Microsoft *IS* Killing Silverlight
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Dario Solera wrote:
I develop web apps all day and I can't think of any relevant incompatibility between IE9, Chrome, FF4+ and even Opera.
You are not mentioning some pretty popular browsers: IE7, IE8, Safari and mobile browsers. Sorry, but you are just trying to throw a very real problem under the carpet. I also develop for web nowdays and browser incompabilities are very much there. But the worst thing is that everybody keeps releasing new versions of browsers almost every month. I almost miss days when I had to worry only about IE6.
I would not consider mobile browsers related to desktop browsers, as interaction is totally different, so you need a completely different UI. At least you have the possibility to do that, as Flash and Silverlight are not an option. As I mentioned in my post (perhaps you've missed it), I always do sanity checks with IE7 and IE8 too, and it rarely happens that I have to tweak something. Sure, there are details that are different (like, rounded corners), but most of the time they don't matter at all. I admit that I neglect Safari, but for us it's not really a problem as everyone seems to be using Chrome on Mac LOL.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] ScrewTurn Wiki, Software Localization Tools & Services and My Blog
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http://slashdot.org/story/11/11/09/1920247/microsoft-killing-silverlight[^]
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997Well, I for one am glad to have never spent any time learning it. Marc
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Not that I'm mourning the "loss", but why? Do they have something else up their sleeve or do they expect that HTML5 will take over?
Why can't I be applicable like John? - Me, April 2011
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Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn - Seán Bán Breathnach
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Da mihi sis crustum Etruscum cum omnibus in eo!
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Just because a thing is new don’t mean that it’s better - Will Rogers, September 4, 1932Adobe AIR
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering” - Wernher von Braun -
Well, I for one am glad to have never spent any time learning it. Marc
here here
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering” - Wernher von Braun -
CDP1802 wrote:
I would not be sure where to start. The code already has reached some size and explaining every detail may prove to be hard. On the other side, there are still a few open ends, like supporting localization in the XAML markup. I would certainly not mind writing about it, but then it should be something that's useful to the readers.
Heh, I've had the same dilemma. I've never published an article here, but have had several little projects that I thought would be cool to share. The problem was that, barring a ground up rewrite (something I have no time or desire for), the articles would be full of phrases like, "Sorry about this next bit of code, but it does this, I swear," and "Oh like all your code is so pretty." The stuff I do on my own time is usually research type development, and it grows organically as I try new things. I learn a TON this way, but the code is a mess at the end (it's much nicer when I put the knowledge to work on an actual project). Some things I've considered publishing: software 3D rendering (to get the math down, not worrying about acceleration) with some physics simulation thrown in, reverse engineering a DOS game to port to Windows, Stupid DSP tricks... but I really don't have the energy these days. Maybe when the kids move out of the house :) That gives me 14 years, roughly.
The code itself is not too messy. It is more like still having to refactor or rewrite something too often. For example, I first had imitated modal forms. Then I realized that forms are not really the best approach when you intend to use the MVP pattern plus a concept of workspaces. Now I have redesigned the entire hierarchy of controls and separated the view (= the content of the form) from its workspace (a simple modal window in this case). And I still see some more such fundamental changes coming.
And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse. -
http://slashdot.org/story/11/11/09/1920247/microsoft-killing-silverlight[^]
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997Your title is more certain than the article justifies. Microsoft are being suspiciously quiet about the future of Silverlight, that's more what is actually being said. It would be a shame if so, it is a pretty good platform for rich web apps, but it has really struggled to take market share from Flash (which it is far superior to for most things, in my opinion).
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http://slashdot.org/story/11/11/09/1920247/microsoft-killing-silverlight[^]
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997Woohoo!!!! I was a hater of flash and when silverlight came out it only gave me two things to dislike. finally we can start doing some real development with "standards" like html5 and css3. please note the quotes I placed around standards. yes we all know each browser has it's own tendency to do things a bit different than the other but today we can take care of that with one of the various frameworks that are in place (jQuery, prototype, etc.).
as if the facebook, twitter and message boards weren't enough - blogged
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http://slashdot.org/story/11/11/09/1920247/microsoft-killing-silverlight[^]
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997Rumor. As Mary Jo already mentioned: "There’s word from some of my contacts that this might be the last major release of Silverlight, but Microsoft isn’t confirming or denying." I agree that things don't look good for Silverlight right now, but I don't think anyone right now can make such statements that Silverlight will be killed, not even Microsoft. Silverlight might be put on a hold, because of all the HTML 5 hype, with security fixes only. But only time will tell the market reaction to HTML5. If MS is smart enough it will keep watching it and have Silverlight ready to continue production. I think many here agree that Silverlight solves lots of problems, like browser compatibility that drive many HTML developers crazy. So I think it's too soon to dismiss the many advantages of Silverlight.
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson
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http://slashdot.org/story/11/11/09/1920247/microsoft-killing-silverlight[^]
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
Dario Solera wrote:
I develop web apps all day and I can't think of any relevant incompatibility between IE9, Chrome, FF4+ and even Opera.
You are not mentioning some pretty popular browsers: IE7, IE8, Safari and mobile browsers. Sorry, but you are just trying to throw a very real problem under the carpet. I also develop for web nowdays and browser incompabilities are very much there. But the worst thing is that everybody keeps releasing new versions of browsers almost every month. I almost miss days when I had to worry only about IE6.
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
- Web development (even using the much ballyhooed HTML5) keeps us wrestling with browser incompatibilities resulting from differences in standards interpretation.
HTML5 is not yet a standard, and in fact I'm ignoring it for now. Browser incompatibilities are very limited today. I develop web apps all day and I can't think of any relevant incompatibility between IE9, Chrome, FF4+ and even Opera. Sure you may have to support IE6, but would Silverlight be available at all in such case? At any rate, if you don't want to do fancy stuff (like some horrible, eye-bleach-style Silverlight apps I've seen), then HTML and CSS are very streamlined, robust and much, much, much, much more concise. And work on mobile devices too. Regarding JavaScript, 99.9% chance you'll need it, and I agree that it's a major PITA. However, there are libraries that make JS development much more tolerable, even funny in some cases, like jQuery. Oh, they take care of browser nuances transparently, so you don't have to worry about that.
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
I hate web development because of all the crap you have to do just to maintain state between page changes
Like what exactly? Modern development frameworks do that for you. Even ASP.NET MVC does that automatically, and without all the VIEWSTATE crap of "classic" ASP.NET. I'm not sure about RoR, but I'd bet it's the same. Despite of what people say, ASP.NET still works very well (although I prefer MVC). As a matter of fact, since when IE9 was released, I continue to do sanity checks in IE7, IE8, Firefox 4+, Chrome and Opera, but I rarely have to tweak something specifically for one browser. I think we've built something that is quite complex, all with XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, and trust me when I say that it works and it scales very well. And no, we've never had to investigate problems related to some weird browser a user in Botswana was using. Not even once in almost two years of operations. Well, we explicitly do not support IE6 (and refuse to serve requests coming from it), but how can that be considered wrong? Again, speaking of business/professional applications, the only thing you can't really do without Flash or SL is serving video. That's it.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don'
" Even ASP.NET MVC does that automatically, and without all the VIEWSTATE crap of "classic" ASP.NET." Excellent Perfomance with the ASP.NET MVC. Classic ASP.NET View State is really may become a Backward Compatibility for MS. I mostly exited and turned towards ASP.NET MVC Rendering Part i.e., because of Razor Engine.
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CDP1802 wrote:
I would not be sure where to start. The code already has reached some size and explaining every detail may prove to be hard. On the other side, there are still a few open ends, like supporting localization in the XAML markup. I would certainly not mind writing about it, but then it should be something that's useful to the readers.
Heh, I've had the same dilemma. I've never published an article here, but have had several little projects that I thought would be cool to share. The problem was that, barring a ground up rewrite (something I have no time or desire for), the articles would be full of phrases like, "Sorry about this next bit of code, but it does this, I swear," and "Oh like all your code is so pretty." The stuff I do on my own time is usually research type development, and it grows organically as I try new things. I learn a TON this way, but the code is a mess at the end (it's much nicer when I put the knowledge to work on an actual project). Some things I've considered publishing: software 3D rendering (to get the math down, not worrying about acceleration) with some physics simulation thrown in, reverse engineering a DOS game to port to Windows, Stupid DSP tricks... but I really don't have the energy these days. Maybe when the kids move out of the house :) That gives me 14 years, roughly.
David Kentley wrote:
it grows organically as I try new things. I learn a TON this way, but the code is a mess at the end
Yea, that sounds familiar. I started playing around with custom graphical controls stored in a dynamically resizing array in a winapp. Wondering if you've encountered something similar or not. I'm running into some severe non-linear performance issues. A 10X10 array renders almost instantly. A 25X25 array is about 6 times bigger and takes about 6 seconds to render. A 100X100 array is 16 times bigger, so if it was linear, should take less than 2 minutes to render. Over 3/4ths of an hour later, it starts rendering and unlocks the program just short of an hour later. (Not using threading logic.) This is on a dual core, 2GH device running at about 56% CPU while it is calculating locations and rendering images. So, one of the CPU's is running at 100% capacity for about an hour. That's all because of the custom images and event handling being added to the controls as they are being created and rendered. Rather frustrating when the underlying app can recursively hit 33K nodes multiple times in 62 milliseconds.