Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I would upvote you but I have a story to share.
A few years back I worked for a hardware company that was looking to partner with MS for their storage software stack. We were doing some pretty crazy things to integrate their OS into our hardware and were working off promises of specific features and deadlines.
After being 8 months+ into the project, MS starts missing software drops and stops communicating release status with us. We eventually discover they didn't like their product as was and was going back to the drawing board, which basically screwed our release.
I don't expect a lot out of MS when it comes top products that arent their main line revenue makers.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Sorry, but I read that, and reread it several times to make sure I hadn't missed anything, but I still don't see any reason to stop thinking you are insane.
.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
Thanks for providing some perspective. It is good to hear observations and opinions that may not align with the views most commonly expressed here.
Still, there are a lot of things in your post that I don't really understand.
I know Silverlight is a running joke on /., and everyone here hates it
Is that so? I thought that Silverlight was just another technology, to be discussed and evaluated like any other. It has its merits, and I have seen several people speak favorably about it on Slashdot.
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.
There are several things here that irk me. I don't think it's insane that a .NET shop would use Silverlight. I mean, if you're already committed to one, it's easy to use the other, right?
What bothers me, though, is the concept of a ".NET shop". So, there is this company that has decided that .NET is going to be their answer to every question they encounter. I know that there are many companies that make this choice, or the same choice, but for a different technology (e.g. Java). But what happened to using the best tool for the job? There is a lot of impressive technology in .NET, but is it really the best tool for every job, now and in the future? In my view, it isn't, and can't be. So I would have my developers learn several technologies, and chose the best one for each project. Any developer worth their salt should have no problem with that, IMO.
Next, the idea that Silverlight was a good choice to deliver a very rich user experience over the web that was cross platform. It may technically be possible (I haven't looked at Silverlight hard enough to know), but the idea that this would be cross-platform is simply wrong. If anyone had seriously looked at it, they would have realized that Silverlight only really works under Windows. Yes, I know about Moonlight, but simply reading the WikiPedia article about it will tell you that what works under Silverlight will not necessarily also work under Moonlight. I am not going to speculate as to why people at your company may have thought Silverlight was cross-platform, but I am going to say that it was the wrong tool for the goal you stated, and someone should have realized this and spoken up. You may deride Slashdot's groupthink, but at least we do get dissenting posts, and they do get modded up, too.
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."
I don't think HTML5 would have been a good choice, either, so I am glad to hear you didn't go that route. However, I wonder why you didn't go with Flash, given that, in your own words, it was the big thing TM for interactive "web applications" at the time. It also has a much better track record than Silverlight as far as support for multiple platforms is concerned. So why didn't you go with Flash? Also, since you mentioned HTML5, did you consider using DHTML (AKA AJAX)?
As I said, since we're a .NET shop, Silverlight was a really great alternative to Flash.
Well, opinions seem to differ about that. I think that if you had already decided on .NET, then Silverlight could have been a better choice than Flash (after all, you can write your code for Silverlight in a .NET language). However, if you had put the requirements first, instead of the technology choice, and your requirements included "cross-platform", then I question whether Silverlight would have been the better, or even a good choice.
Furthermore, if you
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Hey, Commodore! How could you let my investment ins skills die on the vine! Bring back the C64 and the Amiga!
Microsoft doesn't have partners. They have future victims.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.