Most websites glossed over this, but we didn't. Silverlight, once touted as Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash, has been retooled from its original purpose. Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, and that's it. So... Silverlight is dead - long live Silerlight?
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Member since:2005-11-29
This has been the trend Silverlight has been going in for a while. Moving from a web based flash competitor, to a client side technology. It's going to converge with WPF and become the One UI Toolkit To Rule Them All.
I don't know of anyone who still uses Silverlight for pure web content in Microsoft shops, at work we do all our work Out of Browser. It's a cross platform CLR.
Member since:2005-07-13
"This has been the trend Silverlight has been going in for a while. Moving from a web based flash competitor, to a client side technology. It's going to converge with WPF and become the One UI Toolkit To Rule Them All."
that's been the plan since before 2.0 was released. after version 1 and around the time 2 was about to be deployed to the world Microsoft realized that Silverlight could be better poised than a flash competitor and quite frankly silverlight is wonderful to work with. i look forward to it's further integration into windows and windows CE
Member since:2007-07-13
Member since:2009-08-26
Meh, Nokia and Novell have done same thing numerous times.
Whatever happened to the .NET compact framework?
It's been dumped for Silverlight lol. I think it was mostly used by CE devs who they want to move to WP7. There is also .net micro.
Like ASP AJAX it probably didn't gain enough of a following to encourage further development.
And getting slightly off-topic, how is WPF coming along? I mean, is it really taking off? I can't recall sampling any apps that use it, unless they're so close to the native Win32 look & feel that I didn't recognize it.
It's a two-fold problem of XP users having a large presence and most applications being started before WPF. A lot of the big Windows programs were started in C++ before .NET existed and would be very expensive to convert to WPF. For a program like winzip it wouldn't matter but itunes would look great in a wpf rewrite.
The decision to use WPF often looks like this:
1. Build a great looking program for Win7/Vista users, but then tweak it so it looks average in XP.
2. Build an average looking program that doesn't need to be tweaked for XP and also doesn't require a newer .net pack.
So if you want to see more #1 then get people off XP. Mono also encourages #2 since it doesn't use WPF.
Member since:2005-11-29
Member since:2006-02-05
the performance is pretty ass too. I wrote a fairly simple app awhile back, and the ui was rather sluggish when it came to dynamically updating it, and I was on a quad core with 8 gigs of ram. It also had a really long start time, noticably longer then winforms. Finally, it was virtually unusable over terminal services.
It is a really cool idea, but I wouldn't do anything serious in it for another few years when either it gets more mature, or average hardware outpaces it.
Member since:2007-09-23
Yeah, VS2010 is WPF.
In my hobby project I use WPF. I know, it's not a big project but you can see for yourself that it looks very native: http://code.google.com/p/yet-another-music-application/
Member since:2005-11-13
Member since:2010-11-01
I developed both http://www.muvaudio.com/ and http://www.muvunder.com/ in WPF. WPF definitely has a learning curve but it allows for some amazing things. Think of it as being similar to the the switch from MFC to Windows Forms.
Also, Blu, another twitter client, was created in WPF.
Developers are learning. Traction is building. Just give it time. HTML5 will be the same. It's hard to put a lot of effort into learning a new technology until you feel like it's where it needs to be and won't just disappear.
Member since:
2005-11-13
But I suppose it's bad news for Silverlight devs, unless they're coding for Windows Phone. Is it just me, or does Microsoft have a habit of changing their minds about which of their technologies that devs should be using. Whatever happened to the .NET compact framework?
And getting slightly off-topic, how is WPF coming along? I mean, is it really taking off? I can't recall sampling any apps that use it, unless they're so close to the native Win32 look & feel that I didn't recognize it. I heard they retooled the code editor in VS 2010 to use it, but besides that?