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Comment by Meai | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing Microsoft could say to appease .NET developers. Obviously .NET and Silverlight aren't going away, everybody must know that. The only reason people are so mad, is because now they are not the only courted workforce anymore.

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There is probably another reason here. WPF and Silverlight were meant to bring rich beautiful interfaces to Windows. But they did not succeed not because of the technology. The reason is precisely because a majority of the people who are prepared to learn .NET is the old breed of developers who still think in terms of WIMP interfaces. So years after WPF, there are few good looking apps in the wild.

In contrast, the devsigner community in HTML is vibrant and competitive. Just look at how many beautiful SaaS apps there are.

MS needs these people working on their stack and they realize Silverlight and WPF is a hard sell for these people who already have HTML chops. If they could get these devsigners working on Windows, it will present a shot in the arm for better looking UI on Windows again.

Well this is off topic in my opinion, but I think Silverlight simply has worse designer tools than Flash. There isn't anything intrinsically bad about .NET, it just so happens that the tools are nothing a designer would ever put up with. I encourage you to try Blend...defining a few animations is magnitudes more complicated than just drag and dropping stuff into keyframes and then pressing play.

No, as a WPF/Silverlight developer, I think those technologies failed to take off because the development workflow of WPF/Silverlight simply sucks ass. Expression Blend is awful and is incompatible enough with VS that it becomes a nuisance to use.

XAML, WPF and Silverlight were designed by .NET developers for .NET developers, but marketed towards designers. You cannot develop/design in that ecosystem without already knowing C#, VS project and solution files. The workflow was very dev-centric, and that's why I think it failed to take off as MS would like.

Well, the tools may be awful, but designers are not easily persuaded to change their tools. Even today, Photoshop trumps Illustrator in popularity. There is no workflow from PSD to HTML other than a secondary market of slicers. If MS wished to succeed, it had to bring the same familiar workflow into the process.

The workflow was very dev-centric, and that's why I think it failed to take off as MS would like.

Silverlight is irrelevant, has always been, will always be. Maybe it won't completely "go away", but anyone who is betting a farm on it is an idiot that deserves what is coming at him (yes, him, women wouldn't be that stupid).

You're the idiot

For better or worse, Silverlight is still the best way to play back video in the browser. The performance of the Flash video player is simply appalling and HTML5 video playback has its own problems as well (codec issues, buggy implementations although that improved a lot recently.) If you want nice, smooth playback in any browser, on Windows or OS X, you need to use Silverlight. It's not a coincidence that Netflix uses it.

I have to agree though that it doesn't really make sense to use Silverlight for anything else, although Bing Maps is pretty impressive.

Don't forget DRM, too (a la Netflix)

I don't support restrictive DRM, but Netflix does have to bow to their content owners to stay in business

What percentage of users have silverlight installed?

Depends on how you segment. For mobile its just a 1-2% tops (WP7 users). On the desktop I've heard something like 50-60%.

Lets put it this way, there are 500M or so Silverlight enabled desktops. There aren't many things you can target that have such a large user base.

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