As a developer in the Microsoft stack, this is par for the course. Choose your tech wisely.
Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
11–20 of 31 posts
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#12Developers complaining that a company with a history of treating people poorly betrays them? Cry me a river.
I see where you're coming from, but in regards to MS and developers I really can't disagree with you more. MS, more than most, bends over backwards to reach out to developers. You can still target COM and OLE, you can still write VB4. I have applications written for DOS and Windows 3.1 that still work on Windows 7. In this case, I think it is more a failure in PR than anything else. Silverlight will continue to work…
Honestly I think Microsoft's extreme desire to maintain backwards compatibility has hurt developers in the long run. That's an awful lot of legacy to carry around and they haven't been proficient at phasing products and platforms out when they're clearly way beyond their prime. They should focus more on being innovative and having solid strategies for moving developers incrementally towards new platforms and frameworks.
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#13Developers complaining that a company with a history of treating people poorly betrays them? Cry me a river.
I see where you're coming from, but in regards to MS and developers I really can't disagree with you more. MS, more than most, bends over backwards to reach out to developers. You can still target COM and OLE, you can still write VB4. I have applications written for DOS and Windows 3.1 that still work on Windows 7. In this case, I think it is more a failure in PR than anything else. Silverlight will continue to work…
> it will be the primary way of writing apps for the Windows phone.
This, right there. Silverlight isn't going away. It's still useful. They just aren't trying to compete in an area where it won't be as useful. However, Silverlight developers suddenly have this transferable skill that Flash developers don't have on the mobile side.
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#14It seems like just yesterday that developers were saying Microsoft betrayed them by breaking compatibility between VB6 and VB.Net.
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#15I've been working on a Silverlight app full time for the past 8 months. I was relieved when Microsoft made this announcement (even if they are now trying to back track on it a bit).
Silverlight isn't bad at all, really. In some ways it's just fantastic. And given another 3 or 4 years or so, it will mature to the point of being a great framework. It's a truly awesome framework for WP7 and if MS can gain some traction behind WP7, having Silverlight in their corner is going to be a boon for them.
But right now Silverlight is both mighty raw and almost pointless for webapps. There are so many bugs in Silverlight itself and its related tools that it can make working in Silverlight quite frustrating. When all this time I watch HTML5 blossom and take off and pretty much gain feature parity (and beyond) to Silverlight, I can't help but think to myself as I look at my app, "What's the point?"
Nothing is perfect, and of course HTML5 is going to have its warts, especially when dealing with every vendor's own implementation of JS and the new HTML5 components. But at least with this route you're swimming with the current and not against it. There's a lot to be said for that.
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#16I thought this was a refreshing move. They've accepted the situation and adjusted their strategy accordingly. The only other option seems to be ignoring reality and continuing on their old course, which won't do anything to improve the success of Silverlight. Even Adobe seems to have given up the fight and accepted html5 as the winner (given their demo's of html5 authoring tools recently).
I do wish MS would release a SL to HTML5 compiler though. That would mitigate a lot of the rancor.
That would be a hard cookie. In many ways, Silverlight has a lot more features than HTML5 and it is also compiled to binary. I guess it would be possible to compile the binary to some sort of JavaScript and emulate some of the Silverlight API, but I seriously doubt that it would yield very convincing results.
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#17Developers complaining that a company with a history of treating people poorly betrays them? Cry me a river.
I see where you're coming from, but in regards to MS and developers I really can't disagree with you more. MS, more than most, bends over backwards to reach out to developers. You can still target COM and OLE, you can still write VB4. I have applications written for DOS and Windows 3.1 that still work on Windows 7. In this case, I think it is more a failure in PR than anything else. Silverlight will continue to work…
"You can write very capable, very pretty web apps using just javascript, CSS and HTML4. HTML5 just makes it that much easier."
Which part of HTML5 are you talking about here? I always assumed that in this context HTML5 meant 'Canvas + element'. I hope that developers aren't going to use Canvas to replace CSS/javascript menus, rounded corners etc. with Canvas-based ones 8(
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#18I thought this was a refreshing move. They've accepted the situation and adjusted their strategy accordingly. The only other option seems to be ignoring reality and continuing on their old course, which won't do anything to improve the success of Silverlight. Even Adobe seems to have given up the fight and accepted html5 as the winner (given their demo's of html5 authoring tools recently).
I do wish MS would release a SL to HTML5 compiler though. That would mitigate a lot of the rancor.
I could be wrong, but I don't think translating between Silverlight and actual web development with an acceptable level of fidelity is realistic. If it were, ASP.NET WebForms 3.5 and 4.0 would have implemented something like that to begin with and Silverlight would have never existed.
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see where you're coming from, but in regards to MS and developers I really can't disagree with you more. MS, more than most, bends over backwards to reach out to developers. You can still target COM and OLE, you can still write VB4. I have applications written for DOS and Windows 3.1 that still work on Windows 7. In this case, I think it is more a failure in PR than anything else. Silverlight will continue to work…
Honestly I think Microsoft's extreme desire to maintain backwards compatibility has hurt developers in the long run. That's an awful lot of legacy to carry around and they haven't been proficient at phasing products and platforms out when they're clearly way beyond their prime. They should focus more on being innovative and having solid strategies for moving developers incrementally towards new platforms and framewor…
One word: Enterprise.
I currently contract for a company with 50,000 + employees and some pretty specialized software that way too many people need to access. Getting that to change is like turning a convoy of sea liners with no radio communication.
The programmers who actually understand the weird ass domain of that software really wish they were still writing COBOL on a mainframe, the users who know how to use the software are understandably reluctant to have to learn another application when the existing works fine for THEIR needs (and job security). We have succeeded in getting a lot of stuff transferred to Citrix servers, but there are still a few hold outs / problem areas.
So, yeah, sometimes we really need the existing old stuff to still work.
Re: Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing Silverlight strategy
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wish MS would release a SL to HTML5 compiler though. That would mitigate a lot of the rancor.
That would be a hard cookie. In many ways, Silverlight has a lot more features than HTML5 and it is also compiled to binary. I guess it would be possible to compile the binary to some sort of JavaScript and emulate some of the Silverlight API, but I seriously doubt that it would yield very convincing results.
I agree, but in my mind it doesn't need to be perfect. Just good enough to get the bones to dance a little, and frankly, there isn't a lot you can do in SL that you can't do in javascript / HTML.