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Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers

Posted by kdawson on from the they-can-afford-to-wait dept.

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."

8 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Why switch? by TheSpoom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
    - E. Debs
    1. Re:Why switch? by plague3106 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:Why switch? by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  2. Poster is Astroturfing? by TheSpoom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
    - E. Debs
  3. Waiting for 2.0 by Westley · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:.net by CodeBuster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  5. it'll get popular by pak9rabid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:.net by dlim · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.