

Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site - aritraghosh007
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-pulls-the-plug-on-its-silverlight-net-site-7000008494/

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yason
While Silverlight seems to continue under the umbrella of MSDN, it never took
off and basically remained a mere nuisance, so I'm not surprised to see it
being "shifted" out as a product.

Silverlight was (implicitly?) positioned to compete with Flash and just like
Flash, it was mostly an obscure piece of proprietary technology and mostly
just a nuisance. What made Flash matter was video streaming and YouTube:
suddenly all those who had been avoiding Flash because of stupid games and
stupid Flash advertisements had to get Flash to view videos on YouTube. This
never happened on Silverlight _to a major_ extent; it always remained a weird
alternative to Flash.

Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner
that I consider Microsoft dead. They will both churn along for years but their
supply of momentum is running out.

What practically killed Flash was the highly excretory nature of the Flash
codebase. With the huge installation base induced by video streaming the Flash
plugin had great opportunities per se but their codebase barely ran on a fast
PC, and mobile Flash never materialized for real. First it was slow and when
mobile devices got faster, it was a battery hog. So Flash got stuck in
remaining the de facto web video player device and that space is slowly eaten
out by various HTML5 based video technologies.

I hope we can ditch first Silverlight and then finally Flash in the shortest
order of time.

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pjmlp
> Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner
> that I consider Microsoft dead.

Game developers beg to differ

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Terretta
They can beg. Meanwhile the casual games audience is moving on.

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pjmlp
Really?! I haven't noticed it.

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Terretta
Who's playing all the iOS app store games, then?

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pjmlp
You know that Flash nowadays also compiles to native code, right?

[http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WSfffb011ac560372f-5d0...](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WSfffb011ac560372f-5d0f4f25128cc9cd0cb-8000.html)

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Terretta
Yes, and fair point.

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jamesaguilar
Lesson I would get out of this is: developing in Microsoft technologies where
they don't already have a strong or dominant position in a market is risky.
These days their embrace extend extinguish tactic isn't working so well.
What's included in this? Winphone? Surface? Don't really know what else.

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geetarista
Exactly. Other than Netflix, what well-known applications did Silverlight
back? None come to mind for me.

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vyrotek
There are a lot of private enterprise applications built on it. Its strength
was that you could build complex tools relatively quickly. For example, I know
of a local company that builds law enforcement software on it. I believe
Netflix only uses a small portion of the 'Smooth Streaming' technology in
Silverlight.

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vyrotek
I've been a .Net dev for many years and I'm generally optimistic and excited
about many Microsoft products but I warned everyone to stay away from
Silverlight from day one. I knew that couldn't be the future of the web. I
think I can safely thank those years of being Flash developer for that. One
day Microsoft will realize they can't 'own' all the technology between the
server and your monitor. I do think they're doing a great job embracing open
source and web standards these days.

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jinushaun
When these kinds of articles come about, I never understand the big deal. The
release of the iPhone 5 doesn't suddenly make my iPhone 4s a useless piece of
junk. I can continue using it until it dies and I need to replace it.
Similarly, if you're doing SL work, your stuff isn't going to suddenly stop
working. Your current copy of VS won't magically stop compiling SL code.
Continue to use SL if it works for you. SL seemed to only have mild success as
an intranet technology, so my suggestion above is valid.

This problem doesn't go away with open source, since projects can die and non-
backwards compatible versions can be released. No one is forcing you to
convert all your Python 2 code to Python 3

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kackermann
One thing good about Silverlight is that you don't have to use Javascript.

Has anyone here successfully developed a JS app with a quarter million lines
of code? And maintained it?

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factorialboy
Err.. Gmail.

You're grossly underestimating JavaScript.

With JavaScript its possible to break your code into logical abstractions,
either functional or object oriented or a hybrid of the two.

What's stops you from writing maintainable JavaScript apps is perhaps the
quality of devs.

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cageface
Gmail is written in java and compiled to javascript via gwt. Doesn't count.

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vetinari
Gmail's backend is written in Java.

The frontend is written in Javascript, it has nothing to do with GWT.

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evanmoran
Sorry, you are incorrect. GWT writing javascript is the whole point.

<http://css.dzone.com/news/understanding-gwt-compiler>

From the article: "The GWT compiler is really a Java source to JavaScript
source translator."

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silas
Gmail is written using the Closure library:

<https://developers.google.com/closure/faq#gwt>

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aroman
Seems pretty absurd to think that they'll be actively supporting a product for
another decade without putting out any new releases... then again Microsoft
and I have never seen eye-to-eye about how to sunset and subsequently retire
software.

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Alaskan005
IIRC, they have a written (or maybe unwritten) rule that they will not drop
support right away. It's probably to encourage adoption of Microsoft's
standards and software by enterprise. If a major company adopted this and
Microsoft gave them a 6 months notice, they'd be pretty upset and less likely
to do business with them again.

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dennisgorelik
Silverlight team (or more precisely, Silverlight management) is weak. Was weak
from the beginning. Delivered poor product.

As a result - Silverlight failed to get enough traction. Now Silverlight and
Silverlight team is getting abandoned by MS.

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hyuuu
what about netflix? they are still using silverlight

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geetarista
Let's hope this means they start moving away from it.

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SoftwareMaven
Agreed. I've never watched a Netflix program on my laptop because I refuse to
install Silverlight. Flash it bad enough, but, for the most part, I have to
tolerate it thanks to its huge market presence. Silverlight never had that,
and I certainly wasn't going to help make it.

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dccoolgai
Web developers everywhere break down in tears...

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geetarista
Hip hip...

