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How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

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41–50 of 99 posts

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#41
post #23

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…

WPF and WinRT share similar ways of working.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#42

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.

In this case they undermined a major new technology (XAML) three years after introducing it.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#43
I remember it all too well. I was a WPF contractor in early 2011 and Silverlight was the one of the best paying skills so it was the thing to learn until the confusion of that announcement. I got a short Silverlight role at the end of 2011 but after that things dried up totally just as I was hoping to buy a home when they were affordable.

I mistakenly stuck with .Net and ended up going to back end data work before returning to the web side as I had begun years before. Things are good on the web and cloud side but I stick see Xaml as too risky to go back to now, even with Xamarin.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#44

I remember it all too well. I was a WPF contractor in early 2011 and Silverlight was the one of the best paying skills so it was the thing to learn until the confusion of that announcement. I got a short Silverlight role at the end of 2011 but after that things dried up totally just as I was hoping to buy a home when they were affordable. I mistakenly stuck with .Net and ended up going to back end data work before re…

ASP.NET MVC has served me well for pretty much a decade. Has a bright future as well.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#45
post #40
post #35

It's crazy to think that the owner of the win32 API, probably the strongest asset in contemporary computing, ended up with such a disorganized developer story - winforms, wpf, winrt, silverlight, html. The last thing you want your "developers, developers, developers" to do is to stop and think about which APIs they need to evaluate switching to. Because that's how you build mindshare on iOS, Android, OSX, ChromeOS.

It's WinRT via .net/C++/js for future apps. Everything else is legacy supported.

Is anybody actually building Universal apps, though? I just don't see any of the desktop apps with massive existing code bases jumping ship anytime soon, if ever.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the chart on that site, Windows 7 is still at 44%. That very much sounds like "not being able to overcome past Windows versions in market share" to me.

Nope. Look at the graphs for Windows 7 and Windows 10(assuming that's the dotted line) over the whole recorded time starting in 2008. Windows 10 is roughly following Windows 7's trajectory, if not exceeding it a little bit. It took Windows 7 over two years to initially reach 44%. Windows 10 has been out for only about a year now.

Forced upgrades help move the installed line up, (but move the pro-Microsoft line down).

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#47
post #40
post #35

It's crazy to think that the owner of the win32 API, probably the strongest asset in contemporary computing, ended up with such a disorganized developer story - winforms, wpf, winrt, silverlight, html. The last thing you want your "developers, developers, developers" to do is to stop and think about which APIs they need to evaluate switching to. Because that's how you build mindshare on iOS, Android, OSX, ChromeOS.

It's WinRT via .net/C++/js for future apps. Everything else is legacy supported.

Until that also becomes legacy because there's a new hot API on the block ;)

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#48
post #17

I don't agree. Switched my main focus to .NET around 4 years ago, and we keep on having more requests for proposals than we can fulfil, including new applications.

Now yes, .Net is gaining popularity a on the asp.net and web api side since they open sourced it so you aren't tied to MS and still have Mono and Linux support but Windows is dead AFAIC. I've moved to F# and may well move to Reason from there as I switch my skills to Linux.

I totally agree the mishandling on the Windows 8 announcement is what killed windows just as it was getting good. The freedom to style WPF apps would have made Windows keep it's place as the OS that you could make your own but Windows 10 is trying to be Apple, constraining what you can and can't do and forcing you through an App Store.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#49
post #34

And here I am still stuck on WinForms grids. WPF is too slow and the JS frameworks just spin endlessly when I try to throw the amount of data I need to display at them.

Glad I made that decision my self, I had a chance to switch to WPF in 2010, two years later it was on the out.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#50
post #45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's WinRT via .net/C++/js for future apps. Everything else is legacy supported.

Is anybody actually building Universal apps, though? I just don't see any of the desktop apps with massive existing code bases jumping ship anytime soon, if ever.

Well Microsoft have released Desktop App Converter, where you can distribute Win32 apps on the store. And allows access to universal app apis, so you can gradually transition.
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