Mm, Silverlight, what's that smell? Yes, it's death Microsoft hasn't denied rumours that they are about to pull the plug on Silverlight, its development platform for rich Web design. Often compared to Flash, Silverlight could be about to get the same treatment as Adobe's platform and get dumped in favour of leaner, quicker, more energy-efficient HTML5. Adobe recently ditched …
It DID not take a genius to see that Silverlight would NEVER stand a chance. i'd recommend you start reconsidering your career-choice-making-abilities if you're a Silverlight developer.
Seriously ... Silverlight never was more than another useless microsoft alternative, I don't see why anyone even bothered about its existence.
Comparing it to Flash/Flex is a major mistake though, since Adobe's F might still have a future - since it does not currently have any serious opponents . Yes the political pressure is towards HTML5, but that's not going to help you if you want an interactive modern website -- (Yes, I use jQuery, Sencha and Flex and I can tell you Flex/Flash is far from being the worst in most cases).
Silverlight is only on browsers... and probably netflix is already working on a replacement (html5, one would guess). So how does Qt for embedded linux on set top boxes come in as a saviour ?
And why are you posting as AC for such a harmless (though seemingly somewhat dumb) comment OR have I been trolled ?
Qt == Nokia/Trolltech Qt
QT == Apple QuickTime
As if anyone would seriously suggest replacing Silverlight with QuickTime.
Qt on the other hand makes a fine alternative for Netflix, indeed it has been demonstrated in the past.
http://developer.qt.nokia.com/videos/watch/developing_the_netflix_tv_movie_streaming_service_with_qt
How are we going to get DRM content now?
Not that I like DRM... but I do like being able to stream stuff from Netflix and Hulu - and HTML5 (at least check) does not have any mechanism in it to provide DRM protection for video.
I would *really* like to know if this has been solved.
Netflix, at least, still relies on Silverlight for DRM. I would love to not have to rebuild the family laptop (currently working wonderfully with Ubuntu for general web surfing purposes) with Windows just to let the kids use it to stream Netflix.
DRM is evil + Free is good.
Netflix & hulu are Evils of an Industrial society promoting DRM protected content. Instead I want freely downloadable youtube content right now. Google is not just messiah of freedom but is god (& android is its chariot). Down with iOS. Down with DRM. Down with other non-free losers too.
I want Freeeeeedoom.
PS: Sex with celebrities should also be free. Paris Hilton is keeping sex with Paris proprietary. That is a downright insult to any red blooded man (or a woman of certain inclination). She should allow Free Celebrity Sex (FCS) right now - just like in 60s.
Once FCS/Paris allows Free Celebrity Sex, anyone else having sex with her must allow all future sex to be free. Soon we will be able to force all celebrities to release their sex as FCS.
I'd hate to just blurt out "but nobody uses it anyway" without any figures to back that up, but I kinda just did ...
In my "little" world of web dev, we've never had any requests for silverlight, never pursued it as a rich media solution - in fact, it's never even come up in conversation.
Certainly, my small circle I move in is hardly a market indicator, but looking further afield, to the movers and shakers of web development, I see no activity on the silverlight front either.
It does appear - and correct me if I'm wrong - that Silverlight was pretty much DOA.
The HTML5 Canvas element is simply burying the body, with little to no fanfare, in a field somewhere near Redmond.
"leaner, quicker, more energy-efficient HTML5"
Apart from Steve Jobs doing some smoke and mirrors no one involved in HTML 5 has ever claimed that it is leaner, quicker or more energy-efficient than Flash or Silverlight. In fact, Flash is arguably quicker and more efficient than many nascent HTML 5 / Javascript implementations because it has had the advantage of many iterations of optimisations, something that simply cannot be said of HTML Canvas and I'm waiting see announcements of hardware acceleration for WebM.
HTML 5 is based on a deep-rooted desire for openness and level playing fields. By promoting audio and video to the DOM, developers and users have more control over what's happening. CSS transitions, HTML Canvas and SVG animations bring to the mainstream effects that are commonly seen but not transferable. And putting everything in the browser makes security testing easier but then it also increases the risk of a single point of failure.
Adobe and Microsoft know that there is no way that they can optimize Silverlight and Flash for every concievable device nearly as well as the browser vendors for those devices can. Android has a highly optimized browser that can offload functions to phone GPUs and optimize for arm, iOS has similar, and so on and so on. Every platform you can think of has a web browser that is being optimized for that platform. If Flash is more efficient than HTML5 on any platform right now, it is only due to a head start and that advantage will be gone within a matter of months.
A worrying thing for anyone trying to forge out a career in software development is that the lifetime of things seems to be getting shorter and shorter. There are probably kids in colleges learning this stuff in the hope of a job later, but now have skills that are out-of-date.
Put it simply : don't go into retarded useless tech .
1. pick good tech (mostly not microsoft and not some obscure troll stuff)
2. pick used tech (if you want a job, your tech choice should at least cover some market share)
3. avoid a fail when you see it (silverlight ... Anyone not seeing how it was DOA should probably leave the tech decisions to someone else.)
I'm not sure I'd call this a "skill".
It's something you can invest time and effort into learning, but all such things have a shelf-life that you should think about before you invest. Kids in colleges should be looking for a mixture of lifetimes -- something to get them their first job, and other things to get them a *few* more after that, and perhaps a handful of things that will last a lifetime (but there are precious few of those to choose from).
In the olden times, new predators or agricultural catastrophes jumped at you out of nowhere every fews seasons and you had to relearn to survive until you croaked hungry, forgotten and alone in a cold cave at the age of 40.
In today's times, new stuff from fastcycle development inc. jumps at you out of nowhere every few seasons and you have to bore through another Manning book to survive until your croak hungry, forgotten, alone and pensioneless (your savings having been taxed and inflated away) in front of TV sitcoms at the age of 60.
C# ... microsoft's failed java, far from cross platform, far from performant ... kill it now please ?
Delphi : caveman tech at it's best ...
Okay Silverlight is both BAD and RECENT ... but that doesn't make Delphi good.
If at least you had said C/C++ instead ... you would still have the excuse of performance, but those two here are inherently flawed choices and clearly unrelated to freshness.
I've encountered 3 sites in maybe 5 years - they all wanted me to install the Silverlight plugin, needless to say there was no chance of that happening and whatever effort was expended on those sites was thus completely wasted. With the decline of IE, this situation was only likely to get worse, assuming it could actually get any worse. Silverlight may still have some kind of future within corporate networks but on the pubic internet it died a long time ago, in fact it was still born.
I recently recommended an organisation not to use Silverlight but choose Flash for a non too complicated image manipulation\markup system. I hate flash and told them the same, I hate all plugins (for general user usage). But, . . . . given they insist on I.E. 6 support then lesser of two evils IMO so flash wins, see later on HTML 5 \ canvas object. Seems to me a huge number of organisations consider moving from I.E 6 to 7 an upgrade :(
I'm glad Apple said no flash, I don't want an iPad, much happier with a android + Asus transformer but at least they have marketing dosh to say get lost to Adobe and force their hands to use HTML5.
BTW if you must cater for I.E 6/7 forget things like canvas for I.E. solutions, YMMV but anything other than a basic app just dies a death and even does that in an ungraceful manner (try drag n drop). No surprise of course - when complex jQuery manipulations need to be used on I.E. 6,7, another kind of death. I could be kind and say well I.E. 6 is circa 10 years old but it really is a nuisance to cover and unfortunately 7 is no better and in some respects worse.
I do feel sorry for people trying to keep up with MS technology at the moment, seems more volatile than even forking Android ;)
Could share 90% of the code with a wpf windows app. Also worked on the mac which was nice. Was great for rich clients on the web, as it was so much quicker to develop for than web app's. Making apps is expensive, complex web apps are often not fit for purpose as they're too slow so this was quite a nice half way house imho.
.. use Silverlight, including the one I'm working on right now. Microsoft's positioning of SL in the early days as a Flash killer/rich web app platform was wide of the mark., but for LOB there's a lot going for it, the tooling support in Visual Studio/Blend being one, targeting IE6 clients (always an issue in the Enterprise) is another.
HTML5 will have it's day for LOB apps, as will the next big thing after that, when the tools and the client base support it. So don't kill it just yet, not until win8 and it's XAMLyness comes out.
FFS can these people pull their heads out of their rears long enough to make up their minds and give people like me(Devs) the chance to make them money?
Do these morons have any idea how long it takes to master a platform sufficiently so that *I* can make money with it? No... talk-out-your-ass mastery doesn't take long at all but REAL mastery that can be used to deliver a product in a way that makes a developer money DOES take time. And after I make that money I want the platform to last long enough so I can justify the investment.
Apple is just blowing Microsoft away in the key area that MS dominated for so long...developer tools and platforms.
I doubt MS will be killing off Silverlight any time soon - the new "Power View" data visualisation tool in the yet-to-be-released SQL Server 2012 is built on Silverlight and this is a new show piece feature that is bound to be supported for at least a couple of iterations of SQL Server.
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