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Comment by vailripper | Hacker News Reader

Because silverlight takes all of 15 seconds to download and install, and Visual F# is an hour+ to install, plus a couple hundred megabytes of additional assets?

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I don't do windows development, and I've never installed any of the Visual <insert proprietary language here> environments, but I cannot believe that Visual F# takes over an hour to install. Is this true?

Much more if you consider the install time of Microsoft Windows.

Complexity. Target achieved.

Well, it's not like the apt-get solution is a whole lot more elegant: http://thecodedecanter.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/installing-m...

That's... not apt-get. Three commands that can be copy and pasted is about 10000x more elegant. In that it works in Linux and Siverlight doesn't.

In most cases Moonlight works just fine for my F# silverlight stuff. You should give it a go.

I guess it's an effect/payoff tradeoff. All the same, it's an annoying reminder of how Silverlight helped in a very small way to tarnish the web for Linux and Mac users.

Silverlight for Mac exists and is updated in line with the Windows version. Works great.

I anticipated "works for me" comments, I have no doubt experiences vary. I've installed Moonlight dozens of times in both Firefox and Chrome. I've used Silverlight on my MBA. I can absolutely say they are second class compared to Windows with Linux being unusable for anything interactive Silverlight and I can say for certain that the Azure portal was often unstable or annoying to deal with in Mac in the pre-HTML5-Azure portal era.

Well, if you're going to dismiss anecdotes, you probably shouldn't provide your own. (OS X Silverlight always seemed to work okay for me, too).

That said, the Azure portal never seemed to work that great for me, even if I was running Silverlight on a Windows box. The HTML5 portal actually seems worse, to me, though.

You might be interested in this, the azure-cli tools: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/12/19/azur...

Sorry, I wasn't trying to dismiss them, I was saying that while Silverlight for Mac works for somethings, it doesn't work for plenty. Further, not a single person in this thread has defended interactive Silverlight in Linux because Moonlight has never been but a joke.

I don't know how you can find the new portal to be worse. That Silverlight portal was one of the single worst thing I've ever used in my life. The HTML5 portal is quite nice, it uses the same endpoints the VS extension uses, giving them a single point of entry for management actions. I'm happy with the management portal now but am already aware of the CLI tools too.

Works perfectly for me on all my 5 Macs. And on windows..

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