A Decade Later, .NET Developers Still Fear Being 'Silverlighted' By Microsoft (visualstudiomagazine.com)
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the_insult_dog writes: Some 10 years after the final Microsoft Silverlight release, some developers still fear being 'Silverlighted,' or seeing a development product in which they have invested heavily be abandoned by Microsoft.
Microsoft will tell you that official support for Silverlight will end in less than two months, on Oct. 12, 2021. Anyone in the industry will tell you it effectively died around 2011 when the last version, Silverlight 5, was made available for download. Speculation about its demise arose around the same time.
Microsoft will tell you that official support for Silverlight will end in less than two months, on Oct. 12, 2021. Anyone in the industry will tell you it effectively died around 2011 when the last version, Silverlight 5, was made available for download. Speculation about its demise arose around the same time.
Special Protocol for the Winter Olypmics of 2010 (Score:3, Interesting)
Sliverlight was meant as a special ActiveX wrapper for NBC's Internet broadcast of the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was used for a few other streams since it was released to the public... and most things were converted to .NET after the protocol was eliminated. Nobody's using it anymore and the encoder is totally out of date, so just forget about it. Nothing left to lose here, move along.
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Not to mention .NET is open sourced. So Microsoft couldn't abandon it even if it tried. https://github.com/dotnet [github.com]
If you're afraid of dotnet going away you're just someone who still writes Microsoft as "M$FT" and nobody cares what you think about .net anyway because obviously you weren't going to use it no matter what they do.
Silverlight saw very little adoption and was a decent alternative to flash. But obviously everybody using Silverlight needed to adopt HTML5 standards like 10 years ago and Microsoft
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Yeah, part of Silverlight's main selling points was it wasn't Flash...
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There is plenty of Open Source abandonware as well.
Python 2 anybody? The whole industry is still dealing with Python 3 migration. But the python foundation has decided that Python 2 isn't worth maintaining. Which is understandable but also from a developer perspective equivalent to Microsoft pulling the plug on their platform as well.
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Not quite so bad, if there is enough demand third parties could take the open source python 2 and continue maintaining it. There are already some linux distros that continue to provide security patches and support for python 2.
Re: Special Protocol for the Winter Olypmics of 20 (Score:2)
And this problem is because Python 3 isn't backwards compatible.
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As with Python 2 vs Python 1. Compatibility-wise, they could just as well have different language names which would have avoided some conceptual confusion.
Scala, take notice!
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Yes, they really should pick a different name for a new incompatible language.. Python, Anaconda, Cobra, Viper, etc?
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Python 3 was released in 2008, and the intent of someday retiring Python 2 was announced at the time. People had TWELVE YEARS to move their code to Python 3. I have no sympathy for anybody who is still complaining about the lack of compatibility.
Perl went through a similar change when Perl 5 was released. The existing base of Perl 4 code had to be updated. But unlike the situation with Python, the community quickly adopted the new version. The earlier transition from Perl 3 to 4 didn't affect many people be
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Perl 6 is officially Not Happening. The project has been renamed Raku and is released, but it is no longer being seen as the successor to Perl 6.
Instead we will be getting Perl 7. But as a site about it explains (https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/), it's really just Perl 5 with different defaults that reflect how most people are using Perl in 2021. It will continue to evolve, but mostly remaining compatible with Perl 5.
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Re: Special Protocol for the Winter Olypmics of 20 (Score:3, Insightful)
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Sensible thing to do is stick to the subset that is open, avoiding any of the proprietary bits.
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Remeber Zune and Visual Fred? (Score:1, Informative)
Remember when they backstabbed their Zune (ipod clone) partners? https://gigaom.com/2006/07/22/... [gigaom.com]
Microsoft Partners, You Been Zunked
2006
Re:Remeber Zune and Visual Fred? (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, Microsoft's best effort was "Play for Sure", which at its heart was a DRM system allowing someone to buy music, and own it and play it forever more. You gotta love the name.
Then: DRM servers related to PlaysForSure were turned off August 31, 2008, meaning that any operating system upgrade or migration rendered all content unplayable. [wikipedia.org].
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PlaysForSure was only abandoned because Microsoft decided to promote the Zune which uses a slightly modified but incompatible version of PlaysForSure.
Someone suddenly realized a little bit late that they were competing with themselves so they killed it off and kept the Zune.
Well we know where Zune is today. I wonder when the DRM servers for Zune will be turned off.
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Microsoft's greatest contribution to the world was a demonstration that DRM disenfranchises the user.
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Actually, every PlaysForSure "forever" song was replaced with a watermarked MP3 during the spend-down.
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Where I work, we have a department that gets to report its doings on a state-run website that uses Silverlight. That means that whenever we roll out new computers to these people, we have to make sure the Silverlight runtime is installed and working.
I haven't heard anything about this website being replaced anytime soon, either.
(That it's a division of the kakistocracy that is state government that's still using this outdated tech should come as a surprise to nobody.)
Re: Special Protocol for the Winter Olypmics of 20 (Score:2)
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and most things were converted to .NET after the protocol was eliminated
The real misconception about Silverlight is that its later versions were full .NET runtimes just like the Java plugin was a full Java runtime.
Microsoft just never made it a full platform in and of itself like Java was. I wonder what drove that mindset, was it to avoid the "stink" of Java security to be wrongfully applied to .NET and Silverlight? Nobody outside Microsoft knows.
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The real misconception about Silverlight is that its later versions were full .NET runtimes just like the Java plugin was a full Java runtime.
Clarification: Silverlight's later versions were truly full .NET runtimes like the Java plugin but MSFT never really promoted that fact, choosing instead to promote it as a Flash alternative.
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I know of a company HR portal that still uses it, and therefore requires you to log in using IE. Probably due to inertia and underinvestment in IT. I doubt they're the only example.
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Way to miss the point. People who adopted it invested in learning it, and then it went away. Much like may other things Microsoft is pushing now. "Blazor (web dev primarily with C# instead of JavaScript)" well that can get fucked. Learn the lesson of using some proprietary nonsense.
it's the opposite of "nothing to see here", it's "look at this car crash, and learn from it."
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Originally perhaps, but it rapidly evolved into a full application framework for multiple platforms.
A company I worked for decided to use it for a Windows CE 7 tablet device. The desktop people were familiar with it, the hope was they could write the app quickly and easily. Unfortunately Microsoft abandoned not only Silverlight but also Windows CE 7 around that time.
First problem was that Silverlight just didn't work on the embedded hardware. There was a demo app that seemed to work but you couldn't actuall
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You proved my point. Sliverlight for WinCE is now a forerunner to MPEG4-to-iPhone.
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I'm telling you the reason why Sliverlight was invented... it was the first attempt at adding encryption to NetShow streaming, which was renamed Windows Media Player, then changed the key to make PlaysForSure...
In other words, it's 10 year ago tech... we've moved on since then.
Article author is an idiot (Score:1)
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Silverlight was crap and almost no one used [...]
Yeah, sadly WOTC used it for the 4th edition D&D character builder, and while the paper 4e rules have everything you need to do that by hand, it is much harder then it should be. Although it doesn't really matter since WOTC pulled all that stuff down when they went to 5e, so even if MS still supported it you wouldn't be able to use it anymore (I stashed a local copy in a VM, but it looks like it needed some WOTC backend stuff anyway).
Probably Not (Score:5, Informative)
A big chunk of Microsoft technology depends on .NET. Azure, SQL Server, IIS, Sharepoint, Exchange, chunks of Windows and XBox OSes, Office... all need .NET for various things. Microsoft has spent significant resources getting .NET to run on Linux with .NET Core.
It would be possible, but it would be a LOT of work. It would be like trying to pry out Perl as a dependency for a major Linux distribution. You could probably do it, but a LOT of stuff needs Perl to work. You'd end up re-engineering a bunch of scripts to run on something that was, basically, the same thing as Perl, with no real benefit.
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This isn't about .NET. This is about up-and-comping tech Microsoft wants you to explore, like Blazor and whatever the hell MAUI is. They still want you to get invested in something proprietary if they can, and they will still pull that magic carpet out from under your feet. .NET is safe, all those things you mentioned are safe. This is about all of the unproven tech under the .NET umbrella.
I removed all the swear words because Jesus fucking a rhinocerous read the pants shittingly short article net time d
Re: Probably Not (Score:2)
MAUI is the long term replacement for WPF for GUI applications in .net. It supports windows, android, ios, macos, and web. It's going to first appear in .net 6. No Linux support as gui on Linux is pretty fragmented (xorg, Wayland, qt, etc.) and there isn't a whole lot of demand for it. Though .net 6 is fully open and under an MIT license, so the community can add support if there is enough of a need for it.
Re:Probably Not (Score:5, Informative)
It would be possible, but it would be a LOT of work. It would be like trying to pry out Perl as a dependency for a major Linux distribution.
Fedora did that. There is no Perl in the base image. Surprised the hell out of me a few months ago.
Microsoft didn't kill Silverlight (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft didn't kill Silverlight (Score:4, Interesting)
It is impressive that Microsoft extended Silverlight support for such an extended period. It even outlasted support for Adobe Flash, the product that it tried (and failed) to replace many years ago.
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Microsoft didn't kill Silverlight - Apple did.
Can you really blame Apple for this? Silverlight was effectively Stillborn. I saw it once in my entire computing history. Did Apple kill it, or did Apple just take out the trash?
Shafted Developers (Score:3)
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VB isn't garbage, it's the programmer who wrote the bad code.
Re: Shafted Developers (Score:2)
Because the language allowed for sloppy code.
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Because the language allowed for sloppy code.
all languages allow sloppy code.
uncompiled languages are def more error prone (Score:2)
Because the language allowed for sloppy code.
all languages allow sloppy code.
Yes, any tool is dangerous in the hands of an idiot, but an idiot can do a lot more damage with a chainsaw than a pair of scissors. Certain languages allow more sloppy code...uncompiled come to mind. Some guy leaves your company and you've inherited a 1000 file node.js app. Have fun. :) With Java/C/C#, at least you have mature static code analysis tools so you can instantly figure out where a line of code is used or an API call is used. We have to upgrade libs for security all the time. In Java, if the
VB6 is a mature product (Score:4, Interesting)
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I remember when VB was a business with companies selling pre-made code to those needing parts for their own solutions.
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By the time VB6 came out, yes it was mature. It's kind of a shame that they dropped it, because there are good qualities in it. I think I learned in VB4 and moved to VB6, then realized how dog-assed slow it was compared to C, and implemented a few calls in a C .dll and sped it right up. Yes even native compilation was very slow.
It's almost dirt-brained simple to have a junior coder do some VB stuff and a senior coder do the fast stuff, and the mid-range guy just goes and gets coffee and does the document
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VB-Classic (Score:1)
I know a lot of orgs pissed at their killing off VB-classic. They should have at least open-sourced it (along with FoxPro). MS did offer a classic-to-dot-net code converter, but it was crap.
These products may have had some proprietary or trade-secrets in the code, but they could have released the rest and let OSS developers fill in the gaps with new code, by describing what the missing parts do.
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If you're shafted by Microsoft and you're in the C world, I'm pretty sure you've found an alternative and moved on. And as long as you stayed away from proprietary stuff like a good little child, it surely wasn't more painful than what regex can handle. Search and replace in a sub-project, test, view diff, commit.
C is not the hill people should die on.
VB was basically a toy until VB5, and VB6 was a fairly minimal improvement. So serious coders should have been in technical debt only just a few years. If
This is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
...you should depend on standards, and not on software provided by a single manufacturer; you're always running the risk of it getting abandoned.
This is also why I do not trust software which does not comply with standards (or, at least does it's best to comply with them).
Oh, come on... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, come on, Microsoft is not the worst at abandoning things developers have invested in! Not while there's Google around. Besides, whoever invested heavily in Silverlight was not very bright in the first place...
Microsoft HAS been involved in the worst developer abandonment ever though, but in an indirect way. They sent their own Stephen Elop to take over Nokia, destroy it so that Microsoft can buy it cheap to do their mobile phone experiment. Nokia was transitioning from Symbian to Maemo/Meego at the time and had promised a smooth transition to developers with both platforms supporting Qt. Stephen infamously sent the "burning platform memo", the costliest memo in corporate history, abandoning the strategy and switching to Windows Mobile. There was a hilarious excuse used (he said the Maemo/Meego strategy could only lead to 1-2 major phone releases per year - yeah, who wants to be like Apple!) and almost all developers abandoned ship. Microsoft did have to abandon Windows Mobile later on, but it's not that they did not try as much as they could, and nobody in the right mind would think it was certain to succeed.
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Who said they were the worst? Also, the article isn't about Google. And then you tell a story about the worst abandonment and it involves Microsoft?
Re-read the summary at least, then come back and explain what your point was. Google is bad? Fine, submit something on that topic and let's bash the shit out of them elsewhere.
Silverlighted... But ghosted first. (Score:5, Interesting)
They did the same for a bunch of other technologies. Windows Media Center was one of them as well - it was essentially a free DVR we had, if we had a PC (and bought a cablecard tuner). It wasn't a bad product at all, but they ghosted us there as well. Even the Zune music player app (standalone - wouldn't buy one of those MP3 trainwrecks) was a superior experience to some of the other music players available at the time: cover art animations, etc. They just stopped updating things and never told anyone.. Or at least in any way I ever heard about it.
Microsoft simply can't be trusted to maintain their products. I've moved on, for the better.
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They've half-baked Desired State Configuration several times now.
Re:Silverlighted... But ghosted first. (Score:4, Interesting)
My business got screwed by MS back in the mid 90s. Windows CE was the new thing, and we were targeting these mobile devices with our healthcare software. Microsoft had officially announced that the next release, Windows CE 2.0, would include a Java VM. We were bleeding edge at the time, and ordered HP Jornadas (320 and 360s) that had upgradable ROM OSs. Finally when we received the Windows CE 2.0 ROMs we discovered.... no JVM. No support of any kind.
What happened, back at that point in time, is that Microsoft was very afraid of Java, but also had to support it at least to some extent. What they did was start bastardizing Java with Windows-specific APIs. Sun took MS to court over it, and basically won (I think MS settled). So they dropped the Windows CE JVM as a result, and screwed over a number of us that were hoping to use the very new Java on the very new Windows CE mobile devices.
We quickly ported our code to C++ in Visual Studio, which undoubtedly served us much, much better, as the memory and CPU constrained devices would have performed terribly with Java.
After a quick search I see the info is still on the web. Here's a press release about CE 2.0 supporting Java:
https://www.itprotoday.com/win... [itprotoday.com]
And one where it was reported that Java was not supported:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]
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The funny thing about Windows CE is that it was Windows in look-and-feel and API alone. Internally it had nothing that even remotely resembled contemporary Windows 9x/Me, Windows XP, or Windows Server.
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For a while you could buy cheap windows ce netbooks, the windows branding got them some customers who thought they were getting a cheap laptop compatible with full price windows laptops and their library of existing software instead of a linux netbook that obviously wouldnt be compatible.
Instead, they got a laptop that mostly looked like windows but wasn't compatible at all and had even less software available for it than the linux netbooks did.
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I owned a NEC MobilePro 800 Handheld PC running Windows CE. It had the apps I needed at the time and was the perfect form factor, compute power, screen size/resolution, and battery life until the netbooks started hitting the market about half a decade later.
I'm curious about your statement about vendors who tried to pass off Handheld PCs as netbooks. The first netbooks like the Eee PC came out in the mid-2000s. I bought my Mobilepro 800 in the late 1990s and, by then, the H/PC market was very mature.
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Not a handheld pc, a netbook in the typical netbook form factor. There are lots of netbooks shipped with windows ce, for instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Local retailers used to carry these, and the "windows" branding used to get them some sales, but such users were often unhappy and felt misled because they thought they would be compatible with the existing windows versions they have on their desktop or full size laptop. At least the retailer i was aware of had an extremely high return rate when t
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Ahh, I remember those. There was a resurgence of them in the mid to late 2000s to compete with the OLPC. I bought one for $100 called the Cherrypal. Of course it was cheap junk from China and parts started falling off. I returned it for exchange but never heard from the seller again, something that happened to lots of other customers.
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wouldn't buy one of those MP3 trainwrecks
I can't speak for the original Zunes, but the Zune HD was a really good device and featured FM HD Radio and an app store. If you've ever played with a Windows Phone the Zune is its ancestor.
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Well hang on there, Hoss. The topic is that Microsoft does support some things, but abandons other things. If you choose a core technology, you won't see much in the way of problems. If you choose a peripheral technology like Blazor or Silverlight, you will likely have problems.
Your examples include WWF, which I had to learn briefly in the last 6 months, and Media Center, which is the Windows XP Xbox. One of these clearly wasn't going to make it, and one of them is still around.
re: "Microsoft simply can
10y support for a bad choice is EXCELLENT support (Score:5, Interesting)
While I am not a fan of Microsoft server-side products. I actually actively dislike them. However, I must concede, they did right by their customers for this failed client technology. Picking sliverlight was a bad decision for many reasons. You bet on the wrong horse and it was very short-lived. Kudos to MS for supporting their loyal customers for so long. I wish every development library had this level of support.
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"While I am not a fan of Microsoft server-side products. I actually actively dislike them."
This sums up some of my M$ experiences well.
So it will stop offering to install Silverlight... (Score:2)
Microsoft will tell you that official support for Silverlight will end in less than two months, on Oct. 12, 2021
So on Oct 12 software updates will stop offering to install Silverlight? :-)
Those Silverlight developers should fear me more! (Score:2)
Because I removed the Silverlight-Plugin along with the MS Office-Addon from every Firefox installation I got my hands on - and I deactivated flash ofc and installed "click to play" and updated flash to the newest least vulnerable version, instructed the users that flash is a threat and that they should only activate it if it was "sane" to do so.
And I deactivated AdobePDF-Viewer, mostly because it was almost as bugged by known vulnerabilities as Flash, that was also before pdfjs.
Ohh and yes I deleted the pl
Make way for Swift (Score:1)
All-in on Silverlight (Score:2)
I knew a company that built their entire frontend product on Silverlight. The CEO carried a Windows Phone and told people how great the camera was. And it was better than Flash.
Schizophrenic company.
I'm surprised it's still around (Score:1)
I never really got the point of .NET since it seems to mostly just be a parallel implementation of the Win32 API that requires an extra runtime. It's never seemed like Microsoft really has any kind of plan for .NET or knows quite what to do with it either, so why they keep plugging away at it is a mystery to me. The SOAP API was supposed to be the next big thing in web programming back in the day, only it never really seemed to catch on, then .NET came along shortly after Microsoft lost the lawsuit with Sun
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It's not just a runtime, it's a virtual machine. WinForms doesn't work anywhere except Windows because no one ever wrote an implementation for anything else. Silverlight was the closest Microsoft ever got to putting .NET on MacOS. Mono has a (bad) implementation of WinForms, which means it works on Mac and Linux, arguably. Java (including Swing/GUI) works great on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so I don't know what you mean about Java not being cross platform.
Cross-platform OSS WinForms? (Score:1)
> Mono has a (bad) implementation of WinForms
Why is it so bad? Is it fixable, or is the core too bleeped up?
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It does not render well so apps look totally broken.
Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Not in the .Net Core community that I am part of - everyone is excited by the direction and energy being put into it...
What people *have* been in an uproar about is Microsofts approach to community projects, in that Microsoft tend to release their own solution for things rather than engage with the existing community projects already ongoing - Microsoft has changed their approach on this in recent years, but its had mixed results.
For example, Microsoft professed a desire to develop and include into ASP.Net Core an OAuth 2/OpenID Connect compatible identity system, and the community jumped on them for eclipsing the then community standard in Identity Server - so Microsoft backed down, and said "ok, we will include Identity Server-based templates instead". Last year, the people behind Identity Server took it closed-source.... I don't blame them (and will be paying for the license as its decent software), but the whole situation is a bit of a kick in the teeth across the board.
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Of Microsoft? Because some people develop a hate and stick with it.
Contrary to all the negativity around, the .Net Core community is growing and theres no indication that its growth is slowing - and .Net Core/C# is a fantastic framework and language to use, with the added bonus that it gets better with each release.
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And unfortunately your parents didn't take basic contraceptive precautions either, so here we are, stuck with you making ridiculous comparisons between Covid, HIV and Microsoft.
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Okay, but this isn't about .NET, this is about specific bits under .NET like Blazor and MAUI. If only there were some source of additional information one might read for context.
Fuck me, that's brilliant. I'll invent a way of displaying text with a thing you can interact with to link to see related information. It would be a link, but optional and at the same time very helpful, so it's kind of not just a link, it's hyper, like a super link or something.
I WILL BE THE RICHEST MAN ON EARTH
Yeah (Score:2)
They should switch to Google instead. :>
JWS - Silverlight - JWS (Score:1)
Yes, that was a major screw-up by Microsoft. They promoted a technology for always updated apps, much like Java Web Start. We spent considerable time migrating JWS code to Silverlight, only to be hung out to dry. Apps are important, and impossible to replace with web-based tools as they then suggested. Then Microsoft introduced their crappy UWP "solution", NOT. So... years later JWS code is still in production and being used world-wide for the application since no better options are available.
Silverlight was doomed from the start (Score:3)
MS Silverlight was a solution to a client-side problem that was already being addressed by Adobe Flash & Oracle Java (JRE) & the writing on the wall at the time was that they all would eventually be phased out in favour of open standards, i.e. HTML, JS, & CSS. We just didn't expect it to happen so quickly when Apple & Google decided to kill them because the interfered with their mobile app store business models.
Is .NET in a similar situation due to so many services shifting to cloud-based (read Linux-based, including MS Azure) computing? Is there an "Apple & Google getting rid of Flash" type situation in the works or will it just decline slowly like many other legacy technologies?
No, cloud will have little to any impact on .NET (Score:4, Interesting)
Is .NET in a similar situation due to so many services shifting to cloud-based (read Linux-based, including MS Azure) computing? Is there an "Apple & Google getting rid of Flash" type situation in the works or will it just decline slowly like many other legacy technologies?
No. .NET has never been as popular as Java or even PHP/node, but it has a strong community and lots of important customers. Given that ColdFusion is still alive,despite being deemed obsolete for 20 years now, I am confident .NET will outlive me. It's marketshare will go up and down, but I think MS will support it for decades. Also, cloud infrastructure is a red herring. There's plenty of .NET cloud support. If anything Nadella's strategy of focusing on pleasing customers and making money...not on domination just delays any death were it their fate. Today's MS doesn't seem as interested in locking you into a platform, just selling you things...which is the way it always should have been. They have plenty of good products, but their history of not playing well with others under Gates and Balmer have made MS products a non-starter in many shops.
.NET. However, I respect them as an alternative to my preferred platform. People who choose .NET have their reasons to do so and it' s a perfectly competent platform to do what you need. It's not my first choice, but I greatly prefer it to node.js or python for business development. I've seen a lot more teams ship successful products with .NET than Python/node.js. I've seen a lot more apps in production for more than 10 years on .NET than node.js/Python as well. I don't see it's marketshare drastically increasing or declining in the next few years.
Disclaimer, I actively dislike
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Scratch Oracle. They didn't buy Sun until a couple of years after Silverlight came out.
so some poor ... (Score:3)
... ".net developer" sods have been living in fear for a decade now!
gosh, what a moving story. i hope they finally find their peace and will have them in my prayers. peace!
That's ungrammatical isn't it (Score:2)
More correctly it'd be "silverlit".
Mixed bag (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a .NET dev, have been since the early ASP.NET betas. Now I'm running 100% .NET 5, with 6 around the corner.
I have zero worries about Microsoft continuing to maintain and improve .NET, Azure DB, Power Platform, and other tech I interact with regularly.
What do I *expect* Microsoft to bail on, based on past experience?
- Anything hardware. Zune. Windows Mobile. Windows Media Center. Not even sure I'd put much stock in XBox.
- On-premises server software (SQL Server, etc.). Things will move to the cloud.
- Desktop software that seeks to replace web tech: InfoPath, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc.
- All web UI frameworks. Friends don't let friends let Microsoft generate their HTML and JS.
- Any desktop software that competes with cloud plays... other than Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (and only those because the cloud versions still suck).
- Any UI elements that people have grown accustomed to (drop-down menus, Start button, Control Panel, legible icons, browser chrome). I think they hate people like my grandparents and purposefully confuse the hell out of them every few years.
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I actually try to avoid anything they make that is consumer facing. Its constant churn and death there and with no big corporate users ready to scream when the rug is pulled there is nothing to stop it.
The UI element thing is horrible. I have a theory that the PMs use the telemetry data to identify which features in the OS people are using. They then destroy these features with redesign because they are being used so much. They probably figure if people like that area they can put their stamp on it and get
And then you have Googlers... (Score:2)
They deserve it, good riddance (Score:2)
Anybody that used Silverlight deserves it. It filled the internet with pages that you couldnt use unless you downloaded that crappy extension. Good riddance.
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Anybody that used Silverlight deserves it. It filled the internet with pages that you couldnt use unless you downloaded that crappy extension.
I never came across a page that required a Silverlight extension. I guess that means that nobody really used it, so it should be allowed to die.
If Silverlight was intended to be a replacement for Flash, then maybe it was doomed from the start, because Flash was never a good concept in the first place. I am speaking as a user, not a developer. I really hated pages where you could not read the content, because it was embedded in Flash, which probably only worked properly on the web designer's platform. When I
What even was silverlight? (Score:2)
.NET versions... (Score:2)
I'm really surprised about the mess in .NET versions, and how developers put up with it. In my company, the hyped Microsoft-only developers are on their fourth rewrite of major parts of their apps, and need continuous investment to even keep their stuff running. I don't think there's a single exception to this pattern: I get approached by the hipster coders telling me that "Y is the new X, you should really switch over, everybody's using Y now" and after a while I hear that they're asking for budget to re
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Article Author FUD and Gaslighting. (Score:2)
Legacy Development (Score:2)
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What's your exit strategy? Didn't your parents teach you to have good alternatives before complaining?
Keep in mind that Donald had already begun a draw-down, so it's not like there wasn't lead-up time.
Advertising companies don't care about support (Score:2)