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I think I'm on record pretty well for not being anti-MS, but let me play devil's advocate and tell you what really is happening ;-)

I'm going to phrase everything as fact, although purely speculation (an old parlor game, if you will). I have no insider knowledge.

* On the server it will stay .NET. I'll grant you that.

* On the client MS only supports HTML for the tile UI. Launching any other apps opens it in the explorer shell.

* Why? Windows doesn't believe in .NET.

* Why did MS push .NET on the client as recently as a couple of week ago? Because MS is not a monolith. Windows wants IE to be the rendering engine for Windows, while the dev tools group is pushing SL.

* Sinofsky is winning the internal battle. He owns Windows and what Windows ships. VS/CLR can ship new versions of the CLR, but they can't control what Sinofsky/Windows does.

* Ballmer doesn't have the internal power to face off against Sinofsky, but he can throttle STB.

* Everyone thought Muglia got ousted because of Cloud. That was just a part of it. It was because he didn't get inline with the HTML message. He tried to cause a ruckus by getting the message out there, but was shutdown. Everyone in STB now knows to keep their mouth shut.

* Guthrie was told that he's a shining star, but stars won't shine coming from SL. Get over to Azure, and you're still on track for President.

* WP7 uses SL because IE wasn't ready. The SL team took this as their chance to make a big impact and show that SL was indispensible and desired. Good effort, but at the end didn't matter. It will still be replaced.

* MS has no problem killing presentation layers. They killed probably the most popular desktop layer of all time, VB6. They killed WinForms. They let MFC rot slowly with no replacement. WPF was never given much chance to live.

* MS is thinking that iOS took off with Objective-C. A more difficult langauge to learn and with no real dev base prior to 2008. Windows feels that HTML is easier to learn and already has millions of devs. If MS builds a great platform with lots of eyeballs, the devs will show up.

Microsoft should kill unsuccessful tools; internal competition is not bad, but actually good.

WPF is an abomination that was bred to torture developers - basically the Java EE of the UI world.

Also, if you ask iOS devs, they'll tell you that it's the best platform for developers, ever - the UI layer has stylish widgets that work out-of-the-box, they can share code with OS X projects in C/C++, they get to use Cocoa, XCode and the development environment is a real Unix.

And I'm also going to mention Android - while not as stylish as iOS, the development model is so close to web apps it's actually beautiful. Also the dev tools, since they leverage Java, work on ANY OS.

Also, lots of devs create Javascript/HTML UIs (served from WebViews) on both platforms, while there's special glue that accesses low-level functionality.

Microsoft would be mad to ignore this trend. They are already on a serious decline in regards to developer mind-share and the environment they provide is really closed to the outside world.

Did you know that you can share code between Android and iOS through C++? Both can run C++, both have OpenGL ES. But there's no such thing on WinMo 7, it forces you to use dotNET with Silverlight and Direct3D. That's only one mistake in a whole series of mistakes they've done and I'm wondering how much are their heads stuck up their buts.

  And I'm also going to mention Android - while not as 
  stylish as iOS, the development model is so close to web
  apps it's actually beautiful.

Really? To be quite honest, I found Android's development model to be closer to Silverlight/WPF than true web development. The relation between the XML-based layout language and the Java code behind reminded me much more of the relation between XAML and C# than HTML and Javascript.

I'm not referring to the way UI is described with XML, although as I've mentioned there are people doing UI with HTML/Javascript (see http://www.phonegap.com/ for starters).

Android apps can have multiple entry points, just like web apps by means of URLs. From one app you can jump into another app while opening a specific screen. Android apps have a functional back-button that works by default (as in, the developer doesn't have to do anything to benefit from it). Android apps are very composable as normally they expose APIs that can be used by other apps (the environment encourages it by means of intents, services, broadcast receivers and the multiple entry points I mentioned above). Android apps give the impression of being always on, since you can't rely on an app to stay alive you have to implement life-cycle management (e.g. save the user's data and the app's state as soon as you can).

What I describe above is by no means unique to Android apps (iOS apps are usually as well behaved, or even more so), but Android makes it natural. On the other hand, Android apps in Google's market look like shit but the stock widgets are getting better so hopefully people will stop feeling compelled to color their buttons blue :)

MS has no problem killing presentation layers. They killed probably the most popular desktop layer of all time, VB6. They killed WinForms. They let MFC rot slowly with no replacement. WPF was never given much chance to live.

I wish I could upvote you more. They also killed foxpro, left Access to languish on the client side. Each of these have plenty of traction and should have continued to exist if not for the fact that MS chases big markets.

Interesting analysis of MS politics. Just curious -- is your information firsthand or through careful analysis of third-party sources?

Mostly analysis of 3rd party sources. I do live in Seattle (most of the time) and literally about half of my friends work at MS. But they're really tight lipped about product plans, and I'm not the type to pry. But some of it is based on past stories I'd heard about the conflict between Windows and the developer division -- and then extrapolating.

So take what I say with a grain of salt, and more just fun conjecture. I'm probably more wrong the right. But until MS gives devs more info, I think it's not an unreasonable set of conjecture.

"The only people who can make that claim are those who don't really know what .NET is."

Since this is about .NET developers supposedly being enraged, I'd guess it's more likely they don't know what HTML5 or JavaScript is -- and perhaps this leads them to assume it's somehow possible to use them as a "complete" application development platform. I don't know, either way I can't believe people are so lacking of reasoning to actually be concerned about this.

I mean even if their worst nightmares came true and this was a sign that .NET is going to get phased out, Jesus Christ, just learn another platform. Carry the .NET experience over to something else, stop cornering your career into a single technology with some delusional idea that it will never become obsolete, and for god's sake stop crying like babies.

He doesn't actually mention any .NET developers getting upset in the article itself.

Well, this part: "If you are a Windows developer, I'll bet you did: there was little to no mention of .NET technology in the Windows 8 hoopla, and quite a few Windows developers are more than a little angry about the whole thing."

The "more than a little angry" part links to: http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/230502/562113.aspx where you actually do see some .NET people raving like lunatics. So I guess I was kind of writing about that in my post.

Just wanted to say that your comments don't really come across as an angry rant, but as a voice of reason. I agree with you completely, and this sort of approach from Microsoft would be quite in line with everything they've done in the past.

My only criticism of your analysis is that HTML5 and JS already are a .NET presentation layer.

I agree, this is sensationalist, factless and pointless reporting.

What's next? Is CSS4 going to replace the JVM?!?

I like .NET/Mono stuff, and I totally understand the frustration of .NET developers.

I would want to point out though that Javascript does have all the features you listed that .NET has, except the desktop stack - but of course that is precisely what Microsoft (and others, like GTK developers) may be developing.

"what .NET is. It is a desktop stack, a server stack, a runtime for many languages, those many languages themselves, and countless libraries that are being actively developed"

Javascript on the server: http://nodejs.org/

Javascript as a runtime for many languages (more than .NET even I believe at this point): https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

Countless javascript libraries: in the browser https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki and on the server: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules

Even .NET code can be ported to javascript via tools like: https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL (as can java via GWT and so forth) Although of course System.Windows.Forms hasn't been ported (wouldn't surprise me if someone does though).

By the way, I do educational software - we like applets and so forth. That was the main drawback to the .NET/Mono platform, from my point of view. When Silverlight was released to run .NET in the browser, that was great, but it only works in Windows, and Monolight doesn't seem to work too well as a replacement on other platforms. Now with HTML5 and canvas, it's even nicer than applets, although a bit slower (can't run a complex circuit simulation as easily, for example), plus it runs on mobile/tablet platforms of course.

The idea that .NET is going to be replaced by HTML5 and JavaScript is absolutely ridiculous.

Ever hear of the Innovator's Dilemma? The high end is always disrupted by the low end. The low end always appears absolutely ridiculous.

I think JavaScript is going to be the number one choice for server-side programming... for web developers who are dipping their toes into back-end code. .NET covers a lot more ground than that. Anyway, even if you decide to use JavaScript on the server side, you need more than a language. You need a platform with libraries and so forth. Solution? JavaScript.NET. If JavaScript becomes a big server-side language on Windows, that's how it will happen.

I'm not going to say I disagree with you, I'm just quite stumped as to why such a large portion of web developers don't like static typing. These days a static language with good type inference honestly gets rid of most of the burden and the ugly verbosity while still giving you compile time checking.

1. HTML5 and JS become another presentation layer for .NET apps.

Anyone else fails to see the benefit of this in terms of architecture quality? The claim is that anyone who knows HTML and JS will be able to develop UI. But the reality is that it will probably be very different from developing web UIs, with it's own APIs, gotchas and hacks you need to know.

Nevertheless it's an enormous step toward unifying desktop apps and web apps. I'm actually shocked that MS would do this. It seems like the first bold, intelligent move they've made in years, assuming they actually have it in them (I'm still skeptical, but perhaps Sinofsky has squared the circle). At a minimum it should commit MS to making HTML5+JS run super fast in IE, which is a huge deal in itself.

Nevertheless it's an enormous step toward unifying desktop apps and web apps.

Is this a good goal, though?

Web used to follow a certain model that worked well and allowed people to develop websites easily. It grew. Then people wanted a more desktop-like experience. This resulted in development of new APIs and extensive use of JavaScript. We're moving farther and farther away from the original model. And now MS is going to reverse the gears, and use web-based tools for desktop development.

Problem is, developing a web application right now it not much simpler than developing a desktop app. Sure, you get the benefits of no deployment, and instant updates, but this will not apply to "desktop" application in HTML anyway.

There are already client-side MVC frameworks in place---sproutcore, backbone, ... Of course Microsoft will try to put "architecture quality" into their framework. Let's just hope we dont see Javascript Desktop Pages like WebForms.

I applaud MS for looking towards the future instead of the tired technologies of today's desktop. I won't knock it until the they have some code samples up.

I think you're right. Also, since C# 4 there's a lot of similarity between C# and JS. That, plus an MVVM framework like KnockoutJS, make it trivial for a Silverlight developer to get started writing solid HTML/JS apps.

I just can't imagine too many Silverlight devs being upset once they see nothing much has really changed.

Sorry, I don't see the similarity. Can you elaborate? Thanks.

They both have brackets and colons. How much more similar can you get!

Joke aside, the first time that I coded in JavaScript I treated it as if it were a dynamically typed Java. Pain and suffering and confusion ensued.

C#: var obj = new { propA = 1 , propB = "meh" };

JavaScript: var obj = { propA: 1 , propB: "meh" };

I admit that's about as close as they get syntactically, but with type inference, higher order functions, and anonymous types they really kind of "feel" similar in some cases. Oh, and C# has optional dynamic typing, so it can ~really~ feel similar if you want.

I think the similarity started more around C# 3 when C#'s syntax was changed to make functional programming less painful.

I agree, the people who disseminate that meme (with good or bad intentions) doesn't have a clue of the work behind .NET.

At the same time I think that creating HTML5 UIs (ala Windows Forms/WPF) within Visual Studio is a killer application by itself.

If .NET has a place in first-class Windows 8 development, why is Microsoft remaining silent about it? Journalists who follow Microsoft, like Mary Jo Foley, have covered the internal strife over .NET. Reportedly, the Windows division just doesn't believe in it for desktop development.

The idea that .NET is going to be replaced by HTML5 and JavaScript is absolutely ridiculous.

VB6 developers probably wouldn't have believed that Microsoft would kill it off either, but they did.