3 ms·

Remember xna? How about Silverlight? Where is Windows Phone? You see, they don't have the courage to admit defeat. Just let it die and pretend it never existed

Remember xna? How about Silverlight? Where is Windows Phone? You see, they don't have the courage to admit defeat. Just let it die and pretend it never existed.

coldtea 7y ago
>How about Silverlight? Where is Windows Phone? Those never got any traction to begin with. If people aren't using it, they wont miss it.
- panpanna 7y ago
  Actually, they were fairly popular since they were the only viable option on certain platforms. Guess what happened to those platforms?
- ptx 7y ago
  People certainly did use it and are now suffering the consequences. The admin GUI for one popular CRM system is written in Silverlight – a natural choice since the rest of the system uses Win32, COM, .NET and pretty much every Microsoft technology you can think of from the past 25 years. Their new from-scratch rewrite is based on Python and web standards.
pjmlp 7y ago
Yes, two victims of the WinDev vs DevTools internal wars pushed by Synfosky, with such a result that he ended up resigning. UWP was the fix to WinRT and UAP changes introduced by Sinosfky's team. Again, UWP is not only for Windows Phone, all Windows 10 new APIs are UWP based, there isn't any Win32 version of them. People are able to keep using their legacy skills to write new apps, because Microsoft seldom plays an Apple move, killing any possibility to keep using legacy stacks on modern OSes. If you miss XNA you can go use MonoGame, which Microsoft even advises on MSDN nowadays. And Blazor for Silverlight like use cases.
- panpanna 7y ago
  Do you realize what you just shrugged of more or less killed Windows phone??? When WP needed 3rd party games to have a chance in the consumer market Microsoft killed their fully functioning and very popular xna platform without explanation. For a while there was no replacement and the standard response from Microsoft was silence. Later Microsoft pointed to mono as a replacement. At that time, mono was slow, buggy and incomplete. In fact, for a long time mono was missing the asset pipeline tools. According to their official tutorials you had to dig up an old copy of xna and use their asset tools.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I still own two devices, yes Microsoft failed to capture the market, even though they managed to achieve around 10% in Europe. UWP was never about Windows Phone only, rather Windows Phone, HoloLens, XBox ONE, 2-1 devices and Windows 10 desktops. So Windows Phone failed, plenty of scenarios still available on Windows 10 deployments.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      And the number of companies who care about any of those platforms are vanishingly small. How many companies that still care about the desktop at all are going to invest resources in Windows only frameworks and not something like Electron? How many of those that are writing native Windows apps are going to use UWP instead of Win32?
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Plenty of them across Europe to keep me and other devs busy until retirement. macOS is largely insignificant in many countries over here outside iOS shops, GNU/Linux hardly matters for consumers, the Web still fails short of many native scenarios and mobile devices are mainly for consumption.
        scarface74 7y ago

Remember xna? How about Silverlight? Where is Windows Phone? You see, they don't have the courage to admit defeat. Just let it die and pretend it never existed.

coldtea 7y ago

>How about Silverlight? Where is Windows Phone? Those never got any traction to begin with. If people aren't using it, they wont miss it.

panpanna 7y ago
Actually, they were fairly popular since they were the only viable option on certain platforms. Guess what happened to those platforms?
ptx 7y ago
People certainly did use it and are now suffering the consequences. The admin GUI for one popular CRM system is written in Silverlight – a natural choice since the rest of the system uses Win32, COM, .NET and pretty much every Microsoft technology you can think of from the past 25 years. Their new from-scratch rewrite is based on Python and web standards.

pjmlp 7y ago

Yes, two victims of the WinDev vs DevTools internal wars pushed by Synfosky, with such a result that he ended up resigning. UWP was the fix to WinRT and UAP changes introduced by Sinosfky's team. Again, UWP is not only for Windows Phone, all Windows 10 new APIs are UWP based, there isn't any Win32 version of them. People are able to keep using their legacy skills to write new apps, because Microsoft seldom plays an Apple move, killing any possibility to keep using legacy stacks on modern OSes. If you miss XNA you can go use MonoGame, which Microsoft even advises on MSDN nowadays. And Blazor for Silverlight like use cases.

panpanna 7y ago
Do you realize what you just shrugged of more or less killed Windows phone??? When WP needed 3rd party games to have a chance in the consumer market Microsoft killed their fully functioning and very popular xna platform without explanation. For a while there was no replacement and the standard response from Microsoft was silence. Later Microsoft pointed to mono as a replacement. At that time, mono was slow, buggy and incomplete. In fact, for a long time mono was missing the asset pipeline tools. According to their official tutorials you had to dig up an old copy of xna and use their asset tools.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I still own two devices, yes Microsoft failed to capture the market, even though they managed to achieve around 10% in Europe. UWP was never about Windows Phone only, rather Windows Phone, HoloLens, XBox ONE, 2-1 devices and Windows 10 desktops. So Windows Phone failed, plenty of scenarios still available on Windows 10 deployments.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And the number of companies who care about any of those platforms are vanishingly small. How many companies that still care about the desktop at all are going to invest resources in Windows only frameworks and not something like Electron? How many of those that are writing native Windows apps are going to use UWP instead of Win32?
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Plenty of them across Europe to keep me and other devs busy until retirement. macOS is largely insignificant in many countries over here outside iOS shops, GNU/Linux hardly matters for consumers, the Web still fails short of many native scenarios and mobile devices are mainly for consumption.
      - scarface74 7y ago