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Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

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Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#71

Post by nitrogen »

pornel wrote: post #68
pnathan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the clientside web stack needs to be obseleted as well. I hope that someday the farting around with compile-to-js stops and we get a true bytecode VM-in-browser.

We had true bytecode in the browser already, it was called Java. VM isn't necessarily going to make things better. JS execution speed increased by orders of magnitude (it's getting close to decoding H.264 in real time!) It's more likely that ES6 and future versions will make JS more palatable and easier to optimize. Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly complicated C++-derived interfa…

Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly complicated C++-derived interfaces and DOM speed didn't get as much love as the raw JS.

What I'd like to see is a layer of abstraction somewhere between canvas/SVG and the DOM: you have mostly-rectangular objects, with Swing- and Qt-style layout managers used to specify their positions. The container object's CSS specifies the layout used to arrange its children. It would need to be possible to write custom layout managers in JavaScript. Then you could write a layout manager that evenly spaces its items around a circle (or any other arbitrary path), for example.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#72

Post by nitrogen »

ceejayoz wrote: post #69
WayneDB wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, show me your best HTML UI components and we will compare them to the native ones or even the Silverlight ones that are available (from Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics, ComponentOne, etc) Can you even get a data grid that is half as powerful or has as robust an API as something like this? http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx

I don't see anything particularly remarkable there. http://www.trirand.com/blog/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

Is pagination of the data (as shown in those examples) mandatory? It seems kind of annoying to have to limit the amount of data actually in the browser at one time, especially if it's done for "performance" reasons.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#73

Post by nailer »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #8
nailer wrote: post #7

Microsoft's IE9 product lead, said - without even saying that it was confidential or not to repeat - 'Silverlight is dead, I give it six months tops' at OnGameStart a couple of months ago. I believe him.

Just the web plugin. No evidence of it going away on WP7 or Windows 8.

WP7 and 7.1 have just a few apps. Do you think WP8 won't use something like winjs ala Windows 8?

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#74

Post by bokchoi »

dmethvin wrote: post #70
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the web plugin. No evidence of it going away on WP7 or Windows 8.

Get out your magnifying glass and find Silverlight and .NET on this diagram from Build: http://blog.discountasp.net/build-conference-developers-have... With Microsoft diagrams, the importance of the technology is proportional to the size of the box.

Isn't XAML another name for Silverlight and/or WPF?

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#75

Post by zbuc »

WayneDB wrote: post #45
rbanffy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have very rich HTML+JavaScript+JSON interfaces here that make me orders of magnitude more productive than I was in the 90's, but that may be me. OTOH, you may be tied to IE6 and unable to see all this.

Please, show me your best HTML UI components and we will compare them to the native ones or even the Silverlight ones that are available (from Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics, ComponentOne, etc) Can you even get a data grid that is half as powerful or has as robust an API as something like this? http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx

It won't even run on OS X so that's a pretty big plus for HTML UI components, given that modern web UI frameworks are all pretty reliably cross-browser.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#76

Post by jordan0day »

bokchoi wrote: post #74
dmethvin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get out your magnifying glass and find Silverlight and .NET on this diagram from Build: http://blog.discountasp.net/build-conference-developers-have... With Microsoft diagrams, the importance of the technology is proportional to the size of the box.

Isn't XAML another name for Silverlight and/or WPF?

Sort of. That is, traditionally XAML has been used primarily for Silverlight & WPF applications, but it's actually just a declarative language used for laying out (usually) Silverlight & WPF controls.

It's sort of a combo HTML&CSS. So your statement in that vein would be like "Isn't HTML&CSS just another name for Gecko and/or WebKit?"

That said, even though it looks like XAML may be used for new WinRT-based apps in the Windows Metro stuff, I'd be surprised if it survives the deaths of Silverlight & WPF.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#77

Post by jjcm »

bokchoi wrote: post #74
dmethvin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get out your magnifying glass and find Silverlight and .NET on this diagram from Build: http://blog.discountasp.net/build-conference-developers-have... With Microsoft diagrams, the importance of the technology is proportional to the size of the box.

Isn't XAML another name for Silverlight and/or WPF?

The XAML/C# stack is called many different things within windows. Silverlight and WPF are just two names for it. Keep in mind though that even things that are branded silverlight (desktop/web apps and wp7 apps) aren't even the same thing. The WP7 API differs heavily from the desktop API. The XAML/C# stack for metro apps is also just a very small subset of the silverlight stack.

Silverlight may very well be going away, but XAML/C# isn't. The only thing that's most likely disappearing is the push for it to be on the web and the name "silverlight" itself.

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#78

Post by beagle3 »

d4nt wrote: post #59
beagle3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stalemate? Two years ago, flash was the only game in town; Good HTML5 implementations were no where to be found, and Silverlight adoption was a joke. It's not like you could HTML5 an equivalent to flash on an iPhone OS 3. I agree that things started changing rapidly two years ago, with the introduction of iOS 4. But there was never a stalemate -- Flash was king; then there was chaos; and now HTML5 is winning (for the…

I guess I mean that for people who were considering which platform to build their rich internet app on, there was not a obvious choice. EDIT: I admit, there was a time when Flash was the only option, but as early as 2003 I recall "Ajax" being used in preference to Flash for web user interfaces that needed an element of richness. So, I think there has been dissatisfaction with Flash for longer than you imply.

Your choice of words was unfortunate, then - "stalemate" implies a tie with no possible move for any player.

In 2003, there was Ajax rich (you could do some nontrivial client side processing -- like hide and show elements), and there was Flash rich (antialiased polygons, sound). I was talking about the latter, and so do most people that consider HTML5 a worthy flash replacement (even though e.g. you still have to use Flash for proper sound support).

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#79

Post by nobody3141592 »

nailer wrote: post #7

Microsoft's IE9 product lead, said - without even saying that it was confidential or not to repeat - 'Silverlight is dead, I give it six months tops' at OnGameStart a couple of months ago. I believe him.

The year before the Silverlight team were saying that WPF is dead and Silverlight is the future.

Good job we all switched to Qt and C++

Re: Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

#80

Post by jjcm »

dos1 wrote: post #55

Good riddance! I spent the last 5 months at a gig working on a massive Silverlight 4 application. I've been a web guy forever, but I took this job thinking it would be good to learn how the other half lives. After experiencing the pain and drudgery of working with Silverlight, I couldn't be happier that it's going away. The most maddening part of working on a Silverlight app was that things that are dead simple with…

I was a ruby on rails dev for about 3 years up until a year ago, when I got hired by Microsoft. I now work almost entirely on the XAML/C# stack. Honestly, I really like it. There are some very key improvements in the stack that I see over HTML/JS. Javascript is a great language for small and simple scripts, but for larger js-heavy applications it gets pretty hairy quick. Likewise, html is a fantastic markup language for webpages, but for embedded applications it's horrible.

Silverlight in itself was never meant for the web, it was meant for more robust desktop applications, and it shows. The C#/XAML stack works great for complex applications. Likewise, html/js aren't that fantastic of languages to work with when doing embedded applications; but they're a great team for the web.

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