Microsoft releases Silverlight 5 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft releases Silverlight 5

zdnet.com

27 pointstilt15 comments

"3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives."

Is this the type of thing they said was a security problem with WebGL? What have they done to mitigate the security risks they raised themselves with WebGL?

Haha Busted, I remember that. But now that Silverlight is in shutdown mode and they declared HTML5 as the winner of the thin-client battle I guess it wouldn't matter to include in the release anyway. I don't work with any Windows stack anymore but IMHO I found all the .NET 3.0 a big failure from the version number to WWF, WPF and WPF/E.

The concerns that have been raised around security in WebGL are 99% centered around shaders, which have been available in a limited form (just pixel/fragment shaders) in SL for a while now, as image filters. It's been a fairly hypocritical argument the whole time, IMO, although I do believe the risks are real (since I've been doing a good bit of WebGL/general 3d security analysis for a while myself).

I thought they gave up on Silverlight. Is this the last hurrah? Or are they not going down without a fight?

What makes you think so? sl4 support until 2013 and sl5 until 2021 sounds like great news for people invested in silverlight. Also despite Maryjo's speculation that sl5 will be IE and windows only, now we know SL5 continues to support the same set of browsers it supported in sl4 on both windows and mac.

"SL5 until 2021" really means "bugfixes and security updates only," of course. The future of the technology is stagnation.

There is still only speculation that this will be the last version. That said, it will most likely fit the bill for a lot of apps in it's current form. If SL5 can give you what you want, I don't see a real problem not to use it to develop your next app. It has the tools now and it's in production now.

If you don't think an app you start writing today will still be being used in 10 years time, you're being short-sighted in my opinion. That kind of attitude is the reason so many companies are still stuck on IE6 (which came out just over ten years ago) due to poorly written intranet apps.

You raise a point which is interesting if there was an official word from microsoft that this will be the last version. Right now this is still only speculation. Anyway, from a pragmatic view point SL5 is available today. A fresh release like this is a good reason to rejoice instead of speculating when the next release will be. Out of curiousity, what alternate are you suggesting that has the same unmatched tooling, documentation and support "today"? Specifically, if the mobile/tablet is not your target and your main audience is desktop on mac/windows and perhaps linux(note: with a small effort you can make your app work on moonlight too).

Edit: note also that with a small effort you can target the new windows 8 marketspace and release it as a metro style app as well.

SL5 would not be supported until 2021 if there was going to be a SL6.

I heard rumors they are shutting down Sliverlight. So this is surprising for me too.

Am I mistaken that what we know as silverlight is built in as a first class API in windows 8 and thus you wont need a plugin anymore to write code for it?

Do you mean a plugin as in the browser? No, you will need a plugin to run Silverlight in IE10 on the deskop, and you cannot use Silverlight (or Flash, or any other plugin) when IE10 is in its tablet-style Metro mode.

The new WinRT API that Windows 8 is built on is very similar to Silverlight/.NET but is not totally compatible so it requires code changes. Most SL programmers will be able to find their way around pretty easily though. The UI guidelines for Metro have changed quite a bit so there are more considerations than just porting code.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br22957...

No mouse/keyboard events: They along with Touch events are unified under Pointer events. For more information, see Touch and mouse input.

I can see that being a PITA. Will have to look through what they've done sooner rather than later I think.

Is Win8 going to be the first hybrid system that people are going to have to write code for?

"Microsoft released to the Web on December 9 Silverlight 5, which could be the last major release of Microsoft’s"

The last major release of microsoft. Does that include IE?

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