OSNews

agreed! they are having a hard problem phasing out Win32 let alone .Net

Well, Win32 was positioned as a lock in cash cow:

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in

.NET serves the same purpose and it would be surprising if Microsoft suddenly drops old practices.

Not over night, but the fear is that WPF (for being a big slow mess only enterprises like) and Silverlight (for not getting any traction besides DRM streaming) will get deprecated.

The current MS is scared of be seen as this big slow old fashioned behemoth that isn't doing any hip stuff (besides Kinect).

So they want catchy stuff like one-true-dev-platform for everything (JS + HTML5) on their (fast and hip) IE browser.

They want to be lean and mean and run on tablets and WebOS has shown that doing everything in JS and HTML can work really well.

Don't underestimate the current MS willingness to do radical things that they think they need to do to be relevant in the future.

But like every MS technology WPF and SL will still have a very long life as MS zombies ahead of them.

Well, if you read the comments from the Microsoft guy in the Silverlight forums, it very much looks like that they're at least dropping development for Silverlight.

Cite:

"As to everything else: You all saw a very small technology demo of Windows 8, and a brief press release. We're all being quiet right now because we can't comment on this. It's not because we don't care, aren't listening, have given up, or are agreeing or disagreeing with you on something. All I can say for now is to please wait until September. If we say more before then, that will be great, but there are no promises (and I'm not aware of any plans) to say more right now. I'm very sorry that there's nothing else to share at the moment. I know that answer is terrible, but it's all that we can say right now. Seriously."

from http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/230502.aspx

I mean, if there are really absolutely no plans for dropping Silverlight, he could simply say so. But the way he is presenting it does neither support nor weaken the speculation about Silverlight being dropped, but from all the facts presented about Windows 8, indications about Silverlight's death are definitely there and I absolutely understand the SL developers' fears.

So I would be very very careful with the above statement. Mind that Microsoft is a profit-oriented enterprise (don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing that at all), so they have to make certain decisions when they see a technology is not developing as they expected it to be.

Adrian

Edited 2011-06-13 21:14 UTC

Uhm, no. If the orders are not to talk about the development environment until BUILD, then he can't "simply say say so".