Silverlight - it gets worse

Gary Wheeler

WPF and Silverlight are hardly the same thing.

Software Zen: delete this;

Pete OHanlon

Ah, don't you just love the ol' rumour mill. There's a new strategy at Microsoft where news is released in a carefully controlled fashion. So, just because they don't respond to rumours now, it must be true. The thing is, nobody outside of MS actually knows whether or not this is true - and, as a result, anybody can say what they want.

Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos

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pseudonym67

I can't speak for silverlight because I've never had any interest in web programming. ( Yes I know I'm becomming like my old university lecturer quite happy to stick with the stuff I know. We used to laugh at him for using still using dos based programs when we had all moved on to win 3.11 ) But Wpf which I'm just learning at the moment is more of a gui programming extension that can also be used on the web, but probably not if you want to leverage the full capabilities. From the windows programming point of view it's more the next generation of forms etc. Though apparently you can't do transitions when using a wpf control in a windows forms app. I haven;t tried it yet but this is the only thing I'm not happy about. But then it's easily fixed with tabs or splitters, it's just that transitions would be cooler.

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RobCroll

Why would Microsoft's competitors support their technology! They should have thought about that when they crippled Java.. Even today I'm forced to view some of Microsoft's online content in ie. "You've made your bed, now lie in it". A lot of good things came out of Silverlight. Hopefully they'll drag all that goodness into WPF before nailing down the coffin.

"You get that on the big jobs."

Henry Minute

Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

The thing is, nobody outside of not even MS actually knows whether or not this is true

FTFY.

Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.” I wouldn't let CG touch my Abacus! When you're wrestling a gorilla, you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is.

Lost User

As it appears, WPF already was out of fashion after the Longhorn and Vista failures. Silverlight was the way to go after that and now may be on its way out as well. Only the old dinosaur, Win32, seems to survive everything.

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.

Rajesh R Subramanian

CDP1802 wrote:

Only the old dinosaur, Win32, seems to survive everything.

Way too awesome for an old fart like that, don't ya think? :cool:

"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.

Lost User

Microsoft's tendency to drop things as quickly as they invent them has made going back to Win32 and C++ very appealing. Both have become something like stepchildren after .Net, but this also isolated them from much foolishness.

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.

bosedk

CDP1802 wrote:

Both have become something like stepchildren after .Net,

More like children of ex who's less attractive and earns less (?) than the current spouse.

realJSOP

CDP1802 wrote:

but this also isolated them from much foolishness.

...and much updating.

".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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NormDroid

You don't know what you're missing ;P

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Lost User

Isn't it great? Pull out 15 year old code, compile it and it runs. No updating any frameworks. The platform SDK has remained, thank god, very much the same. And the second bonus is that the smart cargo cult programmers will not last very long there. They will give up wenn they encounter their first pointers.

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.

RobCroll

And it compiles so quickly you have to do a clean and build to convince yourself that it did actually recompile.

"You get that on the big jobs."

Lost User

And you can say that for the code's performance as well. Very much less shoveling data from and to a database, converting it ten times along the way. The code itself had less fat and more muscles and C++ also helps a little by 'forgetting' the word 'managed'. Our intern has just 'proven' that C# runs just as fast as C++. By taking the time a for loop needs to count to 4 billions in both languages. Now he is puzzled why I laughed and told him that this is not much of a surprise.

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.

RobCroll

When it comes to release time, I think I'd feel better with managed code. But yeah a bit more muscle and a bit less blot would be good thing (he says looking down at his own paunch)

"You get that on the big jobs."

BillWoodruff

HM response += 5; I think you just put a spotlight on a central assumption that's too easy to make: that Microsoft is some monolithic centralized entity with some highly rationalized planning process. Before I went to work at Adobe, long ago, I had this idea in my head that it was the "shining city on the hill," the "Valhalla" of PostScript (which was my specialty); it was an Oz, that, if it had witches, all of their last names were: "The Good." After six months there, I realized I was much more in the equivalent of a group of feuding city-states (say something like relations between Florence, Genoa, and Venice in the early to late Renaissance), with brutal turf wars going on. That's not a complaint, by the way: Adobe was the greatest company I ever worked for, and John Warnock is the most brilliant person I've ever had the privilege of working directly for and with (in the creation of what became Acrobat ... against very strong internal resistance from some groups in the company). I'd bet there's a lot of internal conflict, debate, and maneuvering still going on at MS right now around the future of SilverLight and WPF (and WinForms ?) in the context of what we have been "sold for now" as: the "next reality up to bat:" WRT, Metro, Win8, etc. I admit my bias: to me the whole schizo-relationship of Win8 and Metro looks to me like a temporary breakwater to halt the overwhelming tide of Apple's ascendancy in the mobile/tablet space. And the giant thundering strides of the JavaScript + jQuery juggernaut. I don't think the 'fat lady's sung' ... yet ... in the Microsoft Opera. I don't even think all the 'instruments' are in tune ... yet. best, Bill

"I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone." Bjarne Stroustrop circa 1990

Rajesh R Subramanian

bosedk wrote:

less attractive and earns less (?)

Less attractive, yes. But earn less? I doubt that.

"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.

Lost User

'Feel' is just the right word. Lately I have been looking at MASM again and they claim that there is no notable difference between a C++ developer or one using MASM for Win32. Given that both know what they are doing. Both use the same libraries, call the same functions and perform the same tasks. The only real difference is that their code looks different. Yet everybody always 'knew' that assembly must be a huge waste of time. Now, if we had two versions of the .Net framework, one managed and the other one with the same functionality, but unmanaged. What great difference would it make? With some discipline and good practices you can get along with 'unmanaged' very well and the rest of the code would again be very similar. I really think that 'managed' or 'unmanaged', object oriented or not or the choice of language have little objective influence on productivity. Given a similar environment, framework and tools, it's just a question of preferences. In the end it's more about the developer feeling comfortable with it.

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.

BobJanova

I doubt MS would shoot themselves in the foot like that. Pulling it entirely would make more sense than putting the effort into releasing it only to alienate developers.

BobJanova

It isn't quite 15 years yet, but pull out 9 year old .Net code[^] and it will compile and run – and I expect it to do so in another 6 years with no problem, too. The 9 year old EXE you made will still run, too.