back to article OpenSilver throws Microsoft Silverlight devs a lifeline as end of support looms – or you could forget it ever happened

Microsoft Silverlight, now only supported in the legacy Internet Explorer, goes completely end of life on 12 October – but an open-source project called OpenSilver has appeared to convert Silverlight projects to WebAssembly. Silverlight is a plugin developed by Microsoft in what now seems like an alternative universe, when …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    I am eagerly looking forward to an article in this style concerning Sharepoint.

    But I'm not holding my breath.

    1. JoeCool Bronze badge
      Windows

      First, you need to find someone that thinks sharepoint is "the best" for some practical use

      1. anothercynic Silver badge

        Sadly there are many.

  2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    ...and finally compiling the solution.

    As easy as that? Eh?

    These people talk with other hats on about data testing as being something that cannot be skimped on. Yet here the idea of taking several big black boxes and chucking them into some kind of compiler glosses over this very issue.

    Not unless the workflow includes interspersing every line of code with generic test-points for surfacing testing of the migration as an acknowledgment of the gravity of the problem.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Forgot to mention Amazon and Netflix

    Which M$ strong armed into using silverlight as the core of their DRM enabled video players, then M$hafted them by doing a 180 less than a year later. As a result they had to announce a decade of extended support for the dodo after they abandoned development.

  4. trevorde Silver badge

    Silverlight lives on

    We now have the term 'Silverlighted' or seeing a development product in which they have invested heavily be abandoned by Microsoft

    https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/17/silverlighted.aspx

    1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: 'Silverlighted'

      Reading your informative link reminded me of a word that seems to have disappeared from the developer lexicon: "Portability".

      Cross-platform portability used to be a much-touted requirement for software. Cross-platform in the case of software that relies on browser hosts should, of course, mean cross-browser.

      Arguably the value of an application written targetted at businesses should consist mainly of the data under the bonnet and the way that data is linked together. Presentation is important, of course, to interpret the results, but if data is segregated from the user interface, according to best practice recommendations, then it should be a trivial matter to port from one "platform" to another. It seems that Silverlight devs were guilty of being drawn in by imagining some kind of "Microsoft will look after you with our eco-system" mantra (in reality the E to E mantra), and were severely burned by not abiding by what should be their normal behaviour, to insure against such things happening.

      I wonder how many App developers have written their Win, IOS and Android apps in a portable way? Judging by the caveats I see in many apps marketing blurb, there are many that don't.

      It might be argued that performance might be the reason for tuning software to having direct links between the engine and presentation layers. IIRC SQL was widely advertised as taking this into consideration in its development. The devs of that have generally maintained that if performance is bad, it is your method of querying that needs a re-design, not the engine.

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