It's a shame it's being ignored by most of the HN community.
That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy?
I don't know many happy Flash developers these days, either.
Adobe's done a pretty good job of sabotaging a good thing.
Maybe they'll make a fully functional JavaScript Flash player to avoid having to use the plug-in in the first place.
Adobe has 0 strategy regarding web development solutions , Flash is dead, coldfusion is dead , Fireworks is dead (a great product for webdesigners), dreamweaver lacks of basic features even a little text editor like sublime text has ... all the edge stuff is a joke.
I wish there would be a serious alternative to photoshop , i wish adobe was just died.
Also I wish that Adobe die in a fire. The only product they ever made that made me happy is the font Source Sans Pro.
Stuff fails in the marketplace - it is a sign of maturity that the company shoots the stuff that isn't working and focuses on the things that are.
Silverlight still works on Windows 8 machines. What do you want them to do? Sue Apple for banning a Silverlight plugin from their tablets and phones?
The actual Silverlight and XAML skills are directly applicable to developing Windows 8 Store apps and Windows Phone apps.
Microsoft can abandon anything that's not core to their survival, and right now that's Windows.
Azure is a key component for integrating your business with Microsoft via Office 365. It isn't going anywhere.
But to your point, Microsoft tends to play "me too" when trying to compete with other technology companies which results in a lot of less-than-polished and sometimes abandoned products and services.
Azure could be a decent server platform, but until Microsoft's intentions for that platform are made more clear, as right now with Ballmer in charge, nothing other than Windows, Windows, Windows is ever a sure thing.
Consider Microsoft's strategy to build the Surface and compete directly with the OEMs they sell through.
It's often hard to tell the difference between being a good friend of Microsoft and their worst enemy.
Here are the intentions from the latest shareholders letter
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar12/shareholder-l...
"Helping businesses move to the cloud is one of our largest opportunities. All the online services people use today — both from Microsoft and other companies — run on servers in datacenters around the globe. The volume of Internet services used will continue to grow as people connect to the Internet from more devices for more purposes — fueling incredible opportunity in our server business. Unique to Microsoft, we continue to design and deliver world-class cloud solutions that allow our customers to move to the cloud on their terms. For example, a company can choose to deploy Office or Microsoft Dynamics on premises, as a cloud service or a combination of both. With Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure and System Center infrastructure, businesses can deploy applications in their own datacenter, a partner's datacenter or in Microsoft's datacenter with common security, management and administration across all environments, with ultimate flexibility and scale. Our business customers tell us these capabilities are critical to harnessing the power of the cloud so they can reach new levels of efficiency and tap new areas of growth."
This is all well and good if you're a company using the Microsoft stack, but it doesn't mean they're as committed to making a platform-agnostic hosting platform like Amazon is with AWS or other big vendors like Rackspace are.
First, Microsoft has three major divisions bringing in somewhat equal amounts of revenue, Windows, Office and Server & Tools.
Second, if you apply the same metric to other companies, it would be foolish to use OS X, Gmail, Docs. App Engine. Android, and perhaps even Azure.
Third, Microsoft could've competed by making a better Zune, perhaps, but it's not the same thing as the iPad killing Silverlight, because that was done by not supporting plugins. Tablets are slowly overtaking PCs in sales, what sense does it make to push new versions of a plugin that will never run on most of them?
The transitions have mostly been smooth, VB apps still run on Windows. Hell, a game bundled with the Windows 95 CD still runs unchanged on a Windows 8 machine.
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe
http://www.johnlamansky.com/blog/the-legend-of-microsoft-hov...
I don't think the same thing can be said for Amazon's AWS or other infrastructure providers like RackSpace where that would be as much as going out of business.
I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't take care of Windows, if anything they support it too much, but anything that's not Windows is just one executive decision away from being shut down.
That and Microsoft's siren song has gotten people into trouble before. Do you know any Silverlight developers that are still happy?
Ironically, Microsoft is usually known to support things for ages, getting a lot of flak in the process.
My only point of contention here is that I won't use a "cross platform" MS technology that hasn't made it to a 3rd release on the non-windows platforms. I do a lot of .Net (ASP/MVC mostly) for server-side code... but never really saw an advantage to Silverlight over Flash/Flex development.
I don't fault MS for shuttering Silverlight... but do think that MS should have made efforts for taking Silverlight projects into desktop applets, since the web stuff is a dead end for non-JS/HTML5.
MS took what seems like ungodly long to release IE10 for Windows 7... a year ago, it was current... now a lot of new focus has been on WebRTC, where IE will again trail the pack. IE also introduced some new inconsistencies with the Metro docking behavior. I do like the IE10 grid system a bit better than what will likely become the blessed spec though.
edit forgot this: startup is www.bemvi.com
It's been very fast and perfectly reliable, also free thanks to BizSpark =)
Deleted comment
"So you basically need to buy windows and visual studio to work with Azure"
Comes with BizSpark (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-4... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500)
"if you are not into windows centered development, Azure is not that interesting ."
You can use their website to set everything up. I did it from my iMac. As a simple test:
http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ <-- this is using their Heroku-like offering. You push to a git endpoint.
http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ <-- this is using a ubuntu VM running in their AWS-like offering.
Both are running the nodejs script:
var http = require('http');
var port = process.env.PORT || 1337;
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
res.end('Stop niggling!\n');
}).listen(port);