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Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8
aesoteric writes "A legion of Silverlight developers have threatened revolt after Microsoft made no mention of Silverlight or .Net in the vendor's brief video preview for its upcoming Windows 8 operating system. Developers expressed fears Microsoft might let their investment in skills 'die on the vine' as Redmond finally embraces open standards. Microsoft, for their part, have told developers they can't say more until September."
A much better headline.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
...there's a legion of silverlight developers.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
I know Silverlight is a running joke on /., and everyone here hates it, but I work at a .NET shop and we used Silverlight to create a product. Now, you may think that's insane, but what we wanted to deliver was a very rich user experience over the web that was cross platform. Furthermore, clients would install the plug-in after purchasing, so it's not like proliferation of the plug-in mattered. As well, the decision on technology was made over 2 years ago, and back then HTML5 was but a whisper, and Flash was still the big thing TM for interactive "web applications."
As I said, since we're a .NET shop, Silverlight was a really great alternative to Flash. Furthermore, if you haven't worked with Silverlight or WPF, you're really missing out on an amazing development experience.
Now, I completely agree with the mentality that plug-ins are stupid. We only did it this way because we sell a product; we don't put our stuff online to try and shove the plug-in down everyone's throat. And at the end of the day, the message from Microsoft was that Silverlight will be everywhere "in the future," so we hoped we could hit all platforms with a rich product without doing any porting.
And now this, the latest in a long steady stream of screw-overs. They have seriously broken their promise to the developer community. While I'm happy they embraced HTML5 so strongly, they should just admit that they fucked up with Silverlight and hung the devoted developer community that exists out to dry. This was a low move from a company that previously has a great track record with developers, and I'm very unhappy with how they handled this.
And yes, I fully expected to be modded down for just using Silverlight to make anything.
So these developers are crying because they invested in a technology that's becoming obsolete? What else is new?
I've got way more dead technologies under my belt than I have active ones. It's the price you pay for being in the computer industry -- some of the skills you pick up will never be used again. Hopefully you learn some techniques from working with those tools that will carry over to future projects, but as long as you got a functional project out the door and in the hands of the users, what difference does it make whether you get to use the tools again?
Then again, I enjoy learning new technologies. I don't expect to be doing the same-old, same-old for years, much less decades. And guess what? I've never learned a tool without learning some skills that did apply down the road.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
C'mon does everyone instantly forget how Microsoft operates each time something new comes out? They come out with something, it hangs around for a few years and poof it's gone, just like Bob. It's freakin' groundhog day, the only thing that changes is the name of the latest MS fad.
My bet is that Silverlight isnt going anywhere anytime soon - Microsoft are still attempting to get a successful smartphone out the door. As long as they're focused on WP7, they'll continue to make investments in Silverlight to try and win developers for both platforms.
The nuances and gotcha's of any existing GUI kit take a while to master. Just because the Hello World drag-and-drop examples are simple does not necessarily mean delivering a finished product is.
Table-ized A.I.
.NET apps and Silverlight apps will run very well on ARM processors, unlike code compiled to x86 or x86-64. .NET is used on Xbox 360 also, and it's PowerPC.
And Microsoft will be thrilled to have every app they can which they can claim actually works on ARM Windows as well as x86 Windows.
I think these guys are making incorrect assumptions.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Someone hand that man a cigar, he identified why Silverlight was a Dodo from the start.
I mean, imagine this: You're responsible for creating a webpage with some "flashy" content. Will you use Flash or Silverlight? One is supported on "all" platforms, the other one only on Windows. Development cost/time is roughly the same for both. Question for 100: Will you choose the technology that runs on all platforms or the one that runs only on Windows?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I only use silverlight for netflix, but netflix is great. Flash on the other hand crashes and causes my 64bit computer to go crazy from time to time.
For me, there is no comparison in terms of which is better. But I'm just the end user.
That was my first thought. .net has a much longer history than Silverlight (when considering it as a platform). And yet MS still treats .net as a stepchild. While it sounds ridiculous to say Office should be rewritten in .net, remember Windows Defender was originally .net and was re-written to remove those dependencies. If Microsoft is unwilling to commit to that platform, they're surely not going to commit to a platform with .net as a dependency.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
Err, wrong on that mark - Silverlight runs on a Mac too, and on browsers other than IE. It's a fairly straightforward plugin to install.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
The issue is that its obvious where Microsoft is heading, away from Silverlight and .Net. It gives the same effect as when Elop went out in public proclaiming loud and clear that Nokias Symbian was dead, people stop developing for it and customers stops buying it. As a Silverlight developer you know your days are numbered, you just dont know what that number is.
HTTP/1.1 400
I don't know about Silverlight, but .NET is not going anywhere. They've built up an armada of C# developers on the Windows platform. Seeing as C# is pretty much tied to the CLR, there isn't a chance in hell they're going to just abandon it.
Silverlight never did catch on as well as it could have, so I do feel sorry for those developers who use it, if something should happen.
Hey, Commodore! How could you let my investment ins skills die on the vine! Bring back the C64 and the Amiga!
If you depend on proprietary languages and proprietary frameworks, then you've only got yourself to blame when the vendor decides to discontinue support. It's not like it hasn't happened before, for example VB6.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Microsoft doesn't have partners. They have future victims.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
most users just follow the instructions
You've never done technical support, have you?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This sounds like another example of lock-in turning into lock-out.
Microsoft has sometimes done things in a proprietary or different way as a tool for creating "lock-in" to their ecosystem. So folks adopt things like .Net and Silverlight and WMA format audio files.
The other day I heard someone who I knew was a Microsoftie complaining that they couldn't upload their music to either Google's or Amazon's clouds and they couldn't figure out what was wrong. Well, if your music is in either MP3 or AAC format, it'll all work fine, as those are open enough. But if your music is in WMA format... Microsoft has tried to lock you in to Windows, and the result is that if you're not sophisticated enough to deal, you're being locked out of Google and Amazon and, basically, the future.
Sounds like the folks who bought in to Silverlight are getting hit by the same phenomenon. It's interesting to me that it's happening at about the same time.
I guess the lesson is to give up on drinking Microsoft's kool-aid, and go for standards-based interoperability wherever you can. It might be a little more work in the short term, but it will be less in the long term.
(Prediction: Outlook/Exchange and SharePoint will suffer the same kinds of fates within 18 months, at least on a small scale.)
I've always felt that it's stupid to pigeon-hole yourself into being a _______ developer. I'm a professional graphic designer, just a hobby programmer, and a pretty experienced web designer and have done more than my share of front-end work over the years (including JavaScript in the bad old days).
I realize that there is time and energy involved in learning a particular programming language/environment, but isn't that kind of what you signed up for? When I applied somewhere that used Quark I didn't say "sorry, I only design with InDesign and Photoshop." I warned them I didn't have much experience in it and that might slow me down a bit at first, then I sucked it up and learned the new environment when they hired me. The tools were different (in some places radically so), and took quite a lot of learning to acclimate myself, but surprise surprise the basic design skills I've developed over the years still applied.
Similarly, the concepts of programming are the concepts of programming. Once you get good enough you aught to be able to transfer those skills to other languages. A loop is a loop, an array is an array, etc.
That said, if you do put all your professional skill development eggs in one proprietary basket you completely deserve any harm that befalls you because of that dumb-shit decision. Doubly so if you're so dense that you can't transfer anything you learned writing VB in .NET to big boy programming.
Porquoi?