Silverlight 1.0 released, Linux support announced
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I know nothing about IronRuby since it's outside of my domain of interests or work right now. Acropolis and wpf are too infant to be of any concern at the moment however I do have a good wpf book and have studied up on the subjects quite thoroughly, enough to know it's not technology that's innovative enough to be useful quite yet as it's missing the most critically important thing to me which is writing a web browser and desktop app once, something they seem to be moving towards but not quite there yet. Linq I must admit is a complete mystery to me and something that I've looked at extremely lightly and don't quite *get* at all, but I'm sure it will all make sense when the time comes. To be fair this stuff is not coming all at once, I think I read about wcf a couple of years ago but either way it's not a *lot* of stuff and much of it you either need or you don't. I believe in learning deeply what you need when you need it and only skimming the rest to know if it's likely to be a useful tool or not. I still don't think it's a fraction of the amount of technology we had to deal with back in the mfc c++ days when you factor in all the huge amount of 3rd party libraries required to make even the most basic of my applications actually do something useful. When I think of all the installers and reporting suites and encryption libraries and writing my own web server and on and on and on I feel like .net has nicely wrapped everything up and made it much cleaner and simpler to deal with.
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
p.s. of all the new technologies out there, the one I'm betting will be successful is LINQ. It makes your code clearer: instead of saying how to get the information (creating lists, doing for loops, getting data, generating objects from that data, then adding those objects to the list), you instead simply say what you want, and LINQ does the rest. It's really beautiful.
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Um..what thread were you thinking you replied to, or were you just writing gibberish in this thread? :wtf:
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
I was drawing a parallel. Crabby or lazy? Personally, i could care less about rounding methods in the library - in the past ten years, i've needed precise control over rounding exactly twice, and both times wrote my own routines just to be sure i would have that control. But obviously, it's a bigger deal for you, as you've brought it up at least twice in these threads. The parallel with browser support then is that you hope or had hoped for a consistent runtime, and found that various implementations were picking and choosing at what they'd actually bother to implement - hit the cool stuff, leave the mundane half-baked to trip up those trying to actually get stuff done.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
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SupportW, whatever it is, is nonexistant as far as I can tell. If the definitive tool for seeing if your application is supported, MOMA, doesn't indicate support (and it does check each p/invoke) then as far as I'm concerned it's just not supported. I have searched for this before but it's dropped off the radar so far that I can't find *any* info on it now. The thing is that it's easy enough to rewrite your own code to be compliant, but without the support of the really good 3rd party libraries that are out there I don't see how you can make anything commercially viable.
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
John Cardinal wrote:
without the support of the really good 3rd party libraries that are out there I don't see how you can make anything commercially viable.
Great point. I just ran Moma on our big WinForms app and we have surprisingly few problems: a handful of P/Invokes for shell interop and a few things partially implemented or not implemented at all in Mono. This is all stuff we can get around with relative ease. However, if I include our 3rd party dlls in the mix -- SyncFusion, AtwoodExceptionHandling, Krypton Toolkit, Divelements, EasyMail.NET -- the Moma warnings shoot into the thousands. Ouch!
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Yes, and it's easier to do some things with this glorified VG plugin than it is with vanilla JS. [cue collective, "aahhhhhhh" sound]
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Of course it is. That's one of the points in using someone else's code. ;) Obviously, things are a little bit different in browser-land, since you can't bring along just any code, but at the end of the day you're still just choosing between what's already been written and what you think you can write.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
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What is this vanilla JS you keep mentioning? All JS is vanilla.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
Meaning, nothing fancy, just plain old Javascript. (Say, as opposed to using Javascript with Silverlight.)
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Of course it is. That's one of the points in using someone else's code. ;) Obviously, things are a little bit different in browser-land, since you can't bring along just any code, but at the end of the day you're still just choosing between what's already been written and what you think you can write.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
That's such an obvious and well known point, Josh, I hesitate to chime in with agreement. Knowingly or not, you and Paul have taken what I've said out of context and argued me to death over minutia. I guess that's how it goes on the internet. Read this whole sentence and I think you both will agree with me: Silverlight lets you do things difficult or impossible to do with plain old Javascript, such as doing animation, playing audio, playing video, all in a cross-platform, cross-browser fashion. :cool: Comparing it to regular old JS + HTML + CSS, then, is silly; you're comparing the fabric of the web to a browser plug in, which, ironically, uses both JS and HTML. :doh: HTML + JS + CSS isn't going away, Silverlight is a great alternative to Flash. That's all. No need to get religious about it, mock it, nor any need to pull out the tired, old "Microsoft is going to take over the web" conspiracy theories. This isn't Slashdot, and we're not zit-faced teenagers.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Roman Catholic Relevance? The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
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That's such an obvious and well known point, Josh, I hesitate to chime in with agreement. Knowingly or not, you and Paul have taken what I've said out of context and argued me to death over minutia. I guess that's how it goes on the internet. Read this whole sentence and I think you both will agree with me: Silverlight lets you do things difficult or impossible to do with plain old Javascript, such as doing animation, playing audio, playing video, all in a cross-platform, cross-browser fashion. :cool: Comparing it to regular old JS + HTML + CSS, then, is silly; you're comparing the fabric of the web to a browser plug in, which, ironically, uses both JS and HTML. :doh: HTML + JS + CSS isn't going away, Silverlight is a great alternative to Flash. That's all. No need to get religious about it, mock it, nor any need to pull out the tired, old "Microsoft is going to take over the web" conspiracy theories. This isn't Slashdot, and we're not zit-faced teenagers.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Roman Catholic Relevance? The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
Judah Himango wrote:
Knowingly or not, you and Paul have taken what I've said out of context and argued me to death over minutia.
Hmm. I wasn't trying to attack you, Silverlight, or anything else with the possible exception of... well, i'll get to that. Frankly, i think it's a slick enough little plugin. It certainly beats Flash, at least from a developer perspective. That said, Flash to me is three good things: games, films, data visualization - and a host of bad ones: ads, menus / nav systems, splash screens, skins, "custom controls"... Now i'm speaking here as a user, a guy who spends far, far too much time on the web - Flash, however useful a tool in cautious hands, is a scourge. A similar - but more developer-friendly - plugin isn't really giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling, ya know? Now, speaking as a coder - i think you really missed the point that Paul was trying to make earlier. Of course there are things that you need a 3rd-party component to do, but just as needing video hardware doesn't mean i have to tie everything to NVidia, needing a video player or vector renderer doesn't mean i need to tie myself to Silverlight. Let me use an example: vector graphics. I have a certain little tool that displays as part of it's UI a small wire-frame diagram of a machine. On Mozilla and other browsers that support it, the Canvas element is used for the actual display; on IE, it's VML. VML is a bit creaky, so at some point this might well change to support Flash or Silverlight or whatever else works - but the point is, that area of the code is dreadfully boring. It's a tiny bit of glue between the stuff that interests me - building and transforming the model - and some 3rd-party library that actually renders the results on-screen. Whether that 3rd-party lib is built into the browser or some sort of plug-in isn't actually very important, so long as it's reasonably fast and widely available. The vast bulk of the code isn't going to change. And the rest of the app has animation. It has transparent sliding panels, custom controls, charts rendered on-the-fly. Some of that would be a fair bit easier with Silverlight; some of it would just be different. But what's the point? The only thing i really need is a simple vector rendering component. And there are plenty of those...
every night, i kn
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Right, John, we as developers don't necessarily have to learn everything. However, Mono is trying to provide compatible stacks for all this stuff, everything from LINQ to WPF to WCF to WinForms. Complete with the compiler and runtime backings all that implies. In other words, they actually do need to address most everything, and with the flood of technologies out of MS in the last year or two, that's a big platefull.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Roman Catholic Relevance? The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
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p.s. of all the new technologies out there, the one I'm betting will be successful is LINQ. It makes your code clearer: instead of saying how to get the information (creating lists, doing for loops, getting data, generating objects from that data, then adding those objects to the list), you instead simply say what you want, and LINQ does the rest. It's really beautiful.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Roman Catholic Relevance? The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
We'll see I guess, but I remain extremely skeptical of how it's going to be of any major benefit to the code I work on in the real world. Perhaps I just don't know enough about it but it seems like it's more a very minor benefit to the developer in terms of writing slightly less code to accomplish essentially the same thing.
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
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I was drawing a parallel. Crabby or lazy? Personally, i could care less about rounding methods in the library - in the past ten years, i've needed precise control over rounding exactly twice, and both times wrote my own routines just to be sure i would have that control. But obviously, it's a bigger deal for you, as you've brought it up at least twice in these threads. The parallel with browser support then is that you hope or had hoped for a consistent runtime, and found that various implementations were picking and choosing at what they'd actually bother to implement - hit the cool stuff, leave the mundane half-baked to trip up those trying to actually get stuff done.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
Shog9 wrote:
i've needed precise control over rounding exactly twice
Well then it's clear you've never had to write any code that deals with money in a big way. MidPoint rounding is utterly essential for dealing with financial data. Even if all you want to do is interface with accounting software you are screwed without it. Sure I could write my own, but that defeats the whole purpose of the MONO project.
Shog9 wrote:
The parallel with browser support then is that you hope or had hoped for a consistent runtime, and found that various implementations were picking and choosing at what they'd actually bother to implement - hit the cool stuff, leave the mundane half-baked to trip up those trying to actually get stuff done.
Not at all and this is probably why what you said seemed entirely unrelated to the discussion at hand. My beef is, to use an analogy, it's like building a house, getting the frame up and instead of putting on the siding and insulation rushing off to put in skylights and a pool in the back yard. It just makes no sense from any perspective. What project do *we* ever work on in real life where you can do that?
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
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Judah Himango wrote:
Knowingly or not, you and Paul have taken what I've said out of context and argued me to death over minutia.
Hmm. I wasn't trying to attack you, Silverlight, or anything else with the possible exception of... well, i'll get to that. Frankly, i think it's a slick enough little plugin. It certainly beats Flash, at least from a developer perspective. That said, Flash to me is three good things: games, films, data visualization - and a host of bad ones: ads, menus / nav systems, splash screens, skins, "custom controls"... Now i'm speaking here as a user, a guy who spends far, far too much time on the web - Flash, however useful a tool in cautious hands, is a scourge. A similar - but more developer-friendly - plugin isn't really giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling, ya know? Now, speaking as a coder - i think you really missed the point that Paul was trying to make earlier. Of course there are things that you need a 3rd-party component to do, but just as needing video hardware doesn't mean i have to tie everything to NVidia, needing a video player or vector renderer doesn't mean i need to tie myself to Silverlight. Let me use an example: vector graphics. I have a certain little tool that displays as part of it's UI a small wire-frame diagram of a machine. On Mozilla and other browsers that support it, the Canvas element is used for the actual display; on IE, it's VML. VML is a bit creaky, so at some point this might well change to support Flash or Silverlight or whatever else works - but the point is, that area of the code is dreadfully boring. It's a tiny bit of glue between the stuff that interests me - building and transforming the model - and some 3rd-party library that actually renders the results on-screen. Whether that 3rd-party lib is built into the browser or some sort of plug-in isn't actually very important, so long as it's reasonably fast and widely available. The vast bulk of the code isn't going to change. And the rest of the app has animation. It has transparent sliding panels, custom controls, charts rendered on-the-fly. Some of that would be a fair bit easier with Silverlight; some of it would just be different. But what's the point? The only thing i really need is a simple vector rendering component. And there are plenty of those...
every night, i kn
I know you guys aren't attacking me; it's dumb arguing over minutia that gets me. It's the 21st century equivalent of arguing over whether it's lawful to eat bread baked in an oven built with a brick laid on sabbath. You and Paul seem to be of the strict belief that if it's not pure HTML + JS + CSS, then it's not kosher. :) I'm of the persuasion that 3rd party components like Silverlight are necessary. In Silverlight's case, it's a pretty cool technology that allows WPF, LINQ, and any .NET language to be run on most any browser on most any OS. That's cool. You and Paul don't get the warm 'n fuzzies over that, OK, no problem. I just don't like the all the pissing on the technology like Paul did in his first few posts, nor the scary conspiracy theories, nor the endless debate over minutia that resulted from those posts.
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How does this excuse not working from the bottom up though? That wouldn't work in any of the projects we as developers work on.
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
I guess it's a choice they have to make: neglect the sexy new and make a full ugly old work implementation, or add basic support for all the technologies new and old. From a commercial standpoint, the "focus on the sexy" makes the most sense, as your company gets the most attention from that and collaboration from the borg. Novel being the sole vendor of Silverlight on Linux is very attractive for them, no doubt. But focusing on the sexy is nothing new...reminds me a bit of this Daily WTF[^]. :) I guess there's a tradeoff somewhere in there...
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We'll see I guess, but I remain extremely skeptical of how it's going to be of any major benefit to the code I work on in the real world. Perhaps I just don't know enough about it but it seems like it's more a very minor benefit to the developer in terms of writing slightly less code to accomplish essentially the same thing.
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
Oh man, I tell you right now, once you break your brain free of the imperative way of thinking, your code becomes so much cleaner and more concise when doing things functionally. It also opens the door for harnessing the power of multi-core processing, which is what projects like PLINQ[^] are all about. I would highly recommend looking into it if you deal with data in your app.
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Shog9 wrote:
i've needed precise control over rounding exactly twice
Well then it's clear you've never had to write any code that deals with money in a big way. MidPoint rounding is utterly essential for dealing with financial data. Even if all you want to do is interface with accounting software you are screwed without it. Sure I could write my own, but that defeats the whole purpose of the MONO project.
Shog9 wrote:
The parallel with browser support then is that you hope or had hoped for a consistent runtime, and found that various implementations were picking and choosing at what they'd actually bother to implement - hit the cool stuff, leave the mundane half-baked to trip up those trying to actually get stuff done.
Not at all and this is probably why what you said seemed entirely unrelated to the discussion at hand. My beef is, to use an analogy, it's like building a house, getting the frame up and instead of putting on the siding and insulation rushing off to put in skylights and a pool in the back yard. It just makes no sense from any perspective. What project do *we* ever work on in real life where you can do that?
"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
John Cardinal wrote:
Well then it's clear you've never had to write any code that deals with money in a big way.
Very true. :)
John Cardinal wrote:
My beef is, to use an analogy, it's like building a house, getting the frame up and instead of putting on the siding and insulation rushing off to put in skylights and a pool in the back yard.
Yup. And maybe i'm just being negative, but that's the sort of practice that seems all too common for API projects. I don't doubt it's a huge problem in the MONO project, but i deal with similar problems in much less ambitious projects: besides browsers, there's the bug-tracker i work with that has huge holes in its API requiring massive amounts of dodgy code to work around, and i just today finished coding up a library to process Outlook
msgfiles - which appear to be little more than a structured dump of some sketchy internal format. Why parse them directly? Because the Outlook-provided API is too flaky to rely on. The world seems full of half-baked APIs, written with a very narrow purpose in mind but positioned as general-purpose tools. :sigh:every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
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I know you guys aren't attacking me; it's dumb arguing over minutia that gets me. It's the 21st century equivalent of arguing over whether it's lawful to eat bread baked in an oven built with a brick laid on sabbath. You and Paul seem to be of the strict belief that if it's not pure HTML + JS + CSS, then it's not kosher. :) I'm of the persuasion that 3rd party components like Silverlight are necessary. In Silverlight's case, it's a pretty cool technology that allows WPF, LINQ, and any .NET language to be run on most any browser on most any OS. That's cool. You and Paul don't get the warm 'n fuzzies over that, OK, no problem. I just don't like the all the pissing on the technology like Paul did in his first few posts, nor the scary conspiracy theories, nor the endless debate over minutia that resulted from those posts.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Roman Catholic Relevance? The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
Judah Himango wrote:
You and Paul seem to be of the strict belief that if it's not pure HTML + JS + CSS, then it's not kosher.
Hey now, don't lump me in with that hippie. ;P Seriously though, my skepticism - and that's what it is, an unashamedly jaundiced view of anything new and proprietary - stems primarily from years of bad experience with previous "silver bullets" - Java, Flash, ActiveX... If you've ever had to parse malformed HTML, you know that it's hardly the panacea of openness and flexibility it purports to be... but it's still possible, with a fair bit of maddening effort, to realize the promise of a "world-wide web" of hyperlinked documents. Products like Silverlight threaten that when mis-used. IMHO, that doesn't put me in the position of a WebPharisee or conspiracy theorist, it's pure pragmatism: the web, for all its faults, works - and not just for you and me as developers, but you and me and Grandma Marie as end-users. It works because of it's faults - it's a terrible platform for traditional developers, because i - the end-user - have the final call over what is displayed, how it's displayed, what portions are displayed, and when. But, that is my opinion. And if i am gonna wear the hat of a legalistic old skeptic, then it'll be with this attitude: if Silverlight is really worthwhile, really is useful, really is more than Flash.NET - then nothing that i or anyone else say or do will stop it - developers and users will drag it into the mainstream together. And if that does happen, i'll cheerfully admit to being wrong about it. ;)
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
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Judah Himango wrote:
You and Paul seem to be of the strict belief that if it's not pure HTML + JS + CSS, then it's not kosher.
Hey now, don't lump me in with that hippie. ;P Seriously though, my skepticism - and that's what it is, an unashamedly jaundiced view of anything new and proprietary - stems primarily from years of bad experience with previous "silver bullets" - Java, Flash, ActiveX... If you've ever had to parse malformed HTML, you know that it's hardly the panacea of openness and flexibility it purports to be... but it's still possible, with a fair bit of maddening effort, to realize the promise of a "world-wide web" of hyperlinked documents. Products like Silverlight threaten that when mis-used. IMHO, that doesn't put me in the position of a WebPharisee or conspiracy theorist, it's pure pragmatism: the web, for all its faults, works - and not just for you and me as developers, but you and me and Grandma Marie as end-users. It works because of it's faults - it's a terrible platform for traditional developers, because i - the end-user - have the final call over what is displayed, how it's displayed, what portions are displayed, and when. But, that is my opinion. And if i am gonna wear the hat of a legalistic old skeptic, then it'll be with this attitude: if Silverlight is really worthwhile, really is useful, really is more than Flash.NET - then nothing that i or anyone else say or do will stop it - developers and users will drag it into the mainstream together. And if that does happen, i'll cheerfully admit to being wrong about it. ;)
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
Fair enough, Josh. Next time I won't lump you in with that dirty Mac-lovin' hippie. ;)
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Judah Himango wrote:
You can't always use somebody else's code, sometimes you have to write your own.
You... do realize, you're discussing a glorified vector graphics plugin, right? It's still someone else's code... ;)
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
And I would want to use Microsoft products on Linux because? 1) Linux needs more hackers making viruses 2) Linux needs to have tons of bloated buggy "managed" code 3) Winux sounds better than linux (or Lindows sounds better than Windows) 4) Microsoft is the 800lb gorilla that hates:) open source products 5) All of the about