Thank you, Microsoft
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
Wow a real life example exactly illustrating my point of why the original statements and lukewarm retraction were such a calamity for Silverlight. I've become convinced that in fact it's a safe platform to bet on but your situation illustrates perfectly why it could become a sort of self fulfilling prophecy in a world where perception can quickly become reality.
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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Yesterday, goldfish, today, pawns. You have to realize that we developers are merely pawns in Microsoft's chess game to market its real meat and potatoes product, namely Windows and secondly, Office. The reason being, the more sexy products we develop for those platforms, and the more we develop stuff that looks and feels like whatever Microsoft's current fancy is (ribbon bars, what a crock of crap), the more the naive consumer will say, wow, look at all those nice shiny apps, or something to that effect. So, the sooner you realize you are a pawn, the sooner you can free yourself of the game. Consider the difference: WPF, Silverlight, C#, F#, .NET, Visual Studio, are all pieces in Microsoft's chess game. HTML 5? There is no "product" that this technology is pushing--it's agnostic, and even more insidious to some, it's not directly connected with profit. Microsoft hates that with a passion because it leads to free thinking and free thinking leads to free action. Microsoft wants you all under the yoke of making money for Microsoft. Marc
Nahh.. the goldfish post was your zenith I think. ;)
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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I was the one that introduced .NET to our office 8 years ago. I remember during my interview I asked if I could write any application they gave me in .NET. When I arrived for my first day of work I had a shrink wrapped copy of Visual Studio on my desk. Nobody there had ever tried using .NET so I was sort of a test case. After the first .NET application went live I led a war against Foxpro and all the other hob-nob tools in the office. We replaced legacy after legacy so that now everything is in .NET and working great. I also moved everyone over from VB to C#. My orginal application is still going strong. I've still not won the war against the horror known as "Access". The point is that the success of .NET has had an impact on my credibility. Had the technology failed in 2005 I don't know if I'd still be employed. So after waiting patiently for Silverlight to mature (all the way to 4.0) I decided to take a risk and make another big move. Instead of support I'm now getting blowback. Well, credibility was nice while it lasted.
Well to be fair Silverlight is still going strong and the furore will die down soon but as a fellow .net developer with a huge .net codebase already written, tested and alive in the real world for thousands of users I would be a mad man to not go the WPF / Silverlight route for new UI's going forward so I think you made the right decision, you just have to gut through it for the next little while. I felt as you do a couple of days ago but I've since come to see it as nothing more than a huge fuck up by a person at Microsoft that should know better if he holds such a position and a bad response when the shit hit the fan by Microsoft but the reality is nothing has changed from when you recommended it. I've been developing for well over 20 years now and the one thing I learned over that time is that nothing you learn or code with will be around for long anyway, it's like being on a treadmill running the wrong way until the day you decide to retire. Don't fall in love with any technology and keep your eyes on the bleeding edge but don't be the first to adopt if you want to stay relevant.
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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While I agree with everything you've said, and followed the same mantra, I will argue about your "against Foxpro and all the other hob-nob tools ". FoxPro is/was a great tool and is till used by manu many shops out there. I spend 15 years as a Fox/VFP developer until I switched to C#. Now I love .Net, but anyonw who's done any real work with VFP knows the power of it.
Everything makes sense in someone's mind
Um..I have done a lot of real work with Foxpro and it's as dead as the parrot in that Monty Python sketch. It was a tool for the time it was in but the world has moved on in just about every way imagineable since then. Don't get me wrong there's no reason any business app made today couldn't be made today in even an old copy of Foxpro but it just doesn't cut it for what people have come to expect out of an app.
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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MehGerbil wrote:
While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
Win32 API has been around for at least 15 years and works just fine. Ditto for COM (not that I am a big fan of it).
modified on Thursday, November 4, 2010 10:53 AM
Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
Win32 API has been around for at least 15 years and works just fine.
Amen!
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russel
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
I can't say I feel very sorry for Silverlight developers right now. They have staked their livelihood on a single company's whims, a company mind you that has a storied history of changing its mind whenever it pleases. "Oh wow, Win32! Time to-" "Err, .NET is in now? Well OK, let's-" "Oh, WPF? I guess that makes since with Vista-" "Silverlight? Really?!" Just to give some examples of how spastic their desktop development toolchain has been. You may as well buck up and learn HTML/JavaScript because that stuff is proven, platform/company-agnostic, and is only going to grow in the future. Now I'm also a bit of an open web app zealot but I wasn't always that way. I still use Windows and I've always loved C#'s syntax and features - I just wouldn't stake my job on them given the choice.
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My point exactly!!!' I have been coding for 25 plus years and every time I open a "new and better" version of something I get this very sad feeling that we really have not progressed much. Recently setting up an ODBC connection (for the gazillionth time) and reading the MS help is like reading a latin translation of a Led Zeppelin song in Chinese’s. Other than Android is there ANYTHING NEW OUT THERE... Why cant my cell phone make coffee or something!! New technology..Big deal, it can send and receive text/verbal messages and tell me where I am. I want a paradigm shift!
Well as far as servers are concerned, the NoSQL movement has emerged, and JS is becoming more powerful, so you can always look into that. In fact a whole new stack is emerging thanks to how powerful servers and browsers are becoming that directly challenges the frontend/scripting/server language/datastore setup traditionally used. So if you want new and exciting you can jump headfirst into that. As for desktop programs, those aren't going to change because let's face it, the desktop hasn't changed very much since it was introduced. It looks a bit prettier but the paradigm is still the same as it always was for desktop software. (Thankfully though things are moving to the web more and more which I think is great. :-D But your mileage may vary.)
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Nahh.. the goldfish post was your zenith I think. ;)
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
John C wrote:
Nahh.. the goldfish post was your zenith I think.
Oh no! It's downhill from here, I guess! :) Marc
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Same really. I'd rather they'd just release something and then concentrate on service packs that fix the bugs etc for a while, maybe with the odd new version that finishes off some of the incomplete bits. As it is the bugs never get fixed and the software is replaced by something totally new a couple of years later, which has its own set of bugs that never get fixed and missing important features etc.
Dave Parker wrote:
As it is the bugs never get fixed
Bingo. Haven't tried VS 2010, but earlier versions seem to always have the same small set of bugs that the space cadets at Redmond can't seem to fix.
Everybody SHUT UP until I finish my coffee...
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
Microsoft has and will come up with new unproven technologies all the time. Some will stick and some will be abandoned. They have to do that just to remain relevant. That doesn’t mean we, as software developers, need to adjust our development platforms every time something new comes out, especially not for enterprise development. We need to separate personal aspirations from what is best for our employers. We are hired to make our employers money. That’s the bottom line. For enterprise applications, a WinForms client with properly layered service architecture on the server side will provide the most value and reduce time-to-market. Why? Because it has been around for ages and it just works. Couple it with ClickOnce and you get an easy deployment mechanism that works well in most corporate scenarios. If you want to waste your employer’s time and money, go ASP.NET and hack your way around with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX and all the other components that result in pure technical deficit. From a business perspective, what is the reason to use Silverlight for internal enterprise applications aside from one’s personal aspirations? The only reason I can come up with is if you went down the ASP.NET route (which I did at some point) and are buried in technical deficit and need a way out. It does have some potential in creating less chaos, but only if your employer recognizes that it will take a long time to build a development framework around it especially since it is an immature technology. Though, can you build a business case for it demonstrating cost savings or additional revenue? Ultimately, your choice of development platform really depends on your core business and the applications you develop. In typical scenarios, business applications will be written differently than public-facing applications and as such you should use different development tools to achieve your objectives. Personally, I don’t see a real good business argument for Silverlight. Sure it’s cool and you can do some fancy things with it, but will it make your employer more money? E.g., can you see yourself standing in front of your board of directors making an argument that Silverlight will make or save $2M? If you can come up with a real business argument (other than fear of becoming a dinosaur which your employer does not care about) then go for it. Otherwise, stay with what you have and if you are developing public apps then start looking at HTML 5. I heard Ballmer speak at the recent Gartner conference and my take on it was that they r
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On a different but very related issue... I realised something was wrong the day I (with a decade and a half as a Microsoft developer) needed to ask someone where the 'Save As' option was in the new version of Word. I still find myself wasting time trying to figure out how to do things I've been able to do for years with previous versions. I thought it was early signs of old age, but yesterday I saw a gathering huddled around a PC trying to figure out how to Print Preview. Somebody in Redmond needs to have a Wireless Keyboard shoved so far up their ass that they can type their resignation letter with their tonsils. -Rd
Hit any user to continue.
Yeah, I went through that too, but in a foreign language. By the time 2007 came out, I was in Japan and had been using Office 2003 based on memory of the keystrokes. Sometimes the menu items get resorted in a different language, so position was not safe. Then the menu hit the fan. I cursed.
Narf.
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Microsoft has and will come up with new unproven technologies all the time. Some will stick and some will be abandoned. They have to do that just to remain relevant. That doesn’t mean we, as software developers, need to adjust our development platforms every time something new comes out, especially not for enterprise development. We need to separate personal aspirations from what is best for our employers. We are hired to make our employers money. That’s the bottom line. For enterprise applications, a WinForms client with properly layered service architecture on the server side will provide the most value and reduce time-to-market. Why? Because it has been around for ages and it just works. Couple it with ClickOnce and you get an easy deployment mechanism that works well in most corporate scenarios. If you want to waste your employer’s time and money, go ASP.NET and hack your way around with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX and all the other components that result in pure technical deficit. From a business perspective, what is the reason to use Silverlight for internal enterprise applications aside from one’s personal aspirations? The only reason I can come up with is if you went down the ASP.NET route (which I did at some point) and are buried in technical deficit and need a way out. It does have some potential in creating less chaos, but only if your employer recognizes that it will take a long time to build a development framework around it especially since it is an immature technology. Though, can you build a business case for it demonstrating cost savings or additional revenue? Ultimately, your choice of development platform really depends on your core business and the applications you develop. In typical scenarios, business applications will be written differently than public-facing applications and as such you should use different development tools to achieve your objectives. Personally, I don’t see a real good business argument for Silverlight. Sure it’s cool and you can do some fancy things with it, but will it make your employer more money? E.g., can you see yourself standing in front of your board of directors making an argument that Silverlight will make or save $2M? If you can come up with a real business argument (other than fear of becoming a dinosaur which your employer does not care about) then go for it. Otherwise, stay with what you have and if you are developing public apps then start looking at HTML 5. I heard Ballmer speak at the recent Gartner conference and my take on it was that they r
Well, my thinking for going with Silverlight is as follows: 1: I read it's a good place to start as an introduction to WPF - sort of a WPF light. 2: WPF seems to be the replacement for Windows Forms and while Windows Forms will be supported for the forseable future it is a very limited technology when compared to WPF and I think Windows Forms will be dropped at some point. Sure you can get customized controls for Windows Forms but I refuse to use 3rd party controls (license fees, upgrades - it's a nightmare) 3: The web applications I write are for internal use only and I see Silverlight as a way to check out of the HTML uproar. Remember XHTML? Yeah, so much for stability there. 4: I don't think HTML 5 will be any more cross browser than HTML 4. It will work, but each browser will have it's quirks. Committee + Different Vendors = Headache. 5: I really hate AJAX and Javascript. I think it is unneccesarily complex and seems to be a bit of a bailing wire/chewing gum/twine approach to development. You can get some slick results but I'd hate to have to maintain it. How accessible is the average AJAX site? Checking business rules client side (for snappy feedback) and server side (for security) is always fun.... totally awful tools, IMHO.
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
For what it's worth... Scott Guthrie just put the issue to rest once and for all. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/11/04/silverlight-questions.aspx Silverlight is not going away any time soon, especially in the enterprise space, which I would assume is where a lot of us are at.
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John C wrote:
Nahh.. the goldfish post was your zenith I think.
Oh no! It's downhill from here, I guess! :) Marc
Nope just need to recharge over the weekend - avoid extended analogies etc until Monday. ;)
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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I can't say I feel very sorry for Silverlight developers right now. They have staked their livelihood on a single company's whims, a company mind you that has a storied history of changing its mind whenever it pleases. "Oh wow, Win32! Time to-" "Err, .NET is in now? Well OK, let's-" "Oh, WPF? I guess that makes since with Vista-" "Silverlight? Really?!" Just to give some examples of how spastic their desktop development toolchain has been. You may as well buck up and learn HTML/JavaScript because that stuff is proven, platform/company-agnostic, and is only going to grow in the future. Now I'm also a bit of an open web app zealot but I wasn't always that way. I still use Windows and I've always loved C#'s syntax and features - I just wouldn't stake my job on them given the choice.
You may as well buck up and learn HTML/JavaScript because that stuff is proven, platform/company-agnostic, and is only going to ...change as rapidly as all the other development platforms, as it has been for the last 15 years. Sticking with HTML has been clinging to a rollercoaster just as much as sticking with Microsoft has been. Plus it means sticking to the whims of 5 different browser makers all at once, which is even more work than sticking to the whims of a single company. I tend to agree that the Microsoft "platform of tomorrow" becomes the platform of yesterday faster than you can even learn it, and that is frustrating, but the entire development world has been doing this in recent years, MS no more or less than anyone else.
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
Meh, We all know technology is a moving target. Expecting anything to be stable in a sales/marketing stand-point is a fool's errand. In the end, you have to follow your gut. MS changes direction on a whim which is why this hornets nest got stirred up. We are all waiting for that other shoe to drop and MS to yank the rug out from under us. So we read the quotes as we wanted to read them. Silverlight isn't going away. Microsoft has 250 programmers working on developing SL. 250. That's not a dead product. It didn't take center stage at PDC, but that doesn't mean it is dead. IMHO: In the Windows platform world... If you are building desktop apps, go with WPF. (Disclaimer: I write WPF apps.) Why? Because it is a lot more powerful and flexible than WinForms. Sorry for those stuck in WinForm hell, but it's true. It is a lot of work to move to a XAML way of thinking, but it is worth it. Look into MVVM. If you are building web apps, go with your gut. My first gig out of college was as a webmaster. I wrote everything in Perl. I still support clients using PHP. That should give you some idea of my love of the Microsoft aka Evil Empire. If you want to deploy "anywhere", look at Silverlight but understand it's limitations. If you are writing WP7 apps, Silverlight or XNA are the only 2 ways to go. I've written a couple WP7 apps. It was easy after doing 2 years of WPF app development. Sticking with WinForms may be fine for your needs. But the sky is not falling when it comes to WPF. Unless you have to have Silverlight's Web-based features, go with WPF. The ideas you'll learning WPF will downgrade to SL. My $0.02 Ivan
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For what it's worth... Scott Guthrie just put the issue to rest once and for all. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/11/04/silverlight-questions.aspx Silverlight is not going away any time soon, especially in the enterprise space, which I would assume is where a lot of us are at.
I don't think anything is put to rest... Microsoft is banking on Silverlight and the more coders that buy into it the better for Microsoft.... .Net... lib always changing, vb6 - gone... but was awesome, SilverLight... guess WinCE is... what? All that ribbon fuss... But if I code javascript, any kind of server output, and html... perhaps xhtml.. I can pretty much do the same stuff. Videos... need a compatible runtime or plugin for the browser... or something the OS can render from the browser... or at least launch a viewer for... I use microsoft technologies.. but only to get a job done... when it comes to innovation.. it's not my first pick... because way too many times I've invested in Microsoft wholeheartedly to finely get some good software done to have it antiquated by their current marketing pushes... yet... my UNIX knowlegde... keeps expanding... old stays working pretty much identical... still new technologies... but all centered around standards... makes it easy for everyone to play in the sandbox.... versus choosing a TEAM....
Know way too many languages... master of none!
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
I agree, technology is moving too fast. It's great when you have all the time in the world to study, but given our work and priorities it's very easy to loose pace and be left behind. I'm trying to catch up now with .Net Framework 4 and it's technologies, but I'm not sure if I will be able to until they release a next version.
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You may as well buck up and learn HTML/JavaScript because that stuff is proven, platform/company-agnostic, and is only going to ...change as rapidly as all the other development platforms, as it has been for the last 15 years. Sticking with HTML has been clinging to a rollercoaster just as much as sticking with Microsoft has been. Plus it means sticking to the whims of 5 different browser makers all at once, which is even more work than sticking to the whims of a single company. I tend to agree that the Microsoft "platform of tomorrow" becomes the platform of yesterday faster than you can even learn it, and that is frustrating, but the entire development world has been doing this in recent years, MS no more or less than anyone else.
Well of course it changes, any tech changes eventually unless it's Bad Tech™. But the point is that HTML/JavaScript probably won't ever be thrown under the bus by a single company; in my view having 5 entities work on it is a pro, not a con. It's not a silver bullet but nothing ever is, really. I just see it as the most future-proof tech right now. YMMV.
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Yesterday, goldfish, today, pawns. You have to realize that we developers are merely pawns in Microsoft's chess game to market its real meat and potatoes product, namely Windows and secondly, Office. The reason being, the more sexy products we develop for those platforms, and the more we develop stuff that looks and feels like whatever Microsoft's current fancy is (ribbon bars, what a crock of crap), the more the naive consumer will say, wow, look at all those nice shiny apps, or something to that effect. So, the sooner you realize you are a pawn, the sooner you can free yourself of the game. Consider the difference: WPF, Silverlight, C#, F#, .NET, Visual Studio, are all pieces in Microsoft's chess game. HTML 5? There is no "product" that this technology is pushing--it's agnostic, and even more insidious to some, it's not directly connected with profit. Microsoft hates that with a passion because it leads to free thinking and free thinking leads to free action. Microsoft wants you all under the yoke of making money for Microsoft. Marc
This is the same type of thinking I get from some folks who always 'blame the politicians' for the messes democratic countries get in, without considering the voter side of things that drives the stupidity. I've worked for many orgs that stay away from the 'hottest tech' rat-wheel.. those folks tend to create better/more stable/more predictable/more profitable products, and for some orgs run by folks completely in love with that same rat-wheel (with the coincident lack of quality and chaos that results). Its easy to blame the provider, but remember that they are simply providing what their customers ask for.. in the absence of that need, things would be a tad more rational. Remember.. Microsoft can't force folks to buy things, its a two way street. Your post ignores this part of the human equation, making it, err.. less than reflective of reality.