Silverlight 2.0: killer features, no Flash killer

Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0, released this month for Windows and Mac, is a tipping point. This is the version that gives developers the features they have long been waiting for, including a cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework. Microsoft will use its massive Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) in …

[Anonymous Coward]

WHY?

"...including a cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework."

WHY would anyone want to port a security Swiss cheese like .NET to any other platform?

And does this mean MS will be porting Visual Studio to Linux? Somehow I think not. Which means it's only cross platform at the client end. Which means MORE Swiss cheese at the server end because you have a to choose between MS Windows or ...errrr ....MS Windows. Brilliant!

...And I though flash was a PITA !!!

[BlueGreen]

Dear MS: Why?

You've spent tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions on producing a competitor to a well established product with a solid developer base. Do you really think you're going to displace it? Let's see.

I don't even let flash run (nor even JS) unless it's essential and then only within a VMachine, because of security issues. You can be sure your product isn't going anywhere near my browsers.

Nor are developers going to be won over to your cool stuff because of the chicken/egg thing.

As I see it, the technically savvy won't touch it and the untechnical masses won't get presented with sites needing it. Additionally it will suffer from security holes like all such products, but you will get it especially in the neck just because you are Microsoft. Additionally people will despise it not because it is bad but just because etc. You may try to push it via windows updates but that may backfire because it won't be seen as a critical patch, and obviously won't reach firefox users which is, what, >30% of the market?

You've created something expensive that I'm fairly confident will be a pure loss to you. Even if you succeeded, so what?

This is just a pathetic land-grab that is likely to cost you plenty, in goodwill as well as money (you have plenty of one, somewhat a dearth of the other).

What exactly were your long-term business plans for this nascent white elephant? I suspect you had none, just the feeling that you had to have *something* that only you could control, just in case. Well, you could afford to waste the money I guess.

[Steve Davies]

Flash is bad enough

But do I have to block more of this <add animal excrement of your choice here> from web sites that I visit?

I browsed to a site that uses Silverlight the other day. All I got was a totally blank screen. At least with flash, you know that there is something that you can play if you want to.

Thumbs down because crap website designers will start creating whole sits with this sh1t.

[Anonymous Coward]

RyanAir and Silversh*te

Some time ago RyanAir changed their working "destinations" page to use this nonsense, and so anyone using Linux can't see where they go to (and consequently buy anything from them). Interesting to go to a non-cross-platform and cut off many of your users ...

[Tom Chiverton]

flex ?

a lot of your IDE comments are already addressed if you look at Adobe's Flex Builder IDE, rather than their CS tools.

[Andy Worth]

Bored and tired

I'm already tired of having to click "No Thanks" EVERY time I visit the MS site (which is reasonably often due to my job). I rarely install anything on demand, even less so if it doesn't actually give any immediate benefit.

[The Mighty Biff]

Corporate users

But it will be popular on corporate intranets. Web app front ends are still somewhat lacking in performance and features when compared to client executables running on every user's machine. This would seem to fix that problem nicely.

It's all about building and maintaining the developer base. People tend to develop applications using tools that they know. Flash and Ruby on Rails may be teh awesome, but if Megacorp has a gross of .NET programmers on the payroll, they'll start using Silverlight.

[Mark]

More dynamic adverts

just what I wanted..

[Anonymous Coward]

Embrace and Extend is go

I work for a large corp and we already have developers requesting to use this for both intranet apps and client facing apps.

Zero concept of people using anything other than windows and IE, no care for forcing yet another plugin on people, no appetite for avoiding vendor lockin.

Chalk up another win for MS.

[Tom Chiverton]

RyanAir

I booked a RyanAir flight from Linux just last week, didn't notice any Silverlight shite...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another case where msft needs to do it before people notice

Why is it people always wait for Microsoft to reinvent it before it's the new platform. Who ever started the 'Flash killer' think anyway.

Microsoft hired a bunch of Macromedia\Adobe Flash guys and created SilverLight wow.

Just remember Microsoft needs to feed the beast and it will not tighten the purse strings with tighter licensing when the time is right. Microsoft does not want you creating apps that do not require a windows OS.

[BlueGreen]

Oh yes, and get the basics right before being clever

The link 'Building Concurrent Apps with F#', top right in the MSDN plug zone, caught my eye. Started reading it and found some dubious constructs in there so I thought I'd check it thus <http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmsdn.microsoft.com%2Fen-gb%2Fmagazine%2Fcc967279.aspx%3Fpr%3Dblog&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0>

Result being '92 Errors, 68 warning(s)'. Significant ones too, may of them.

MS is still trying to break HTML, I still contend they are trying to break XML <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/01/understand_xaml/comments/>.

I'll assume the article content is better than the markup and carry on with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn...

Funny how people accept one monoploy and not another.....ho hum.....

[David M]

I might place a bit of a wager on Silverlight

I think dismissing Silverlight is a bit premature.

As a .NET developer, within 5 minutes of taking my first steps in looking at Silverlight I could see where it is going.

Dismissing .NET as "shite" is coming from a position of ignorance. Microsoft's biggest problem is actually in playing a different sort of catch-up in a market that is not really their traditional line of business. But once they begin to, look out... because I think that to evolve Silverlight from where it is now (infancy really) to delivering very very serious web-served business apps in a browser is going to be relatively easy for them to do. I'm kind of astonished that .NET is sometimes dismissed off-hand, because it has developed to a very powerful stage, and if there is one game in which I WOULDN'T want to be taking on MS it is that one.

Competitors are in a sense coming from opposite ends of the planet. Flash has the established market position, and has been evolving into a business technology. Microsoft already has that underlying technology. Serious technology. Personally, if I was say Macromedia I as sure as hell wouldn't be smugly dismissive.

As for a difficulty in understanding the emerging MS technologies, isn't that true of anything? VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 has coincided with an explosion of new technologies... Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, LINQ, Silverlight, so on. They have some real learning curves associated, but that's proportionate to what's under the hood.

Anyway, back to work... if .NET is shite I have developed some strange fetishes, because Visual Studio and the .NET platform seriously turns me on. At the end of the day we each understand the technologies that we live with. How well MS can market Silverlight.. who knows? But if it begins to gain acceptance... it could be competitors playing their own kind of catch up.

[Peter]

Killer Ap

If MS had managed to coordinate themselves well enough and get the tech up to scratch so they could PhotoSynth as a Silverlight application, I think that would have done a better job of convincing people that Silverlight was actually a really powerful and worthwhile new technology.

Without a killer ap like that that will really wow end users, all that will happen is people get put off by the Microsoft smell. WPF, LINQ and so on may be great tools for developers, but important as that is, a development environment that turns on a few developers isn't enough.