
Is Microsoft ditching .NET in favor of JS? - cygwin98
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/A-quick-look-at-Windows-8
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kenjackson
Crazy thought here... what if at their dev conference they show Silverlight
compiling to HTML/JS.

The first thought from a lot of devs might be "oh no, you can't break the
html/js abstraction -- this is ASP.NET all over again". I'd argue its
completely different. ASP.NET tried to abstract/create server side state. And
with this tons of issues crept into the abstraction. With clientside
technology, these abstractions are what we've always done, whether macro
assemblers, C compilers, JVMs, Lisp interpreters. I've long argued that JS
should be abstracted (and honestly I'd prefer a bytecode, but that's a
seperate story) -- here's to hoping they've done it (and of course languages
like CoffeeScript and Script# have gone a long ways towards it already).

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bdfh42
No its 1993 all over again - Windows 95 (announced at the developer's
conference in LA that year) was going to be the OS that used a browser as a
significant portion of the UI...

This stuff keeps coming around.

One does wonder why MS think they can outdo Google Chrome OS and HP/Palm WebOS
at this though - still a native API for JavaScript is a cool idea although I
wonder how that fits in with the "sand tray" security model.

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glhaynes
This is a bit incorrect - browsers weren't a big thing in 1993, and the
development of Windows 95 happened in a world where browsers were only
becoming "a big deal" in the background. (Hell, The Microsoft Network that
came bundled with Windows 95 was essentially meant to be a competitor to the
Internet.) It wasn't until a service pack or two into Windows 95's life that
IE started to be bundled, and it wasn't until IE 4 in 1997 that Active Desktop
appeared.

But, yes, the main interface to the Windows desktop being rendered via IE has
been a long-term and recurring thing for Microsoft.

~~~
bdfh42
You are correct in pointing out that it was Windows 98 that brought the
Internet Browser to the foreground of Windows. The big error was embedding the
browser into the OS - and Windows users paid for that architectural mistake
many time over.

