Silverlight for mobile: what's in, what's out

Microsoft has scheduled the first quarter of 2009 for the first code drop of Silverlight for mobile devices. And while Silverlight for mobile will be missing some elements in the desktop that have people excited, Microsoft's working to pack in other features increasingly considered standard in the demanding world of mobile …

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait Just a Rootin Tootin Minute.

So you'll be able to zoom in infinitely on the crappy unfocused pics you took on your camera phone in the pub last night, but not be able to access more useful features like a calendar?

Way to go.

[Martin Gregorie]

CTP?

That has to be about the worst acronym M$ could have chosen: every acronym-droid and their chihuahua have used it already but, hey, why not add to the confusion.

On second thoughts, Chronic Testicular Pain seems oddly appropriate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop the misuse

c/scripting languages/languages/

I'm just about fed up of the misuse of the term and mischaracterisation of various languages in this way. If this is the only argument that people in their "nyah nyah my language is better than yours because" playground games have, then they really need to grow up.

Yes, I know why people say this. Yes it's off-topic. Cue the abusers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fragementation on Java

Has not happened because SUN did want it to happen. Want to have your runtime built in in a mobile? Ask the manufacturer. Of course, if the phone has any special features that make it special, different or simply better than the competition, the phone manufacturer will want you to have an API to take advantage of them. If not, you can take your runtime elsewhere, thank you.

In as much as MS is used to blackmail hardware manufacturers, this will not work with the mobile phone ones. They've learned the lesson from PC/PDAs, and know for sure that if they buy into the MS runtime all their phones will look and behave the same in the long term, andit will be MS who will determine the specs of the new generation phones.

Sorry, Microsoft, unless you make it both free (no fees) and open (source code available, anyone can modify it) no mobile manufacturer is going to take you seriously.

[druck]

4MB my arse

No, the user will never see 4MB because it will be pre-installed. But there will be 1MB of security patches every week, service pack 1 will be a 6MB download, and version 3.0 which actually includes working basic functionality will have ballooned to 24MB.

[frymaster]

re: fragmentation

Some good points, but I disagree about needing it to be open-source. Microsoft's strengths lie in having an open _platform_ (ie making it easy for people to use and add stuff on*) which is all that's necessary.

If nokia, for example want an API for nokia-specific stuff, they should be able to do that without needing source code access.

* if you think about it, a lot of improvements MS has made recently involve it taking back control of things rather than letting third-party programs alter them if they want to.

[sleepy]

die Silverlight, die

Please please let Silverlight and mobile Flash die. Please let us just use open standards for the mobile web. We've only just fought clear of Microsoft's embrace extend smother hijacking of Web 1.0 on the desktop.

For now it looks like being Apple and Google pursuing open standards versus Microsoft and Adobe rebuilding the bad old days in the mobile space.

[Mr. Wurst]

@sleepy

Apple pursuing open standards? Good joke! No ODF support, NFS mounts on mac are a hell to setup, iChat can't be more closed.. I don't see any interest in open standards anywhere..

[Thomas Bottrill]

@Martin Gregorie

CTP stands for Community Technology Preview, and is a term applied to pre-beta productions that are released for preview.

[sleepy]

@Mr Wurst

I was not claiming that Apple does not mainly offer its own software in proprietary form, but regretting the apparent hope of Adobe and Microsoft to balkanise and pollute the intrinsically open _web_ with Flash and Silverlight alternatives to standards compliant web 2.0. Apple does not attempt to interfere with the use of open standards by corrupting them or supplanting them. They don't have Microsoft's market share or Adobe's hold over content creation to be able to do that.

Apple's strategy for survival as a minority platform includes strongly resisting the encroaching of proprietary cross-platform infrastructure attempting to replace open standards. For example by compelling iPhone web apps not to use Flash, and presumably, when the time comes, not to use SIlverlight.

[Jimmy Schementi]

Clarifying DLR support

Is correct that Silverlight for Mobile does not support the DLR today, since the Reflection.Emit namespace is not in the .NET Compact Framework. However, I'm making changes to the Silverlight integration for IronRuby and IronPython to let them run in interpreted-mode, which will not depend on Reflection.Emit. Once that happens then applications that run in interpreted mode can run on Silverlight Mobile. This will be in the next release on http://codeplex.com/sdlsdk.