It's Official: XNA is dead

I actually can't think of a case as bad as Apple axing the Xserve line and telling people to use mac minis and mac pros in a rack.

Realistically, most EOL'd Microsoft development platforms had been in their period of being officially supported for no less time than it takes an open source platform to go from being the hot new thing to something that's barely worth mentioning on your resume anymore. And Microsoft still offers a lot of continuity - XNA and Silverlight may be dead and WPF might be on the way out. But those C# skills you learn on the old platforms are still usable all over the place, including in Unity (for game developers) and with Xamarin (for mobile). And those XAML skills will still hopefully be useful with WinRT. By contrast, it'll probably be a much bigger deal to switch platforms when Ruby finally becomes passe. For one, it'll take learning a whole new programming language.

Before I get jumped on, I should hasten to say that my intent isn't to criticize any open source for anything. It's to criticize the Microsoft community for developing an attitude of complacency and perhaps even entitlement.

So building products and applications on the flash player these days is quite the gamble.

We have some cool stuff deployed with it (long term service correlation, long running background processes, custom workflows for business processes), but you are right about it being complicated. We're in the financial sector so workflow and process management is king to us.

The API is there for us to not have to do all the legwork. Do you know how complicated it is to produce a workflow engine and do you know how many companies have their own half broken workflow engines?

    System.Workflow.Activities.dll
    System.Workflow.ComponentModel.dll
    System.Workflow.Runtime.dll
    System.WorkflowServices.dll
    Microsoft.Workflow.DebugController.dll
    Microsoft.Workflow.Compiler.exe
    Wfc.exe

I've heard a lot of poeple say "just leave it as 4.0", but we've been there since day one with .Net 1.0 and I'll tell you it's not fun being on the support trailing edge when you have to do a massive port.

For OSS I like for one of three things. Either "too big to fail" (i.e Linux , Rails). Interchangeability , i.e something built on top of an open protocol like an SMTP server. Or something with < ~10KLOC in language I am familiar enough with that I would feel comfortable folding the entire thing into the codebase as a whitebox.

While you can't fork XNA and support it, it's not even remotely tied to the OS. It's a content pipeline and a thin wrapper around DirectX's various components. There's really nothing magical there, and certainly no low-level pieces.

NaCl in Internet Explorer and later in mobile devices would have let them leverage much of their existing code base and developer tools, all with an "industry standard" imprimatur from Google. And where it wasn't supported (i.e., Firefox), you ship a plugin, which is no worse than Silverlight.

2005 - Youtube was created. Adobe purchases Macromedia.

2006 - Kongregate was released. (Semi random example of a popular Flash gaming website.)

2007 - Microsoft releases Silverlight. Netflix starts streaming video online.

2008 - Hulu launches publicly

2010 - Apple releases the iPad, pushing Flash to the side. (Yes, the iPad was released just 3 years ago.)

And if we take into account the fact that Silverlight wasn't built in a day we could probably say that Microsoft started working on Silverlight before Youtube was born, during Flash's heyday, before HTML5 video was even an option, and half a decade before mobile devices started making Flash obsolete.

And let's not forget the fact that Silverlight is an extension of .NET and as a result it was a great competitor to technologies like Java Web Start.

Silverlight was dead on arrival because of the market penetration of Flash and it was killed a little later by tablets and by HTML5 and JS. But back then, for a short period of time, Silverlight made all of the sense in the world.

In the case of Silverlight, I remember thinking to myself about how I would wait on it to see how it fared given the saturation of Flash everywhere else, and see how widespread the adoption was going to be. If I decided to dedicate myself to learning Silverlight I'd be very disappointed.

I said the exact same thing as you are before getting back into native development. "Why should I manage memory myself? Ew!" It was one of the biggest reasons I avoided C++, and I say that knowing C (albeit having left it unused for about six or seven years). Eventually I bit the bullet and jumped back in, and to my utter surprise found it completely easy. C++ is boilerplatey on its best day, but most of the hard problems are solved problems. Like, if you want to treat it like Java or C# (which I've spent much, much more time with), fling boost::shared_ptrs around. If you don't, spend a couple seconds thinking about what you're doing. It really is a non-factor once you get into the swing of things, and while I'm a pretty competent programmer I only started writing real C++ about three months ago and I no longer spend any significant time thinking about it.

C++ gives you sufficient advantages in terms of portability and performance that, if you're writing a game from scratch, you probably want to be using it. If you don't want to be writing C++, you probably want to be using Unity or another engine that bakes in the hard parts (with a corresponding loss of flexibility).