Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site

zdnet.com

While Silverlight seems to continue under the umbrella of MSDN, it never took off and basically remained a mere nuisance, so I'm not surprised to see it being "shifted" out as a product.

Silverlight was (implicitly?) positioned to compete with Flash and just like Flash, it was mostly an obscure piece of proprietary technology and mostly just a nuisance. What made Flash matter was video streaming and YouTube: suddenly all those who had been avoiding Flash because of stupid games and stupid Flash advertisements had to get Flash to view videos on YouTube. This never happened on Silverlight to a major extent; it always remained a weird alternative to Flash.

Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead. They will both churn along for years but their supply of momentum is running out.

What practically killed Flash was the highly excretory nature of the Flash codebase. With the huge installation base induced by video streaming the Flash plugin had great opportunities per se but their codebase barely ran on a fast PC, and mobile Flash never materialized for real. First it was slow and when mobile devices got faster, it was a battery hog. So Flash got stuck in remaining the de facto web video player device and that space is slowly eaten out by various HTML5 based video technologies.

I hope we can ditch first Silverlight and then finally Flash in the shortest order of time.

Off on a bit of a tangent here, but has anyone noticed that Google's efforts to HTML5ize Youtube seem to have totally stalled out for desktop browsers? Progress seems to have stopped after deals were announced with adobe over android flash.

It also seems virtually certain Google has the source code the the flashplayer, as it came out relatively quickly for Chrome's PAPI (adobe moves like a snail when it comes to supporting new apis, especially ones where older apis continue to function), and chrome flashplayer appears to receive patches before even the "official" flashplayer releases do.

I wonder if that doesn't somehow factor into the seemingly arbitrary flash requirements on youtube.

> Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead.

Game developers beg to differ

I know.

They can beg. Meanwhile the casual games audience is moving on.

Really?! I haven't noticed it.

Who's playing all the iOS app store games, then?

You know that Flash nowadays also compiles to native code, right?

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WSfffb011ac560372f-5d0...

Yes, and fair point.

Lesson I would get out of this is: developing in Microsoft technologies where they don't already have a strong or dominant position in a market is risky. These days their embrace extend extinguish tactic isn't working so well. What's included in this? Winphone? Surface? Don't really know what else.

Exactly. Other than Netflix, what well-known applications did Silverlight back? None come to mind for me.

There are a lot of private enterprise applications built on it. Its strength was that you could build complex tools relatively quickly. For example, I know of a local company that builds law enforcement software on it. I believe Netflix only uses a small portion of the 'Smooth Streaming' technology in Silverlight.

It ran (past tense) MLB.com's streaming games, but they abandoned it in favor of Flash.

As I recall, recent X Games and Olympics had all their online video content accessible only through Silverlight players also. I remember trying to watch some of these events and being annoyed because the Silverlight player was locking up Firefox.

Also the Feynman lectures on physics. It’s a shame that they went through the effort to put it online only to release it in an inaccessible format. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.HTML

Playboy

It's not just Microsoft. If you tie yourself to proprietary technology on the web, you run the risk of having the carpet pulled out from under you. Sometimes that risk is worth it; most of the time, it is not.

This. I'm a solution architect at a Microsoft gold partner (a loveless job). We are forever getting screwed. We've just managed to get through the windows workflow engine rewrite that appeared in WF4 and deprecated a shit load of stuff still hanging of asp and vb6 which is falling to bits.

This is all changing though.

Shockingly, management are starting to buy the fact that we're getting screwed. We already have 25 Linux machines and a few postgres machines in production. They all run OpenJDK on them and infrastructure items such as memcached, Postgres, couple of MQ solutions. That and we've thrown TFS out, moved to mercurial+JIRA, have Eclipse on more workstations than visual studio and are not renewing our partner package next year.

This is what happens when you treat your customers like shit and force them through costly audits so they can pay you more money for not understanding very ambiguous license terms.

Certainly winphone. They migrated platforms from winmo 6.5 already, although the development ecosystem was tiny for it (part of the reason why it crashed and burned when the iphone came out). Now there's the upcoming switch with winphone 7 to 8, which introduces an entirely new way of doing things, with limited backward compatability.

The funny thing is that MS built their business on comparatively open platforms (closer to the android model), but they've gotten too greedy and out of touch, I think.

I've been a .Net dev for many years and I'm generally optimistic and excited about many Microsoft products but I warned everyone to stay away from Silverlight from day one. I knew that couldn't be the future of the web. I think I can safely thank those years of being Flash developer for that. One day Microsoft will realize they can't 'own' all the technology between the server and your monitor. I do think they're doing a great job embracing open source and web standards these days.

When these kinds of articles come about, I never understand the big deal. The release of the iPhone 5 doesn't suddenly make my iPhone 4s a useless piece of junk. I can continue using it until it dies and I need to replace it. Similarly, if you're doing SL work, your stuff isn't going to suddenly stop working. Your current copy of VS won't magically stop compiling SL code. Continue to use SL if it works for you. SL seemed to only have mild success as an intranet technology, so my suggestion above is valid.

This problem doesn't go away with open source, since projects can die and non-backwards compatible versions can be released. No one is forcing you to convert all your Python 2 code to Python 3

One thing good about Silverlight is that you don't have to use Javascript.

Has anyone here successfully developed a JS app with a quarter million lines of code? And maintained it?

Err.. Gmail.

You're grossly underestimating JavaScript.

With JavaScript its possible to break your code into logical abstractions, either functional or object oriented or a hybrid of the two.

What's stops you from writing maintainable JavaScript apps is perhaps the quality of devs.

Gmail is written in java and compiled to javascript via gwt. Doesn't count.

Gmail's backend is written in Java.

The frontend is written in Javascript, it has nothing to do with GWT.

Sorry, you are incorrect. GWT writing javascript is the whole point.

http://css.dzone.com/news/understanding-gwt-compiler

From the article: "The GWT compiler is really a Java source to JavaScript source translator."

I don't think GWT is being used for gmail.

Gmail is written using the Closure library:

https://developers.google.com/closure/faq#gwt

Seems pretty absurd to think that they'll be actively supporting a product for another decade without putting out any new releases... then again Microsoft and I have never seen eye-to-eye about how to sunset and subsequently retire software.

IIRC, they have a written (or maybe unwritten) rule that they will not drop support right away. It's probably to encourage adoption of Microsoft's standards and software by enterprise. If a major company adopted this and Microsoft gave them a 6 months notice, they'd be pretty upset and less likely to do business with them again.

Silverlight team (or more precisely, Silverlight management) is weak. Was weak from the beginning. Delivered poor product.

As a result - Silverlight failed to get enough traction. Now Silverlight and Silverlight team is getting abandoned by MS.

what about netflix? they are still using silverlight

Let's hope this means they start moving away from it.

Agreed. I've never watched a Netflix program on my laptop because I refuse to install Silverlight. Flash it bad enough, but, for the most part, I have to tolerate it thanks to its huge market presence. Silverlight never had that, and I certainly wasn't going to help make it.

honestly I read this and that was instantly where my hope went. I mean, picking silverlight in the first place was a bad enough decision on netflix' part. Maybe I'm just bitter because I'm on ubuntu though.

To what exactly? The problem is that video steaming services need to toe the line with the studios. They want DRM, so what other options are there to stream DRMed video in a browser? until studios give up on DRM, Flash and Silverlight will stick around

Web developers everywhere break down in tears...

Hip hip...

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