Silverlight 5 — Back From the Dead?

Barence writes "When Microsoft executive Bob Muglia recently revealed that Microsoft saw HTML5 as the future for universal in-browser development while Silverlight was being repositioned as a native application development platform for Windows Phone 7 devices, most pundits saw this as an admission of defeat. Now Microsoft has released a beta of Silverlight 5, PC Pro's Tom Arah asks if Microsoft has managed to bring Silverlight back from the dead. With a flurry of Android and Linux-based tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes and other devices set to arrive on the market, Arah argues that Silverlight's time will come. 'Crucially, they will also want to integrate their desktop (Windows) and their main applications (Office and other WPF-based applications). Thanks to its work on HTML5, WPF and especially Silverlight, Microsoft and its army of desktop developers will be well set to deliver,' he argues."

Comments

Re:Ok, I'm convinced

[pasamio]

The problem is that Apple initially released their device saying that you wrote web apps for it and that would be the way to develop for it. And everyone hated, said it was a stupid idea and practically demanded an API which Apple subsequently delivered with a controlled way of deployment. The first iPhone SDK was for web apps and bashing Apple for delivering what was requested even if now we have it we realise it isn't so much of a good idea really just gets bothersome. More importantly Apple continue to make that gateway open for developers, Android does though to a lesser extent however Microsoft seem to have the view that anything that runs on a Phone 7 device will be Silverlight or else.

Re:Silverlight as a native application ??

[igreaterthanu]

From what I understand, the controls that Silverlight developers create and use in their apps can only be written in C/C++ on WP7.

Silverlight is a managed framework that runs on top of a subset of .NET. Any .NET code that runs on that particular subset can be used for Silverlight. With regular .NET, managed C++ and unsafe C# are allowed, however the subset of .NET that Silverlight runs on disallows anything unsafe, so C++ is out and so is unsafe C# (regular C# is still okay). Examples of other languages that are okay are: VB.NET, F#.