How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

Even if it's only a machine for strategy games, it's awfully surprising. If I can crank XCOM to high graphics on something, it shouldn't be struggling on a game 15 years older.

This article is dead on from my perspective. I was one of those long-time Windows devs, started on the Win16 API, and I had invested quite a bit of time and effort into WPF and Silverlight because I thought it was cool. I remember that exact announcement, and my immediate thought was that they were ditching WPF/XAML for this new thing, whatever it was, and I just could not see where that was going. I started working in python learning django on linux a few days later and haven't looked back at Windows much since. I don't know how the .NET ecosystem ultimately was impacted, but every developer has to make decisions about how to invest the scarce resource of time, and I am sure there were many people who reacted the same way the author and I did.

In early 2013, shortly after the store opened, Microsoft had a thing going where they'd pay developers $100 for every app they published:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4124548/microsoft-paying-d...

This was actually a net negative for the store, as it led to the bulk creation of a lot of crappy, low-effort applications, setting up the expectation for users that most of the content in the store was junk, and making legitimate applications harder to find. I wouldn't be surprised if this played a significant role in discouraging developers.

Some people will complain that windows tries too hard to maintain backward compatibility and others will complain when they don't. Its like damned if you do or damned if you don't.

Great to see someone holding Sinofsky to task for this!

Some background, from what I recall: - During the planning for Windows 8 XAML was the leading candidate for the UI technology but late in the process Sinofsky personally overruled it to make HTML the preferred UI technology.

- Through the first half of Win8 development XAML support for Win8 was essentially a side project by DevDiv with very little support by Windows.

- Other orgs analyzing UI technologies we told point blank by Windows that Silverlight was dead and HTML was the way forward.

- DevDiv had fairly little confidence in the HTML strategy and was essentially hedging with XAML. But Windows was focused on HTML.

- After people started building apps it became apparent how painful HTML was (this is IE9 HTML- no web components, no ES6, with a framework written by JS noobs), and Jupiter was re-orged into Windows. This was where XAML re-appeared in the PDC slides.

- Sinofsky likes to re-imagine history and say that he was merely getting the Windows org to bolster the otherwise ignored HTML platform, but this is deceiving. The message was clear to the grunts on Windows for the first half of Win8 that HTML was the direction and there was a very hostile relationship with Jupiter.

There was a lot of damage internally to Silverlight through this process- morale was low, internal customers were being warned off of it, etc.

Also this comment just gets me mad: https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/733699065763004416

Sinofsky was the root of so much politicking and poison. Good riddance SteveSi.