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).
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure the EU will have something to say about it if it does turn into that. Then again if it does they should have something to say about ChromeOS too.
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).