

Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release - exDM69
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/9/2548975/microsoft-may-halt-development-work-on-silverlight-after-next-release
Interesting announcements from Adobe and Microsoft, one after another.
======
d4nt
Until a year or two ago there was a stalemate as far as "rich web" development
technologies goes. Neither flash, Silverlight or HTML5 was the clear winner. I
remember people being incredulous that the iPad didn't support Flash, saying
that while it might be ok for the iPhone to not support it, nobody would take
the iPad seriously if it didn't support Flash.

In a way, I think it might be the combined weight of the iPhone and iPad
that's broken the stalemate in HTML5's favour. Apple sold so many of them,
that website makers had to take notice.

When Microsoft announced that Windows 8 metro mode (which may well be the only
mode available for low power Win8 tablets) would not support Silverlight, I
think the game was well and truly up.

~~~
beagle3
Stalemate?

Two years ago, flash was the only game in town; Good HTML5 implementations
were no where to be found, and Silverlight adoption was a joke. It's not like
you could HTML5 an equivalent to flash on an iPhone OS 3.

I agree that things started changing rapidly two years ago, with the
introduction of iOS 4. But there was never a stalemate -- Flash was king; then
there was chaos; and now HTML5 is winning (for the time being, though not for
long, Flash is still among the royalty). Silverlight had always been a
wannabe.

~~~
d4nt
I guess I mean that for people who were considering which platform to build
their rich internet app on, there was not a obvious choice.

EDIT: I admit, there was a time when Flash was the only option, but as early
as 2003 I recall "Ajax" being used in preference to Flash for web user
interfaces that needed an element of richness. So, I think there has been
dissatisfaction with Flash for longer than you imply.

~~~
beagle3
Your choice of words was unfortunate, then - "stalemate" implies a tie with no
possible move for any player.

In 2003, there was Ajax rich (you could do some nontrivial client side
processing -- like hide and show elements), and there was Flash rich
(antialiased polygons, sound). I was talking about the latter, and so do most
people that consider HTML5 a worthy flash replacement (even though e.g. you
still have to use Flash for proper sound support).

------
jongraehl
At Microsoft you have a bunch of brilliant programmers who are forced to
follow "strategic direction" from above. Even if they wanted to, there's no
way they can continue working on a mothballed project they still believe in.

People who relied on the Silverlight plugin certainly cannot continue to
develop it, either.

Long-run, there's more security in relying on software created by a
sufficiently large and capable community of enthusiasts. Such software will
never die if it's good enough to be useful - sunk costs, NIH, and all that.

The "strategic direction" of a community won't change except by consensus.
People will enter and leave. By the time the community withers and dies,
nobody cares any more.

~~~
nobody3141592
I would love to know what Microsoft's strategic direction is.

While announcing lots of C++ love for Visual Studio and promises of C++11
compliance they don't have an API for writing native code apps on Windows

The 'official toolkit' is WPF and whatever managed C++ is called today. But
with Silverlight dead what future does it's under regarded cousin have?

So no problem we all switch to it's new tablet/phone OS. Only they won't tell
us which of the windows phone toolkits are going to be on tablets and PCs - if
any.

Or are we supposed to be developing all our apps for Azure and the cloud now?

Or are they just abandoning the PC like HP and we write everything in HTML5
for the browser?

~~~
pseale
The 'official toolkit' Metro is XAML + (C++ or .NET or MSHTML5). I've been
told by a (true) Silverlight/WPF expert that the Win8 XAML most resembles the
Silverlight API.

Silverlight used to be promoted as:

* Flex/Flash compete * Public web compete (I never recommended it for such) * line-of-business (not publicly available) apps * (recent) Windows Phone 7

Silverlight is now promoted as:

* line-of-business apps * Windows Phone 7, but maybe Win Phone 8 will look more like the Win8 Metro XAML (I don't think they've said anything yet)

Metro is now promoted for:

* Win8 tablet apps * Win8 native apps(? who cares I guess?) * __possibly __Win Phone 8 apps

I don't know what apps you write, so I don't know what your specific roadmap
may look like. I've leaned toward recommending web apps over "client" apps for
.NET devs the past few years, and will heavily lean that way going forward.
ASP.NET MVC skills translate easily to open source/competing web frameworks.
WPF or Silverlight developers can't say the same thing.

~~~
nobody3141592
If all the Silverlight team have been taken out and shot does XAML have a
future?

~~~
pseale
If from a developer's viewpoint, XAML looks identical to Silverlight, and
there are the same number of people working on XAML for the Windows team as
there used to be working on Silverlight for DevDiv, does it matter?

But I bet you're feeling betrayed. I understand. I felt a little betrayed a
few frameworks ago. Post-betrayal, I stick to focusing on transferable skills
and JIT learn the rest of .NET. I'm on a WPF project now, have not studied WPF
deeply.

My advice: if you have any say in the matter, try to work with ASP.NET MVC as
opposed to the .NET alternatives, so your skills transfer.

Footnote: I don't know how many worked on Silverlight/WPF/WP7 versus how many
work on XAML now. I assume XAML will march on. But no one will care
unless/until the Windows tablet is successful.

~~~
nobody3141592
I assumed that XAML was the silverlight team (why duplicate effort) and if
silverligth is gone how much core knowledge stays in XAML?

Personally I stuck to C++ and moved MFC->wx->Qt !

.Net is interesting for the way it allows things like Ironpython and F# in as
first class languages and wpf is fun to play with, but if you can't write
something like Office or photoshop in it then it's just a toy.

~~~
pseale
There you go, no problems then.

------
joelthelion
Good riddance.

And once again, all the companies that decided to rely on a proprietary, non
standard technology are going to get bitten.

~~~
WayneDB
Not really. Silverlight will be about as dead as VB6.

Plenty of companies out there are still using VB6. It's not like Microsoft is
going to take away the download or something, they'll just stop developing it.

Also, why "good riddance"? Do you just hate everything Microsoft or did
Silverlight really cause you any problems personally?

~~~
forgotAgain
Have to disagree with the VB6 analogy. There was a huge investment by
customers in VB6. It had more developer seats than any other Microsoft
development environment. There were simply too many LOC to be re-written.
Silverlight has not achieved that market penetration. If Microsoft stops
backing it the drop off from all radars (bus., dev., game) will be very quick.

~~~
WayneDB
I wasn't saying that Silverlight reached the same market penetration as VB6.
What I said was that Microsoft isn't going to take it away and make it not
work. Like VB6, you'll still be able to run it if you want.

------
JonoW
Damn, we're getting ever closer to Atwoods law!

"Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written
in JavaScript."

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-
is-...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/all-programming-is-web-
programming.html)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I don't know what Silverlight does under the covers, but the event handling
language in Flash is Actionscript, which is a dialect of Javascript. So in
that sense we're already there.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Silverlight is just C# (or theoretically any CLR language) with XAML layouts
and a specialized set of libraries.

------
nailer
Microsoft's IE9 product lead, said - without even saying that it was
confidential or not to repeat - 'Silverlight is dead, I give it six months
tops' at OnGameStart a couple of months ago. I believe him.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Just the web plugin. No evidence of it going away on WP7 or Windows 8.

~~~
apaprocki
That isn't what I've heard (from people still at Microsoft). Everything points
to Silverlight and WPF being frozen because the teams are pretty much broken
up at this point.

Also, this is pretty clear as well:

<http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17254070>

~~~
MatthewPhillips
The branding might be going away, just like the Zune brand, but the core
technologies are already part of the Windows 8 SDK.

~~~
jeswin
Forget silverlight, .net itself has a questionable future on windows client.
WinRT went back to C++. .NET is being positioned a server side technology.

~~~
kenjackson
It depens on what you consider .NET. The CLR? The .NET metadata schema? C#/VB?
The only thing that isn't incredibly important in WinRT is the CLR proper. But
the other aspects of .NET play a huge role in WinRT. They even went and
largely reimplemented the BCL. And the API design guidelines across the board
are .NET based. WinRT looks a million times more like .NET than Win32.

------
hkarthik
I'm curious what Netflix has in the works to move off of Silverlight. I
remember reading that their biggest problem with HTML5 players was the lack of
good DRM options to please the studios.

~~~
recoiledsnake
Why would they want to move off something that works? The plugins will be
getting security updates after all.

~~~
lallysingh
.. fixes for OS updates? Comparability with newer drivers?

------
pnathan
It's a great day, both Flash and Silverlight are on the road to obsolete.

I look forward to our new HTML5 overlord.

~~~
alecco
Well, now that you mention it...

SGML/HTML/XML/CSS/JS have the true open standard good side instead of
anticompetitive proprietary grip. But let's not fool ourselves, those
languages are terrible and backwards. Same with HTTP. Also HTML5 still falls
short of many missing features on the web.

I'm hoping for a new generation of a better set of languages to take over. But
this feels like hoping for x86 to go obsolete, even Intel couldn't kill it.

~~~
pnathan
Yes, the clientside web stack needs to be obseleted as well.

I hope that _someday_ the farting around with compile-to-js stops and we get a
true bytecode VM-in-browser.

~~~
pornel
We had true bytecode in the browser already, it was called Java.

VM isn't necessarily going to make things better. JS execution speed increased
by orders of magnitude (it's getting close to decoding H.264 in real time!)

It's more likely that ES6 and future versions will make JS more palatable and
easier to optimize.

Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly
complicated C++-derived interfaces and DOM speed didn't get as much love as
the raw JS.

~~~
nitrogen
_Currently it's the DOM that needs work: it's full of messy, needlessly
complicated C++-derived interfaces and DOM speed didn't get as much love as
the raw JS._

What I'd like to see is a layer of abstraction somewhere between canvas/SVG
and the DOM: you have mostly-rectangular objects, with Swing- and Qt-style
layout managers used to specify their positions. The container object's CSS
specifies the layout used to arrange its children. It would need to be
possible to write custom layout managers in JavaScript. Then you could write a
layout manager that evenly spaces its items around a circle (or any other
arbitrary path), for example.

~~~
nitrogen
So apparently people are highly opposed to the idea? What would be a better
alternative for creating and laying out web apps without the overhead of the
full document object model?

------
viggity
I "get" it when it comes to silverlight for public facing websites. Really. I
do. The general populace doesn't want to have to install a plugin. But what
about intranet apps? Silverlight is so incredibly easy to work with (compared
to html/css/js) that there are lots of companies that have built intranet apps
with it because they control the end point.

I really hope this isn't true.

~~~
arctangent
But why require your developers to learn another set of technologies? Much
better IMHO to just have a good web development team who can make internal
applications too.

~~~
mweimer
I think most corporations already have people with C#/XAML skills.

~~~
arctangent
The odds are much higher that they have some in-house web developers.

------
platonichvn
It's unfortunate but it was inevitable. HTML 5 is definitely the future.
Although, the ability to write an app using type-safe, object oriented code
that can run on both the client and server was very compelling.

------
bchjam
the Mary Jo Foley article this one loosely references is here:
[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-
silverli...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-
silverlight-6-and-does-it-matter/11180?tag=mantle_skin;content)

~~~
forgotAgain
A tangent but why is "TheVerge" getting so much play on Techmeme's front page
if it produces articles like this one?

------
chadaustin
What will Microsoft do for 3D on the web, then? They've said the won't
implement WebGL and Silverlight 5 + XNA was supposedly their solution.

~~~
hvs
If I were a betting man, I would guess "build some new proprietary
technology", but they may just go back to WebGL now that they are committing
to HTML5.

~~~
5hoom
I really do hope they decide to go with WebGL.

Keeping a fragmented ecosystem with a 'WebDirectX' or some other proprietary
new tech will just slow overall progress in this area. For web developers
doing 3D it means "This site requires IE/This site doesn't support IE" unless
you can support two parallel codebases.

------
Hominem
I have been working on a silverlight app for almost 2 years. We started in
silverlight 2 and are now on silverlight 4. There have been a million twists
and turns but our business demanded things that simply are not practical from
HTML/JS.

People within both Microsoft and Google use my app, and I recently heard from
our division president that they were "blown away".

With this news the mandate came down to prepare to "rewrite in python". How is
that for marching orders. Makes no sense but management is so anti-Microsoft
at this point they are irrational.

As a developer I have sunk years of time and effort into this. I guess I can
take my XAML knowledge and build windows 8 LOB apps down the street.

------
jrydberg
I wonder what will happen to Microsoft Smooth Streaming if this happens.

------
iam
They should've stuck with Silverlight as a rich javascript library (similar to
v1), and used the Silverlight CoreCLR to power the javascript JIT in IE,
providing a superior user and/or development experience compared to other
[desktop] browsers.

Of course, it's entirely too sensible to have actually happened. Instead the
IE team went off and wrote their own JIT for IE7/8/whatever and are still
playing catch up to Chrome.

At this time about 2 years ago they did have JS running on CLR and it was 2x
faster than any browser out there.

------
tcarnell
they should have probably made this decision before starting the first
release!

------
hello_moto
Wonder what will happen to NetFlix for web. Fallback to Flash I'm guessing...

~~~
feintruled
They already have a HTML5 client, created for the PS3:

[http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-
html5-for-...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/why-we-choose-html5-for-
user.html)

~~~
cpeterso
Are Netflix's streaming videos DRM'd? On a closed system like the PS3, an
HTML5 video player might be possible, but how would they protect their video
in a HTML5 video player on a desktop computer? DRM'd desktop video seems like
a good opportunity for Flash and Silverlight since HTML5 is unlikely to offer
might DRM support.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Just because your app is HTML5 doesn't mean you have to run it in a browser.
Just like on phones, drop a WebView in and you're set. IIRC, Spotify actually
uses Chromium in some capacity on their native client.

------
sunsu
So what does this mean for Windows Phone 7? Will Silverlight eventually go
away for it as well? Since the majority of WP7 apps are developed with
Silverlight (i think?) what will replace it?

------
dos1
Good riddance! I spent the last 5 months at a gig working on a massive
Silverlight 4 application. I've been a web guy forever, but I took this job
thinking it would be good to learn how the other half lives. After
experiencing the pain and drudgery of working with Silverlight, I couldn't be
happier that it's going away.

The most maddening part of working on a Silverlight app was that things that
are dead simple with HTML/JS/CSS are tons of work with SL. I was always amazed
at the gymnastics required to get even simple UI functionality to work.

Xaml itself was a problem. Why in god's name to we need another superset of
XML? Especially with all that atrocious binding syntax.

And also, every time you want to see a UI change you have to build the XAP.
When you have tons of Xaml is takes forever to compile to see a minor change!

~~~
jonpaul
Interesting... I as a Silverlight dev now learning JS/HTML/CSS would say the
complete opposite. I find it very difficult to create similar layout
functionality like DockPanel and friends. Any tips?

~~~
dos1
You know it's interesting that you're seeing lots of pain going the other way.
I realized part of my issue with Silverlight was just how different it was
from what I was used to. I don't like things I don't understand :) That being
said, I did like the Stack Panel and the Dock Panel. I liked them because they
worked more closely to the way HTML layout works. It was the Grid that I
despised. The markup was tough to follow (putting Grid.Row="" and
Grid.Column="" for each element inside the grid was stupid) and ultimately
positioning in Silverlight was very much about absolute position and fixed
dimensions.

As far as tips - vertical stack panels are just a series of unfloated divs (or
other block element). Horizontal stack panels are a series of floated divs.

Vertical positioning with HTML/CSS can be tricky, especially in older
browsers. line-height and padding/margin are you friends :)

~~~
jonpaul
Thanks.

I found this a couple of weeks ago, and it seems like it might be useful:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/> Demo:
<http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/> I wanted to post this
for anyone who stumbles across this info via search.

