OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/23992/Silverlight_HTML5_and_Microsoft_s_Opaque_Development_Strategy Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Fri, 24 May 2013 23:41:21 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com devs are right to be suprised.... http://www.osnews.com/thread?448418 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448418 After the last few years of the main marketing message being that WPF on the client and Silverlight in the browser are the way of the future, MS is suddenly seriously laid back on the WPF promotion, and did a 180 on silverlight. Nowadays, WPF is if you need to do something seriously powerful or complex, silverlight is the choice for simpler desktop apps and for winPhone, and it turns out that html javascript and css, three things that MS has been trying to abstract away from their devs for close to a decade now, are actually the way of the future for the web.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when that decision went down. Wouldn't be surprised if some people lost their jobs for how dismal silverlight uptake has been on the web. Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (google_ninja) Comments RE: devs are right to be suprised.... http://www.osnews.com/thread?448421 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448421
I would love to have been a fly on the wall when that decision went down. Wouldn't be surprised if some people lost their jobs for how dismal silverlight uptake has been on the web.


But it's only natural that Silverlight be less than successful on the web - did they think that all those XP users would go out and install the .NET and Silverlight frameworks, just to view the negligible amount of content that needed it? Or were they relying on people moving away from XP, to platforms where Silverlight could be assumed? Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Delgarde) Comments RE[2]: devs are right to be suprised.... http://www.osnews.com/thread?448443 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448443 They spent a lot of money paying key people (like nbc for the olympics) to use it. They were hoping that could drive adoption, and once it had a good install base that more developers would use it. Thu, 04 Nov 2010 03:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (google_ninja) Comments RE[3]: devs are right to be suprised.... http://www.osnews.com/thread?448445 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448445
They spent a lot of money paying key people (like nbc for the olympics) to use it. They were hoping that could drive adoption, and once it had a good install base that more developers would use it.


Translation: They had hoped that Silverlight would replace Flash as a requirement on client machines for users to view rich web content, but now it looks as though not even Flash will be the way of the future for that role but rather HTML5 will be. Silverlight becomes a tremendous waste of development money and bribery money, and all it managed to achieve was a signifcant set-back to their lock-in ambitions for the web.

Karma. Thu, 04 Nov 2010 03:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (lemur2) Comments "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" http://www.osnews.com/thread?448457 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448457 Ehrm, Silverlight might not be as dead as you'd might think. When you read more recent comments after Microsoft's PDC (like http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/pdc-and-silverlight/ or http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/11/01/silverlight-is-dead-lon... ) you will read that Microsoft will be continue developing Silverlight.

That means they will also continue to develop the Windows version of it and not just the Windows Phone version. Thu, 04 Nov 2010 06:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (nirwana) Comments RE: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" http://www.osnews.com/thread?448459 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448459
Ehrm, Silverlight might not be as dead as you'd might think. When you read more recent comments after Microsoft's PDC (like http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/pdc-and-silverlight/ or http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/11/01/silverlight-is-dead-lon... ) you will read that Microsoft will be continue developing Silverlight. That means they will also continue to develop the Windows version of it and not just the Windows Phone version.


Windows Phone 7 is interesting ... apparently it runs only IE7 (and a half?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7#Web_browser
http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2010/10/29/the-real-threat-of-windows-...

This means Windows Phone 7 won't get any HTML5 capability, so the only rich content it might be able to show would be Flash or Silverlight based.

That could go two ways ... it either could keep Silverlight alive, or it could inhibit the uptake of Windows Phone 7.

Given that both iPhone and Android will support HTML5 I would think this could be a problem brewing for Windows Phone 7. From that, we could also see a small market only for Silverlight. Thu, 04 Nov 2010 06:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (lemur2) Comments RE[2]: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" http://www.osnews.com/thread?448460 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448460 Silverlight is the application platform on Windows Phone 7. Nothing to do with the browser.

in fact, this is the point almost every SL dev tries to make. Silverlight is not browser or web technology, it is its own platform.

Silverlight is a portable .NET Framework, and a slimmed down WPF. That's really it.

HTML5 will come to WP7, and Silverlight will be used as the app platform. The world will keep spinning. Thu, 04 Nov 2010 06:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Nelson) Comments RE[2]: devs are right to be suprised.... http://www.osnews.com/thread?448461 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448461 The .NET Framework situation is harder than Silverlight. If someone uses a .NET 4.0 feature on any OS where .NET4 is not a given, then the barrier to entry is suddenly raised substantially, as deploying .NET is often an annoying endeavor.

On the other hand, Silverlight 4 is a 5mb runtime with a 90 second install time, where you dont even need to restart your browser or PC.

Silverlight lack of reach is not as big as an issue as .NET vCurrent. Thu, 04 Nov 2010 06:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Nelson) Comments RE[2]: devs are right to be suprised.... http://www.osnews.com/thread?448974 http://www.osnews.com/thread?448974 Silverlight does not require .NET (or rather, it is in itself a self-contained compact variant of .NET). The download size is about 7M IIRC, and it doesn't require a system or even browser restart. Sun, 07 Nov 2010 13:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (contextfree) Comments