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MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

extremetech.com

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Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#21

Post by WayneDB »

Argorak wrote: post #16
WayneDB wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "whole technology stack" has Microsoft invalidated? How is Cocoa still alive and kicking? How is that different from something like VB6?

Silverlight? You would never start a new project in it nowadays, would you? Cocoa on the other hand is still the foundation of almost all OS X and iOS programs.

I have no problem targeting Silverlight because Silverlight is not the "stack" in that case. XAML and .NET are, both of which are viable for the foreseeable future. Any other examples?

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#22

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

This news explains a lot about St. Gaben's new found love for Linux. Combine Microsoft's attempt to embrace and extend* into reselling software on its platform, with MS not keeping DirectX ahead of OpenGL; and it is no wonder Gaben jumped into Linux development the way he did.

*gobble up and monopolize

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#23

Post by wtallis »

WayneDB wrote: post #13
Argorak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a bonus for existing applications, but not when choosing a technology for a new one. If your technology gets shelved, you won't be able to grow with underlying framework. Now new interesting stuff for you, except if you rebuild. Apple for example takes a different route: they have shorter support spans, but rarely invalidate whole technology stacks. Cocoa is still alive and kicking after all those years.

What "whole technology stack" has Microsoft invalidated? How is Cocoa still alive and kicking? How is that different from something like VB6?

Since being renamed from OpenStep, Cocoa has gotten hardware-accelerated graphics, two new (one since-deprecated) semi-automatic memory management schemes, 64-bit support, a hardware-accelerated animation system, a new fine-grained security model, closure-based concurrency, and cloud storage support. And yet it's still largely compatible with and recognizable as the framework with which the first web browser was built. And it's still a first-class citizen that Apple uses to write their own apps - it's not just being kept around in maintenance mode.

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#24

Post by rplacd »

FireBeyond wrote: post #18
xradionut wrote: post #7

When you work with the Microsoft stack, except for a few core technologies, you have no idea if the "hot" API or current solution Redmond is pushing will be supported or abandoned in a couple of years. Combine that with stapling Metro, a tablet/phone API to the side of the desktop in Windows 8, many developers I know are tired of being thrashed and burned. As a developer/analyst/admin that works primary in the MS app…

What are your alternatives? OSX, where Apple has no qualms about abandoning technology, hardware or software, within a matter of years (the iPad 1 was EOL'ed just shy of two years old, I believe). XCode and (Snow) Leopard? No such luck. Now, you do mention the Linux alternatives, which seem to be the most stable... if you can get around any infighting of QT... Gnome/KDE... etc et al. But it doesn't seem particularly…

The Apple situation's slightly more complex than that: they're certainly ruthless with their hardware, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim they have commitment issues with their software technologies - ObjC, Foundation and AppKit's been around since the late 1980s from NeXT without serious architectural changes; UIKit'll be around for a while yet; let nothing come between them and their investment in the Apple Compiler Group. (The upshot is that they've sufficiently abstracted hardware away anyway, so hardware changes aren't showstoppers.) If anything, they're more conservative with tossing out the SDKs than most: OpenGL support, for example, is still absurdly piss-poor, even if they're getting better with their GPU driver support. But it does net you compatibility all the way down their HCL - at the bottom end, for example, is the mid-'07 iMac with the ATi 2600 PRO.

They do give not-so-subtle hints to hand over to them the cha-ching, though, when they EOL old versions of XCode - but that's usually the most you're going to encounter. So works Apple in general.

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#25

Post by ja27 »

WayneDB wrote: post #13
Argorak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a bonus for existing applications, but not when choosing a technology for a new one. If your technology gets shelved, you won't be able to grow with underlying framework. Now new interesting stuff for you, except if you rebuild. Apple for example takes a different route: they have shorter support spans, but rarely invalidate whole technology stacks. Cocoa is still alive and kicking after all those years.

What "whole technology stack" has Microsoft invalidated? How is Cocoa still alive and kicking? How is that different from something like VB6?

Silverlight, MFC, ATL, Active Server Pages (pre-ASP.NET), MSN Messenger, Windows 7 desktop gadgets, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8 RT (wait, I got ahead of myself - give it a few more months).

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#26

Post by jarjoura »

XNA was a POS and honestly, DOA. Microsoft tried to simplify game development on top of C# but even indie-developers opt'd to go the C++ route with a 3rd party cross-platform engine.

Plus as a game developer, if your game is successful enough to need to build a bigger engine, wouldn't it make sense to just rewrite it on top of C++/Direct3D anyway?

Otherwise a few fixes here and there to a game you've written in XNA will still continue to run on Windows/Xbox. I mean, you can still run VB6 apps for example and that runtime DLL is almost 15 years old :-).

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#27

Post by jordoh »

The writing has been on the wall for a while about the end of XNA development by MS - none of the development tools for XNA have been updated to work in Visual Studio 2012. Fortunately, there's an open source replacement that run on a much broader range of platforms: https://github.com/mono/MonoGame

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#28

Post by pjmlp »

ja27 wrote: post #25
WayneDB wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "whole technology stack" has Microsoft invalidated? How is Cocoa still alive and kicking? How is that different from something like VB6?

Silverlight, MFC, ATL, Active Server Pages (pre-ASP.NET), MSN Messenger, Windows 7 desktop gadgets, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8 RT (wait, I got ahead of myself - give it a few more months).

WebObjects, Java Bindings, Garbage Collector, Quicktime 2/3D, Java Quicktime API, AudioDeviceIO, Carbon....

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#29

Post by pjmlp »

xradionut wrote: post #7

When you work with the Microsoft stack, except for a few core technologies, you have no idea if the "hot" API or current solution Redmond is pushing will be supported or abandoned in a couple of years. Combine that with stapling Metro, a tablet/phone API to the side of the desktop in Windows 8, many developers I know are tired of being thrashed and burned. As a developer/analyst/admin that works primary in the MS app…

> When you work with the Microsoft stack, except for a few core technologies, you have no idea if the "hot" API or current solution Redmond is pushing will be supported or abandoned in a couple of years.

The situation is no different for other software vendors.

That is how commercial software works.

Re: MS kills Xbox 360/PC cross-platform development

#30

Post by chc »

rplacd wrote: post #24
FireBeyond wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your alternatives? OSX, where Apple has no qualms about abandoning technology, hardware or software, within a matter of years (the iPad 1 was EOL'ed just shy of two years old, I believe). XCode and (Snow) Leopard? No such luck. Now, you do mention the Linux alternatives, which seem to be the most stable... if you can get around any infighting of QT... Gnome/KDE... etc et al. But it doesn't seem particularly…

The Apple situation's slightly more complex than that: they're certainly ruthless with their hardware, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim they have commitment issues with their software technologies - ObjC, Foundation and AppKit's been around since the late 1980s from NeXT without serious architectural changes; UIKit'll be around for a while yet; let nothing come between them and their investment in the Apple Compi…

> The Apple situation's slightly more complex than that: they're certainly ruthless with their hardware, but it's a bit of a stretch to claim they have commitment issues with their software technologies - ObjC, Foundation and AppKit's been around since the late 1980s from NeXT without serious architectural changes

And if you happened to bet on those technologies instead of Carbon, you're probably very happy with that. Well, unless you were writing Cocoa apps with Java, which was pushed as a peer to Objective-C in much the same way that Carbon was presented as a peer to Foundation and AppKit. Those technologies all got killed pretty viciously, even though Apple at various points actually seemed to be promoting them over Objective-C/Cocoa.

Apple axes stuff faster than Microsoft is even capable of moving. Looking directly back from their current technology stack, it looks like mostly smooth sailing, but that's because you're not looking at the wreckage to the left and right.

(Bonus points: Remember when Apple were all about Garbage-Collected Objective-C until they weren't and suddenly ARC was the new hotness?)

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