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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass.

I can't imagine spending so much time and effort learning how to use a framework only to have it discontinued in it's infancy. Silverlight dying was a good thing and ultimately it's a win for everybody as HTML is more open, but still - I feel for the devs out there who waste their time.

Edit: On the plus it does use HTML and JS, instead of something much more closed. :)

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>I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass.

Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality.

The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been 'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or something that tries to make HTML palatable.

A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.

It's better than that - WPF and Silverlight skills are directly transferrable to Windows Phone and Windows RT. Yes, there are differences, limitations and in some cases more complete features, but the jump is negligible, with a herd of good resources on MSDN, StackOverflow and so on.

It's better than that. I find WPF to be the most flexible/powerful UI toolkit I've ever worked with (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft). If you ignore anything more complex than Canvas, Label, Rectangle, Image, you can cook up anything you want fairly easily (e.g. a tablet-based programming environment, a live programming editor), and actually have it look nice.

> I don't know why you were voted down.

Probably because they had to go out of their way to describe them as M$. Googl€, App£e and ¥ahoo work just as well, but are never used.

> I don't know why you were voted down.

Because even if he was right, using the "M$" abbreviation is bad form when other people are trying to have meaningful conversations.

Don't blame Microsoft for the death of Silverlight, blame Apple. After the iPhone's release it didn't have a future. Is there a company that better supports its old technologies than Microsoft?

> I don't know why you were voted down.

Possibly because access is a lousy example being hat it remains after 20+ years.

Silverlight would have been a much better example.

Lets not forget how they treated those that invested in Performance Point Server, most found out about its killing off via articles in the mainstream media!

Don't be unfair. Microsoft still uses Silverlight. If, for instance, you go for the "Learn More" link, you'll be greeted by a "Silverlight required" block.

and you could have used your skills to create xaml applications..

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