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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's IE9 product lead, said - without even saying that it was confidential or not to repeat - 'Silverlight is dead, I give it six months tops' at OnGameStart a couple of months ago. I believe him.

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Just the web plugin. No evidence of it going away on WP7 or Windows 8.

That isn't what I've heard (from people still at Microsoft). Everything points to Silverlight and WPF being frozen because the teams are pretty much broken up at this point.

Also, this is pretty clear as well:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17254070

The branding might be going away, just like the Zune brand, but the core technologies are already part of the Windows 8 SDK.

What core technology - XAML & .NET ? AFAIK WinRT is a rewrite and is not compatible with WPF & Silverlight. Silverlight (cross-platform RIA plugin) seems dead.

Certainly Win8 and Windows Phone are not binary compatible with WPF and Silverlight but if you wander around the portion of msdn dedicated to Metro apps or to phone development and look at the available types and methods from the core runtime up to the presentation layer you can see that the common overlap is very large and that they probably started from the same place.

So the namespaces have changed, but the techniques remain the same. XAML remains the same. I can't imagine anyone expecting their WPF application to compile for a new interface with different metaphors.

Forget silverlight, .net itself has a questionable future on windows client. WinRT went back to C++. .NET is being positioned a server side technology.

It depens on what you consider .NET. The CLR? The .NET metadata schema? C#/VB? The only thing that isn't incredibly important in WinRT is the CLR proper. But the other aspects of .NET play a huge role in WinRT. They even went and largely reimplemented the BCL. And the API design guidelines across the board are .NET based. WinRT looks a million times more like .NET than Win32.

WinRT supports .NET applications.

But to your point, I'd wager that .NET is already used more on the server side than on clients apps as its use in enterprise line-of-business is massive.

WinRT works just fine with .net.

There were updates made to WPF in the recent .NET 4.5 beta that was released at BUILD. Not immense updates, but non-trivial ones either.

Get out your magnifying glass and find Silverlight and .NET on this diagram from Build:

http://blog.discountasp.net/build-conference-developers-have...

With Microsoft diagrams, the importance of the technology is proportional to the size of the box.

Isn't XAML another name for Silverlight and/or WPF?

The XAML/C# stack is called many different things within windows. Silverlight and WPF are just two names for it. Keep in mind though that even things that are branded silverlight (desktop/web apps and wp7 apps) aren't even the same thing. The WP7 API differs heavily from the desktop API. The XAML/C# stack for metro apps is also just a very small subset of the silverlight stack.

Silverlight may very well be going away, but XAML/C# isn't. The only thing that's most likely disappearing is the push for it to be on the web and the name "silverlight" itself.

Sort of. That is, traditionally XAML has been used primarily for Silverlight & WPF applications, but it's actually just a declarative language used for laying out (usually) Silverlight & WPF controls.

It's sort of a combo HTML&CSS. So your statement in that vein would be like "Isn't HTML&CSS just another name for Gecko and/or WebKit?"

That said, even though it looks like XAML may be used for new WinRT-based apps in the Windows Metro stuff, I'd be surprised if it survives the deaths of Silverlight & WPF.

WP7 and 7.1 have just a few apps. Do you think WP8 won't use something like winjs ala Windows 8?

The year before the Silverlight team were saying that WPF is dead and Silverlight is the future.

Good job we all switched to Qt and C++

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