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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

People aren't taking much notice of stories like this but I think they should. Because these stories represent something a lot of people have been waiting for.

Namely, we're finally getting to the point where developing Windows only apps is no longer viable.

Even Microsoft essentially knows that now. Silverlight is basically WPF for the web. It's still has limits but MS is obviously trying to get Silverlight up to speed as quickly as possible while WPF (technology which only replaced Windows Forms in the last release) seems to have been all but abandon.

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I disagree, I don't know how much we can learn from these stories. If it was a small company building the technology in question and needed it to work to survive, we may be able to draw a conclusion, but when it's microsoft and its still an early release we cannot draw too much from it.

Sure people are not using it now, in a year or two from now the technology may be better than the Flex/Air paradigm and then we'll have stories about people leaving Flex for silverlight.

As for your other point: "Developing windows only apps is no longer viable" -- I disagree, there is still a huge market for windows only apps, hell the tools to build flex/flash/air really only work on windows.

Other than utility companies (Symantec, Trend Micro, etc...) and a handful of game developers (most have left for Consoles at this point) I don't see anyone targeting Windows specifically.

Again, I don't think Windows is dead or going away I'm simply saying it doesn't make sense to develop an app that's only for Windows anymore.

I mean, ask yourself this. If Silverlight can run in it's own Window (which will be possible as of V3) than why would anyone making a business app using WPF?

So, I think I agree. Business Apps should be either web apps (HTML/JS) or RIA (Flex|Air/Silverlight); I think that's a given nowadays.

what makes you say that WPF has been all but abandoned? the upcoming visual studio 10 release has a WPF based editor.

The fact that there are like...10 books total on it. That the MS people I talk to no longer evangelize it. Or the fact that Microsoft is trying very hard to build Silverlight into a viable competitor as quickly as possible.

Take your pick.

(For the record, I don't think Microsoft will ever actually abandon it completely because they need to have something native. But for 95% of developers WPF just doesn't make sense anymore)

I am not totally convinced that WPF & Silverlight are even in competition with one another. They are both based on the same core technology, XAML. Without knowing what Microsoft's long term plans (presuming they have them) for the two technologies, it's hard to say with any certainty whether or not they intend to converge the two eventually or phase one out in favor of the other.

I am not really sure how great of an indicators book are. All of the "usual suspect" publishers either have books on the topic or are working on them.

What I'm saying is I don't think it matters what Microsoft is going to do. With XNA being the way to write games now and Silverlight V3 looking like it can do everything WPF can (in a (theoretically) multi-platform enviornment to boot) why would anyone choose WPF?

As for books, the fact that there are already dramatically more Silverlight books out there and it came out after WPF I'd say that indicates something.

That's sort of what I was getting at, in other words, you don't really need to make a choice between silverlight and WPF because they are essentially the same thing. Maybe this is just another example in the litany of awful branding mistakes Microsoft has made around .NET?

As far as books go, I'm not surprised that there are more Silverlight books than WPF. Web-centric technology books are in general more popular than desktop-centric books, particularly in the MS universe.

"Namely, we're finally getting to the point where developing Windows only apps is no longer viable."

There's no story here. Both Silverlight and AIR are cross-platform. NYT chose AIR over Silverlight for purely technical reasons that all seem reasonable. Silverlight is not as far along as AIR at this point, simple as that.

The article mentions a bunch of anti-Microsoft comments on the NYT web site, suggesting that 'Microsoft-rejection' led to the migration to AIR. I find that very unlikely.

cross platform does not mean standards-compliant.

What standards does AIR stick to that Silverlight doesn't?

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