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Microsoft

Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8 580

Posted by samzenpus from the we're-not-gonna-take-it dept.
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."
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Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8 More

Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8

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  • Evil overlord's minions demand more evil. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alex Belits ( 437 ) * on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:29AM (#36384104) Homepage

    A much better headline.

  • in other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by s4m7 ( 519684 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:30AM (#36384114) Homepage
    ...there's a legion of silverlight developers.

  • I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by iONiUM ( 530420 ) * on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:31AM (#36384120) Journal

    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.

    • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tokul ( 682258 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:37AM (#36384144)

      This was a low move from a company that previously has a great track record with developers

      You are on the wrong track. Ask VB or web developers about their track records with MS.

      • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:5, Insightful)

        by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @03:42AM (#36384824) Homepage

        Silverlight was Microsoft's answer to Flash, back when it looked like Adobe would take home the rich media prize. Then Apple boot stomped Adobe in the guts, declared support for HTML5, and the Flash gravy train jumped the rails.

        With even Adobe admitting that future products need to support HTML5, Silverlight is now an answer to a question that no one is asking. In a few years, Microsoft will quietly toss it into the basement, along with all of the other misfit toys they no longer want or need.

        Oh, well. Maybe it can play with Bob and Clippy....

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )

        This was a low move from a company that previously has a great track record with developers

        You are on the wrong track. Ask VB or web developers about their track records with MS.

        VB developers had an extremely long and successful run of it and even now you can still developm in VB.net. And given that VB.net is basically a CLR compatible dialect it means you can work, reuse & integrate with every other .NET language and technology. That isn't to say developing in VB / VB.net was ever a rational or sane thing to do but I don't understand why anyone should complain about Microsoft's support over the years.

        As for HTML development, well... If anyone was dumb enough to follow the co

        • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:4, Interesting)

          by segedunum ( 883035 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @06:47AM (#36385814)

          VB developers had an extremely long and successful run of it and even now you can still developm in VB.net.

          Not a very great way of putting it. What it meant was that countless billions of lines of existing code were useless overnight in Microsoft's new development environment. That was the first time something like that had happened and the warning signs should have been there for everyone involved as the same thing happened with .Net over the years - Winforms, WPF, XAML, Silverlight........ Microsoft could never decide what it was doing and seemed to expect everyone to rewrite their code every couple of years. Some people just haven't learned.

          And given that VB.net is basically a CLR compatible dialect it means you can work, reuse & integrate with every other .NET language and technology.

          Great. Completely useless to the existing code already written in VB, but nevermind. It also became clear to everyone that VB.Net was totally useless. C# is the primary language to develop with in .Net and if you can do the same thing in all .Net languages and they only differ via syntax then why not just use C#? Witness how ActivePerl and Python sank like bricks.

          That isn't to say developing in VB / VB.net was ever a rational or sane thing to do but I don't understand why anyone should complain about Microsoft's support over the years.

          VB was completely sane to develop with, once it got somewhere near good enough around version 5/6. I know it's not fashionable amongst many, but a massive number of business applications were written with it and you didn't have to deal with a lot of time consuming stuff like memory management as you did with C++ or full blown object oriented concepts that you just didn't need most of the time. It was a very sensible thing to develop with for many applications. What Microsoft should have done was implemented and improved classic VB but implemented it on top of .Net so all you needed was a recompile as with previous versions.

        • VB.NET is C# tweaked to have some VB-like syntax. It's about as much like VB as Java is like C.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by smelch ( 1988698 )
            That's not really true. There are differences beyond syntax. The difference between shadows and new for instance, or some of the liberties you can take in VB.Net around types that would break in C#. You know, all kinds of really nasty shit you shouldn't give to bad developers because they will make everything unreadable and hard to debug.

        • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @07:00AM (#36385888) Homepage
          Pssst, little word over here. You can't refute an accusation that Microsoft screws over developers by saying that developers who got screwed over by Microsoft were fools.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      @iONiUM
      Surely you didnt believe siverlight would be everywhere??? Thats your mistake, believing a corrupt company. You deserve what you got. Now go use a more open vendor neutral development product.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 )

      if you haven't worked with Silverlight or WPF, you're really missing out on an amazing development experience.

      As an average web user who doesn't care what development experience developers have, I can tell you YOU are losing potential users of your application by the boatload because many, many people have better things to do than install yet another plugin that'll slow down / crash the browser even more.

      they should just admit that they fucked up with Silverlight and hung the devoted developer community tha

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        many people have better things to do than install yet another plugin that'll slow down / crash the browser even more

        Hardly anyone outside of the Slashdot anti-MS crowd cares. Most users will just install Silverlight and be done with it.

        As for slow down/crashing, well, Silverlight hasn't slowed either of my browsers (Opera and Chromium FYI) or caused a single crash. If you're having issues, then it's most likely a problem isolated to your specific PC.

      • The average web user probably also doesn't realize the relationship between development platform and the quality of the product, either.

    • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RyuuzakiTetsuya ( 195424 ) <taiki.cox@net> on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:42AM (#36384194)

      Do you honestly believe they're going to even wink and nod at Silverlight? It failed because everyone already knew Flash, and Flash didn't require you to know a real programming language.

      Silverlight wasn't that attractive for me as a web developer. I had a hard enough time convincing our outsourced call centers to use Firefox 3 or 4, getting them to install Flash or any other plugin was going to be a giant fucking hassle. In your case though, it sounds like you didn't have that problem.

      (I was sad too, Silverlight's Firefox plugin, unlike the Flash plugin, never pegged my CPU to shit ads at me. Netflix also used less CPU to render similar content that I could stream off of Youtube... and this is on the -mac-, so it's not even like they're biased against me.)

      What strikes me as strange is that silverlight integration wasn't something they were talking about day one with Windows 8. if everything's an HTML document supported by JavaScript and styled with CSS, then why not have silverlight integration for more complex tasks?

      Microsoft is even starting to fail at Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Usually technologies like silverlight(or activex in the past), would be the shiv up their sleeves to extinguish the flames. Instead, they're playing catchup to the likes of Apple, Google and HP(their own partner for Windows computers!).

      Feh.

    • Look at the bright side, you have a great future ahead of you as a Windows Phone developer (which is based on Silverlight technology). You'll do great.

      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.

      Did you really believe that? Really? On the other hand, Microsoft already has an ARM port of Silverlight, at least major components, so maybe you'll luck out and they'll have Silverlight in Windows 8.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Only the absolute dumbest individual on Slashdot would believe that Microsoft was truly cutting out Silverlight and not including it in Windows 8. They would be trampling all over their success, specifically with Netflix and driving people away from their own platform.

        Considering that there is a rumor that Xbox will support Silverlight sooner rather than later, I am always annoyed to see these stories. Then again, I am surfing on Slashdot. If it's bad news for Microsoft, then it's front page news for Slashd

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by miffo.swe ( 547642 )

      Silverlight could have been a success if only it had been cross platform. No sane person who screwed up with ActiveX and IE6 would touch Silverlight with a ten foot pole once it was clear it was a Windows only plugin without any support on anything but a PC. Granted there was a Mac plugin but nobody took it seriously. Had they released Linux support it would atleast have appered to be platform agnostic.

      Silverlight was never cross platform. Two platforms do not make something cross platform. Unofficial suppo

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Bacon Bits ( 926911 )

        Yeah, if it doesn't run on BeOS, QNX, and the PS3 then it's not a worthwhile platform. I mean, who cares if the two platforms it does run on are over 98% of the desktop marketplace?

        Oh, right, we're just bitter that Silverlight doesn't run on Linux.

    • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Necroman ( 61604 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:46AM (#36384236)

      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.

    • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:5, Funny)

      by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:49AM (#36384256)

      ... 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.

      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.

    • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rophuine ( 946411 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:51AM (#36384272) Homepage

      I know I'm just jumping on the band-wagon here, but I'm a .Net developer who's worked for a couple of shops over the last few years and has seen plenty of new web products started. I've been on at least three projects where we wrote off Silverlight as an option, citing reasons like unwillingness to use the plugin, lack of available developers, and general opinions that the platform was on a fast-track to being canned.

      Then again, most products I've worked on with a focus on having a great user experience tend to undergo pretty massive UI overhauls every 18 months to three years, and it's pretty common to use different technologies at each iteration. Being forced into changing UI platforms shouldn't come as any sort of surprise to you.

      • It's also exactly the reason why you should choose a layered architecture, and preferably MVC/MVP or MVVM. They all make platform switching much easier as the frontend is a very think layer.

        Silverlight in particular has a really nice MVVM framework called Caliburn (http://caliburn.codeplex.com/). If you've built your app using that, then it shouldn't be a huge amount of work to switch to html5/js for the frontend.

        Hey, you might even be able to use a.net to js compiler to do the body of the work: http://j [sourceforge.net]

        • Anyone who gets that UI overhauls/rewrites happen frequently, but DOESN'T use a layered architecture to keep the UI layer really thin, is an idiot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dsum ( 1233394 )
      I am a .NET developer and my company also uses Silverlight. I don't personally use Silverlight, but the team that code using Silverlight said that there are still many things that HTML 5 doesn't support, or at least not easily implemented compare with Silverlight. At the end, it really depends on the type of the web application you are developing and who are your target users. For enterprise users, as long as they decided to buy a solution that require Silverlight plug-in, they will install it. For consume

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Rophuine ( 946411 )

        We've found entirely the reverse re: enterprise users, albeit with a different plugin. Enterprise users are the ones who force OUR hands. They generally tell us what browser versions and plugins are available in their SOE, and we have to support that or lose the sale. Our clients are exclusively larger enterprises, and our success rate at saying "you just need to install [x] on the machines you're going to use this from" has been zero so far. As a rule of thumb, if it doesn't run on IE7 with Flash installed

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by devent ( 1627873 )

      You are are .NET shop and that is your fault, but did you know about Java and RAP?
      http://www.eclipse.org/rap/ [eclipse.org]
      http://www.eclipse.org/rap/demos/ [eclipse.org]

      It runs in all web browsers, 100% HTML, no plugins needed, and is very rich experience, it is like a real desktop application but in your browser.

    • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:5, Insightful)

      by inglorion_on_the_net ( 1965514 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @02:43AM (#36384540) Homepage

      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 [wikipedia.org] 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

      • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @04:48AM (#36385154) Journal

        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.

        There are many cases where using the "right tool" offers dramatic performance improvements over the wrong tool. For example, writing large scale structured data storage in C is probably a bad idea, but SQL does the job just wonderfully.

        But most cases aren't so clear cut.

        At my company, we're a Unix/LAMP shop focusing on PHP and Postgres. Gguess what our server administration scripts run? There's a small amount of BASH, but by and large, it's all.... PHP!

        Not that PHP is the ideal language for system administration and coordinating backups or system updates, but it's "good enough" and we're already familiar with it. By having it all written in PHP we get "plenty good enough" performance and the knowledge that any of our developers can pick up the script and immediately start reading it without having to think about the nuances of a different language.

        And really, even if there's a 10:1 system performance difference, does it make any difference if the background task completes in 5 seconds instead of 0.5 when it reduces overhead elsewhere?

        The "best" tool for the job is often the most conveniently available tool for the job...

      • "What bothers me, though, is the concept of a ".NET shop" ... what happened to using the best tool for the job? "

        I know I am just picking on a small item out of a very long and well-considered post. However, this is one place I think you are in error.

        If you are a generalist willing to use any technology set, then a specialist will leave you in the dust. If you know a technology set in-depth, know how to get the best out of it, know where the pitfalls are - you will be much more productive than someone with

    • Re:I am a Silverlight Developer (Score:4)

      by hedleyroos ( 817147 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @03:23AM (#36384732)

      I used to be a Windows dev back in the day (Delphi, Borland C++ etc.). I quite liked it and worked on neat products, but eventually the Linux environment became so much more productive for me. And my eyes opened to the difficulty non-MS users encounter when trying to get things to work that were foisted upon the world by MS. So while I appreciate that Silverlght may have a good dev environment I'm really glad I was never part of something that excludes certain users.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Silverfish got mothballed, now that's a joke. Obviously M$ where not able to extend embrace and extinguish with it so they are dropping it. It is not the first time they have done it with a product and it wont be the last. Don't say you weren't warned each and every time an article about silverfish got on slashdot.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by bmo ( 77928 )

      >very rich user experience over the web that was cross platform.

      "Runs on all versions of Windows" is not cross-platform.

      Ever.

      >insane

      Yes, yes you are, or a Microsoft shill. Anyone who says "rich user experience" is a shill. It's one of those marketing terms that means absolutely nothing, but market-dweebs think it's important, so they tell everyone to use it to support the company line.

      --
      BMO

  • Too bad, so sad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:38AM (#36384152) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Re:Too bad, so sad (Score:5, Funny)

      by Myopic ( 18616 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:50AM (#36384258)

      I've never learned a tool without learning some skills that did apply down the road.

      Congratulations on avoiding VB.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by artor3 ( 1344997 )

        I dunno... I learned enough VB in high school to teach me that it was never, ever worth my time to write a GUI in code when a WYSIWYG editor is available. I also learned enough to know that I never, ever wanted to be a programmer -- a lesson which I took to heart, so it is entirely possible that the first lesson I learned was dead wrong.

    • Given the amount of rote programmers I met in my years, I could well see them being dead in the water now.

      People learning programming today isn't what it used to be. They don't learn algorithm development, they learn copying and pasting. And in the short run, that's actually faster. They learn to use google to find a solution to their problems, they will google for their problem, find code that solves it and use that code. Not asking for side effects.

      That such people have to relearn the whole process over a

    • I don't think in this case they are even legitimately being made obsolete.

      Microsoft isn't going to write MSOffice in HTML5. They'll have their lightweight web version but Office Office is going to remain .NET

      My understanding from the Windows 8 presentation was that the little gadgets and applets would be HTML5 but you could still release cross platform .NET applications.

      We all know that those little gadgets are going to be rendered using IE10. If anyone thinks Silverlight isn't going to be a part of IE10

      • Re:Too bad, so sad (Score:4, Insightful)

        by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @03:21AM (#36384722) Homepage

        Office Office is going to remain .NET

        Office is not written in .NET. Unless they've made a very big change, it's written in C++, probably with a lot of MFC. ...you could still release cross platform .NET applications.

        Lol, cross platform .NET applications. Also, do you remember .NET controls hosted directly in IE? Neither does MS, despite pushing them for a while. And despite the fact that they had a reasonable security model for trusted interactions (unlike Silverlight).

        If anyone thinks Silverlight isn't going to be a part of IE10 in some capacity they've lost their minds

        Silverlight will probably be supported for a while, but it will slowly get worse. Just like ActiveX. Just like IE-hosted .NET controls. Just like some of the "browser re-use" components (things like custom print templates, and DHTML editing). You're probably too young, but at one point, ActiveX was the egg nog that was in all MS goat milk. Then it wasn't cool. Then it started having problems. Now it's an afterthought that doesn't work and with an incomprehensible magic security model.

        Silverlight will be the same. We're an MS shop, but we didn't drink any of the Silverlight Kool-aid, because it was clearly a tech that wouldn't last. It just didn't bring much to the table. Unless it finds a much better home in mobile or something, it will slowly wither away. .NET itself should remain for a good while, though. It's a decent framework.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by caywen ( 942955 )

      Silverlight developers aren't upset because Silverlight is dead. They are upset because they don't know if it's dead or not. They are in limbo, and that's the most uncomfortable position to be in.

      Microsoft should just come out and say, "Silverlight is dead. Learn HTML5 and Javascript. Here's some tools and docs to help you port. Sorry." I think most SL developers will either abandon Microsoft entirely, or dive right into HTML5/JS - and then abandon MS entirely.

      To me, the ironic part is that WPF - the one th

      • The problem with this analysis is that Silverlight can be used to deliver apps (slow, bloated apps, we're developing one here). That can run as a browser plugin or be "installed" out-of-browser, using sandboxed local storage. This is one feature that the HTML5/WPF divide can't bridge. We're a company that has web and desktop products because we work with institutions that may or may not be operating behind a double evil firewall, Silverlight lets us deliver both with exactly one codebase.

        BBC iPlayer has thi

    • Until not so long ago, Microsoft was a pretty safe bet. They put a technology on the market, and for better or for worse it will be used so it makes total sense to invest in such technology. On top of that almost all businesses use Microsoft products so if you want to sell to businesses you'd better use Microsoft's technology.

      So this shop investing heavily in Silverlight is not that crazy. MS promising it to be present in Windows pre-installed means that soon enough "everyone" has it installed, and you wou

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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?

      Well, some companies actually have projects that like to go beyond 1.0, oh our language and code base is obsolete so enjoy your legacy support and lack of updates while we work on completely rewriting it on a different platform for version 2.0.

      As a developer, you might like that your company continues to make money and that your skills remain relevant to them - both for your chances not to be laid off, pay raises and the general work environment.

      True, there's always some general skills to be learned but the

  • Wow, a new change in MS strategy, not (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:39AM (#36384158)

    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.

  • Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by donutface ( 847957 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:42AM (#36384196)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'd go further and expect them to integrate Silverlight into new versions of Windows, just like they did with .NET. I'm surprised that they have not already made it a part of Internet Explorer. Perhaps there are some anti-trust issues but Google was okay to include PDF support in Chrome.

  • seriously...

    the only reason why they can port office is because of .NET and the CLR

    silverlight is kind of dead no matter how much noise people make because realistically you get a better reach if you either do things natively like C# or use javascipt and html
    (ask yourself this how many mobile users are you turning away if you have a website that has to use silverlight... look around you... would it not be better to engage the users on their mobile devices...)

    regards

    John Jones

    • > the only reason why they can port office is because of .NET and the CLR

      I'm pretty sure that Office is still written in native code.

  • I'm sure it was just an omission (Score:5, Insightful)

    by YesIAmAScript ( 886271 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:53AM (#36384278)

    .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.

    • Or would they want to force developers back to their code in order to ensure that all Windows 8 apps are more "touch centric?" This would be achieved much easier if they dropped support of existing technologies, such as their current widget drawing library - WPF or something - and the old Win32 based one while they're at it.

      Really, how many .NET and silverlight apps have been written with touch in mind?

    • Re:I'm sure it was just an omission (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tapewolf ( 1639955 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @03:10AM (#36384664)

      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.

      I've been in this exact position myself as a Windows Mobile developer. Learning the 8-year, 200'000 line C++ product that I maintain would have to be completely rewritten in C# and/or Silverlight if it was going to run on WP7 was a fun, fun experience and I would not be terribly surprised if Windows Phone 8 ditched that platform for Javascript, just like last time.

    • Sure, Silverlight will run well on ARM chips. So what.

      Its not good enough to run on ARM chipset if it cannot run on Android or iOS or Blackberry. Silverlight is not as nearly cross-platform as they make out, unless you only count Windows platforms and browsers running plugins on Windows platforms.

      I think they're making correct assumptions. Microsoft saw Silverlight as a flash-replacement, only it didn't replace flash at all. So now they're lumbered with development costs for smomething that competes directl

  • Whaaaaaa! I spent half a fortune on your audits and courses and went into dept, and now you tell me the Thetans are a scam and we should go worship Jeebus?

  • .NET isn't going anywhere (Score:5, Insightful)

    by flimflammer ( 956759 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @02:34AM (#36384484)

    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.

  • Here. [hanselman.com]

    Lots of interesting comments there, and yet MS keeps fueling the fire.
    HTML(5)/JS is still too much work compared with SL for LOB apps.

    I don't see SL going away any time soon.

  • Investment in skills? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Angstroem ( 692547 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @03:16AM (#36384696)
    Hey, Commodore! How could you let my investment ins skills die on the vine! Bring back the C64 and the Amiga!

  • A lesson (Score:3)

    by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Thursday June 09, 2011 @05:35AM (#36385444) Journal

    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.

  • Locked gates work both ways. (Score:3)

    by DdJ ( 10790 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @11:55AM (#36389102) Homepage Journal

    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.)

  • Being a ______ Developer (Score:3)

    by JobyOne ( 1578377 ) on Thursday June 09, 2011 @02:58PM (#36392110) Homepage Journal

    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.

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