Microsoft's Silverlight 4 - Flash developers need not apply Microsoft's Silverlight 4 shows remarkable progress since version 3, released in July. The pace of development shows Microsoft is serious about making this work - but is it delivering something developers can use? The answer is a guarded "yes". Version 4 is a huge improvement, resolving many of the most frustrating aspects of …
Microsoft already has a Mac BU (business unit) with Mac developers. Why don't they leverage this available wealth of talent to port Silverlight fully to MacOS X (and by extension, making it essentailly iPhone-ready)?
That would deny anyone the opportunity to say it's essentially Windows-only as a reason for not adopting it? (Moonlight exists for Linux but its feature set lags and is not as compatible or fully implemented as the Windows Silverlight is. My colleagues discovered this the hard way.)
Personally, I think some healthy (true) multi-platform competition is good. I'm not that fond of Microsoft, but they already have this talent in-house -- why not make use of it? Silly, radical idea, I know... :-)
Only with WMV. MSFT came out with a windows media player for the Mac, let it languish, and finally killed it off with third party picking up the slack (See: Flip4Mac). Even if it's not some diabolical scheme, there's business reasons to focus on Windows (See: Adobe Flash CPU performance on Mac, Linux).
I'm sure Silverlight will be installed on every copy of Windows by sheer virtue of bundling/updates/IE. But because of history and the above reasons, even if they did have a decent port, I'd have no desire to see Silverlight on my machine.
I was just at an MS developer conference where they were plugging Silverlight like mad (along with sharepoint for some reason!)
It runs EVERYWHERE they said - well if you define everywhere to be Windows + MAC.
What about phones we asked = "we can't confirm anything but there may be some news in the next Windows mobile release"
So it might be available for the worlds worst selling phone platform.
WinForms and WPF is dead - Silverlight is the new desktop.
So can we open files? Yes - in my documents, if the user agrees to a whole bunch of scary security pop-ups.
And they now have it working in Chrome (mostly, and unofficially)
Whats the chances that some future revision of SL stipulates that the only browser that can run the product is IE <insert revision here> - vendors who used earliers version of SL would then be left with the painful decision of either redoing something in flash (if its still around by then) or being forced by MS to continue down the SL path and thereby inadvertantly also forcing their consumers to be browser specific.
Why????
Seriously. It's bad enough having one proprietary runtime to fucking deal with while calming down idiot marketeers who get a hard-on about building websites entirely in Flash. We don't want another. Competition here isn't good, it just makes for a bigger bag of dogs' cocks.
I hope to Buddha's balls that HTML5 gets it's shit together quickly.
Pengie:
Former: The option that appeared first in the sentence. In your case, former = 100%. Is that what you meant to communicate?
Tim Anderson:
Why does the title contain "Flash devs need not apply". It doesn't seem relevant to anything in the article. Are you saying no Flash/Flex developers should ever consider using Silverlight?
"Flash is hard to shift, with greater penetration in web browsers, much better device support, and a strong industry alliance in the form of its Open Screen Project."
Forgot the strongest point; Adobe has every reason in the world to make Flash work on as many platforms as possible, while MS has as strong reasons to ensure Silverlight does NOT run (properly) on non-windows platforms.
I havn't seen much trouble with Flash compatibility on Linux myself for the last 2-3 years, apart from the fact that the Adobe Flash player Linux plugins are closed source and the open source Gnash alternative isn't ready for prime time as a browser plugin quite yet.
As far as Flash media content is concerned, it seems that Linux users can rip the DRM right off it with mencoder and flvstreamer, enabling it to be decoded, stored and viewed on a wider range of devices, which gives Linux Flash users an advantage over those using platforms fully owned by anyone other than themselves. So perhaps we could use a flash browser plugin that lets us rip a flash video to disk directly from the web browser, while pretending to be Flash player to the website.
I've had the Adobe Flash 10 plugin under Firefox, Opera and Chrome on Ubuntu for a fair few months now and it seems to work OK. Admittedly, it may be slower than it is on Windows (I have no way of knowing) but it seems to do the job OK.
Yes, it would be nice to have a .deb for it -- but part of the fact that isn't happening is the whole proprietary vs GNU problem which affects many things under Linux.
The place that Silverlight will truly shine is in business and enterprise applications.
Most coders who I know are software consultants and app developers for enterprise and finance apps and Silverlight is the hottest thing around right now. Nobody in the business community cares if its only on 45% of the desktops in the consumer world.
You ever try to write a reporting suite that pulls data from SQL with Flash? How much fun did you have? :)
Er, Silverlight 4 and VS2010 are still in beta. Expect Registry fiddling.
The development stuff they produce generally just installs, which isn't always my experience with dev tools in say the Linux world. Not that there's anything like VS in the Linux world.
First off, I use Linux. BTW 1% of desktop PC users is a lot of people.
I don't understand the criticism of the COM deployment feature though - it's surely just an alternative way of deploying a SL app?
That doesn't mean I trust MS's motives - embrace (to gain share), extend (to lock in), destroy (the competition - having achieved market leadership) - same as ever. They just haven't got to the "extend" phase yet.
To be fair to MS, I am thankful, having to use Lotus Notes every day, that MS occupy the dominant desktop software position nowadays and not IBM.
Programmers in most of the areas where something like Flash or Silverlight actually makes sense (i.e. web games, e-learning, RIAs, annoying stupid ad banners and - for the moment at least, web video) already tend to know ActionScript and all the foibles of the Flash API back to front. So where's the advantage of switching to Silverlight programming - especially when all designers work in Flash?
Even Adobe's efforts to make the Flash IDE the most annoyingly crash-happy application ever would be unlikely to make anyone switch over.
"Silverlight can only muster around 45 per cent according to Riastats.com - though that figure took a lurch upward last month, partly thanks to an increased sample size"
hmmm... does that mean the sample is now more representative, or that somehow you get a less accurate percentage by sampling more sites?
I am not surprised in the slightest that Windows is getting the most attention? This was the point all along - produce a nominally cross-platform / cross-browser runtime, build up market share, and then slowly let the non-Windows platforms atrophy. Why is anyone surprised at all?
Microsoft are paying lip service to other platforms. Mono / Moonlight is just a running joke on the open source community. Moonlight is barely at version 2 and already Silverlight is at version 4. And of course development tools for Linux are awful. MS know the open source community will NEVER keep up with silverlight and will NEVER support their DRM / codecs properly and never compete with their tools so they let it live on as a token project that they can be mentioned when people raise the subject of cross-platform support.
Despite this there is no doubt that Silverlight is better architected than Flex (e.g. multi-threading), but I wonder why anyone wants to sacrifice a ubquitous solution for one which is trying to coral people into the Windows / MS domain. If Flex is not to people's liking then JavaFX would be a better long term solution although it has its own issues.
It will turn out as yet another Microsoft failure and show their inability to penetrate any market other than their encumbered office market base.
While the rest of the world (Google, OSS movement in general) is moving away from flash and plugins in general with HTML5. It is just like pop ads all over again which thanks god have been almost eradicated with popup blockers and now the same is happening with plugins.
I can see a niche market with the naive customers who fell for asp .net, specially in the financial sector, where office integration is relevant.
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