IronPython, but in order to make the languages different and actually useful, that's a sacrifice that has to be made.

Re:FUD. Actually, it is the exact same thing...

[RegularFry]

Not quite. Being a .Net language, and being able to write in any language, implies that you adhere to the CLS to keep things compatible. Languages like IronPython and IronRuby trade off their CLS compatibility by being complete implementations of Python and Ruby that run within the CLR. As such, you can't take something written with IronRuby and simply reuse it in IronPython, but in order to make the languages different and actually useful, that's a sacrifice that has to be made. Not quite. IronPython and IronRuby are both MSIL compilers which output bytecode. It should be possible to share assemblies between them, but I don't think IronRuby's ready for that just yet.

This is maddening

[rastoboy29]

Why is there no Free, Open alternative?  We all bitch about how Flash is a dog on Linux--and it is--but there is nothing to really replace it with.

Or is there?

Re:Thank you for improving the signal-to-noise rat

[MojoStan]

VC1 is kind of like Silverlight--invented by MSFT becasue they wanted to be in control of something, even though H.264 was already there and some might say is superior to VC1 (IIRC H.264 can produce video of the same quality with a slightly lower bandwidth requirement). In any case, when it takes 10 to 20 MbPS (or more) to stream at HD quality Id have to say it is a stretch to say this HD support could be very useful to "low bandwidth servers". I'm not an expert on video codecs, but I'm pretty sure VC-1 has much lower CPU/GPU requirements than H.264. I'm not convinced VC-1 was necessary for Blu-ray and HD DVD (maybe the VC-1 encoding tools were more mature), but I think VC-1 will allow many more current computer users to enjoy high resolution video.

An Anandtech article from a while back showed that a Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66 GHz) was needed to play back X-Men III in H.264-encoded Blu-ray. Of course, internet video won't have such high bitrates or deal with AACS, but the processing requirements of high resolution H.264 still seems pretty hefty. The vast majority of CPUs in homes will be less powerful than the E6700 for some time. Integrated Intel GPUs, which don't assist H.264 acceleration yet, still dominate the market.

Re:Thank you for improving the signal-to-noise rat

[TheNetAvenger]

Just a few quick notes...

AJAX and Silverlight are not in direct competition. Again, think of Silverlight as a cool new picture/animation element on the page that co exists and works with JScript in the AJAX context even. AJAX is only limited by the standard DOM level html contructs available to it, and sadly there is not a good animation standard with this level of complexity, nor a good drawing standard with this level of complexity, let alone one that has inherent code understanding, accessible objects, and event handling.

(This is where people would go SVG, blah blah... There are so many things SVG can't do that Silverlight can it would take a long ass post to point them out. Think of it like this Silverlight understand vector drawing and bitmaps rendering better than PDF or any other more advanced format, and there is no way SVG can even come close to this, let alone do the animation and other aspects.)

Consider this one simple concept, you can even use Ink natively with Silverlight, something that is both complex and out of reach of anything out there. Imagine a Signature box on an AJAX page that retains the ink level data of the person's signature, not just a line or pixel representation.

Also realize that Google is using some pretty heavy backend lifting for some of their AJAX projects that end up shooting realtime rendered PNG/JPG images to the browser. Even for them it would be far easier, and lighter if they could use the new HD(JPEG) photo format and inherent Vector based RIA instead of hit testing an on the fly rendering bitmap image.

(Lookup the new DeepZoom demonstration control of Silverlight for how this plays out in both bandwidth/speed and user experience, and would not be possible without Silverlight.)

One would expect MSFT to support VC1 as it is their own invention....

Ok, a few points here.

VC1 is usually regarded as the better format, as most BluRay and (past HDDVD) titles use VC1 for quality, size and performance reasons. (Search for VC1 and BluRay)

Yes VC1 is basically WMV v9; however, just because this is Microsoft's codec, does not mean it is bad. Let's refresh people of a couple of concepts here. The early MPEG4 specifications for the 1990s is what Microsoft used to created their MPEG4 codecs which XVid/DivX are DIRECTLY based upon. And a lot of people think DivX/XVid do a pretty damn good job, and don't realize the orginal code and concepts were Microsoft interpretations of the early MPEG4. VC1 and WMV are even more advanced versions of codec research from inside Microsoft and can usually beat most other formats in terms of quality or size.

Additionally, the important part of Silverlight supporting HD and VC1 and WMV is that it ALSO supports multi-cast streaming, so you can have one feed using 800kbps and let 1,000,000 people view it at the same time, still only using 800kbps for the streaming content. Additionally, inherent progressive download streaming is an ability of WMV and therefore silverlight, so a dedicated streaming server is not needed for basic video streaming, unlike Flash.

Hey, it's a very popular thing!

[IonOtter]

1.5 million spammers, phishers, crackers and other assorted criminals around the world have been VERY busy taking it apart to make sure THEY know every hole.

It didn't even work on Microsoft's demo

[GrantRobertson]

'Nuf said.

Re:Thank you for improving the signal-to-noise rat

[leabre]

RE: 4) The learning curve might not be so intense as if moving from Python to C# because even on the .NET CLR/DLR that is employed in the Silverlight CoreCLR, you can use mostly pure Python (.NET) and when you're ready to take specific advantage of .NET features, you can do so (at which points one can argue it ceases to be cross-platform Python) but I that's not the point I wish to focus on. Same with PHP. You might be a PHP developer but moving to C# will have some learning curve mostly because C# depends solely on the BCL libraries. But with the PHP.NET project (forgot what it's called) you can use raw PHP (and some of the extensions) in .NET without actually doing anything specific to target .NET.

So I think in a sense you might be right, but you also are wrong. MS is changing the landscape and trying to make it easier to have .NET implementations of any language on top of the CLR/DLR to entice people to move to the platform. If that happens, you can use your language of choice and take advantage of .NET. I actually learned Ruby from IronRuby and would never have touched it any other way simply because I like what I can do with .NET and I like my tools and all the libraries I've built-up over the years that are .NET derived. In any case, with silverlight in particular, you can use a .NET flavor of PHP, Ruby, and Python that closely resumble their native counterparts.

Thanks,
Leabre

Re:Why switch? Because Flash drops the ball?

[Moochman]

Well, if it's a more stable platform you're looking for, you certainly won't find it in Silverlight, at least not in its current incarnation. Based on my experience browsing *Microsoft's own* Silverlight-based pages, the stability is terrible. Clicking a control often doesn't work properly or requires multiple clicks, the mouse pointer doesn't change when you hover over clickable controls, animations are slow and jerky, and the whole thing feels much less "dynamic" than most Flash sites I've been to, as if it's nothing more than an AJAX page with a few extra graphics thrown in.

Negative loss

[Keeper Of Keys]

What can justify that you may lose +/- 5% of your audience (and potential sells) I would have thought most marketing departments would be glad of an opportunity to lose -5% of their audience

:-P