7 ms·

OpenSilver is a modern, plugin-free, open-source reimplementation of Silverlight

84 points by LyalinDotCom 6y ago

ancarda 6y ago
But why? Re-creating Flash makes sense to me because of the sheer amount of content, but the only thing I can think of that used Silverlight was Netflix ... years ago. Is Silverlight really a game changer such that it's worth bringing back from the dead?
- angrygoat 6y ago
  I remember installing it to watch the Feynman lectures, but it looks like Microsoft have made them available without Silverlight now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva-richard-feynman/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva-richar...
- jack1243star 6y ago
  Well Silverlight did have the best official avatar of any Microsoft product, Hikaru Aizawa[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_Aizawa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_Aizawa
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  I recently installed some industrial software that still uses Silverlight. I only needed some header files and promptly removed the foul beast.
- thelazydogsback 6y ago
  I think Silverlight could have been more of a thing if MS handled their UI story better -- WPF/Silverlight was great to develop for and it did solve some problems. I remember that Windows Phone (which also was pretty good) didn't run Silverlight sites -- I always thought that was the weirdest choice, because if it did it would have provided a great mobile experience for it's time.
  - JamesNK 6y ago
    The future of Silverlight and Flash died when mobile phones rejected browser plugins. No amount of good choices from MS/Adobe would change that.
    - zoomablemind 6y ago
      Wasn't that the HTML5 which predicated the Flash video demise? Not sure if it affected Silverlight to the same extent. Yet, the other day I saw another Flash update pop up on Win 10 laptop in Edge. I don't even know why it's still needed.... What a strange ritual (now it's pushidng McAfee along). Edit: FYI, quoting from the Wired, 2017: Adobe itself acknowledged the transition [from Flash over to HTML5], though a bit less bluntly: “As open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web.” https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/ https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/
    - ShhhDontTell 6y ago
      They were dying before that. Open web standards were a big thing for anyone doing front-end dev then. iphone not supporting flash was just another nail in the coffin... turned out to be a big nail.
- fortran77 6y ago
  They really should have positioned Silverlight as a portable .net environment that runs everywhere, and not as a "flash substitute". I liked it.
storedbox 6y ago
> Modern ... Silverlight No. Just, no.
- ShhhDontTell 6y ago
  Agreed. The pain those plugins caused will never be forgotten, even if the current solution is not a plugin but WebASM. DIE JUST DIE.
downerending 6y ago
May we also have modern reimplementations of Bob and CORBA?
tombert 6y ago
Maybe someone here can explain it better to me; why was silverlight a thing? Flash had its problems, but why would anyone instead use another proprietary system that works on fewer platforms?
- thawaway1837 6y ago
  Because there was no open source alternative, the web was a terrible app platform (and frankly it’s still not as good as Silverlight was a decade ago). In an alternative universe where Silverlight, instead of Flash, had become the de facto standard before the iPhone, I suspect we would likely have moved onto something like OpenSilver instead of HTML5 as the backbone for web applications. Flash was designed for tiny animations and somehow became an application platform. Sikverlight was actually designed as an application platform and it showed, in how much better it was.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    I totally agree. I’ve been mainly using the Silverlight-based SDK that powered Windows Phone, and the easiness to made an app with is still unmatched. The ability to make reusable components, complex layout (grids) and design without CSS enabled real productivity. Sure the web now got most of those things, a decade later...
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > why was silverlight a thing? 2005 was a strange place.
  - dhosek 6y ago
    2020 is stranger.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    Sometime after Win8 release it was suddenly the recommended desktop dev platform. Until it wasn’t a while later and UWP came along.
- 6y ago
tluyben2 6y ago
Looks like Framework and Windows only: not so modern.
danShumway 6y ago
Really just a minor side note, but I wanted to say that I was surprised and appreciative to find out that this was rendering real HTML and not just Canvas. http://opensilvershowcase.azurewebsites.net/#/Client_Server http://opensilvershowcase.azurewebsites.net/#/Client_Server Out of the box, the demo is responsive, Ctrl-F search works, zooming in and out of the browser works, my browser scroll settings and keyboard shortcuts are supported, I can load custom fonts through browser extensions. It's not perfect -- buttons are just divs, and there are a lot of divs. But I was expecting that this would just be a shim around Canvas designed to preserve a few old projects; I didn't expect the authors to have put the effort in that they did to do this correctly. Getting cross-platform WASM toolkits to render to real HTML has kind of been my personal hill to die on recently, so it's just a pleasant, happy surprise to load up a cross-platform app and not immediately get a bunch of errors about how I need to enable WebGL to look at it. If OP or anyone else around had anything to do with the project itself, I just wanted to say that I noticed, and thank you for your care and attention to that detail.
- geoffreymcgill 6y ago
  OpenSilver is built with C# compiled to run on the web using https://bridge.net https://bridge.net
- soperj 6y ago
  Just curious, does anyone know of anything like this but for flash?
- buu700 6y ago
  Slightly off-topic, but your name is a funny coincidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)
  - danShumway 6y ago
    :) I know, right? If you want to go a step deeper, Flash was one of the original things that got me into programming, I currently do web programming, and I found Mozilla's project looking for that specific thing -- a Flash emulator. I've thought about trying to be cute and petitioning them to let me take the name on a fork, but I don't really have any knowledge about writing emulators, so I unfortunately don't think I would be a particularly good steward or would have much to add to the project. And I guess efforts like Mame have come farther with Flash emulation since then anyway, though I haven't checked in a while.
sergiotapia 6y ago
God I miss the WPF/Silverlight/Windows Phone era. It was peak developer UX and brought fresh ideas to the table. Now mobile is all drab flatness. Zero personality. If you have the creative choices for your apps, please make them have some balls again! Go for it!
- miffy900 6y ago
  This seems like a weird thing to say, considering Windows Phone (specifically v8) introduced the whole flat-design thing.
- thelazydogsback 6y ago
  Yes, I would have much preferred C#+Silverlight for the FE code I just dealt with to the mess of React crap I did recently. The WPF apps I did at the time were just fantastic looking and gave me time to work on lots of great features.
cosmotic 6y ago
What does "modern" mean?
happyweasel 6y ago
There was this demo written in Silverlight that would basically show the complete Windows Vista Desktop UX, implemented in Silverlight, with calculator, explorer, media player.. anyone remember that one? It also ran in firefox.. I think it was made in slovenia, or so? Can't find it anymore, not even a video of it.. Update: here is an old link: https://savas.me/2007/02/01/amazing-demonstration-of-what-is-possible-with-wpfe/ https://savas.me/2007/02/01/amazing-demonstration-of-what-is...
- nopewrong 6y ago
  I remember this. This was actually demo for WPF/E (WPF everywhere - but more like the browser tab became the window host rather than any cross platform tech) which came well before Silverlight was released/planned. Hosted in browser WPF - it was the full WPF essentially. It was basically a binary plugin for IE8 (I think it was 8) and certain Firefox on Windows only (had to have .Net 3.5x SDK for WPF too), that used some nasty signed ClickOnce shit to run xbap apps. It was horrid. Silverlight started from scratch if I remember correctly and didn't even have <TextBox/> or similar until v2 or 3, by the time Silverlight was up to building LOB apps it was already dead in the water - HTML/JS frameworks were more popular, iPad had already said no to Flash/Siverlight, .Net was stalling (IronPython/IronRuby killed around same time)..
jeffwilcox 6y ago
As a former engineer on the Silverlight team, this is enjoyably fun...
dang 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527481 The cutoff for reposts is a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

84 points by LyalinDotCom 6y ago

But why? Re-creating Flash makes sense to me because of the sheer amount of content, but the only thing I can think of that used Silverlight was Netflix ... years ago. Is Silverlight really a game changer such that it's worth bringing back from the dead?

angrygoat 6y ago
I remember installing it to watch the Feynman lectures, but it looks like Microsoft have made them available without Silverlight now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva-richard-feynman/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva-richar...
jack1243star 6y ago
Well Silverlight did have the best official avatar of any Microsoft product, Hikaru Aizawa[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_Aizawa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_Aizawa
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
I recently installed some industrial software that still uses Silverlight. I only needed some header files and promptly removed the foul beast.
thelazydogsback 6y ago
I think Silverlight could have been more of a thing if MS handled their UI story better -- WPF/Silverlight was great to develop for and it did solve some problems. I remember that Windows Phone (which also was pretty good) didn't run Silverlight sites -- I always thought that was the weirdest choice, because if it did it would have provided a great mobile experience for it's time.
- JamesNK 6y ago
  The future of Silverlight and Flash died when mobile phones rejected browser plugins. No amount of good choices from MS/Adobe would change that.
  - zoomablemind 6y ago
    Wasn't that the HTML5 which predicated the Flash video demise? Not sure if it affected Silverlight to the same extent. Yet, the other day I saw another Flash update pop up on Win 10 laptop in Edge. I don't even know why it's still needed.... What a strange ritual (now it's pushidng McAfee along). Edit: FYI, quoting from the Wired, 2017: Adobe itself acknowledged the transition [from Flash over to HTML5], though a bit less bluntly: “As open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web.” https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/ https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/
  - ShhhDontTell 6y ago
    They were dying before that. Open web standards were a big thing for anyone doing front-end dev then. iphone not supporting flash was just another nail in the coffin... turned out to be a big nail.
fortran77 6y ago
They really should have positioned Silverlight as a portable .net environment that runs everywhere, and not as a "flash substitute". I liked it.

storedbox 6y ago

> Modern ... Silverlight No. Just, no.

ShhhDontTell 6y ago
Agreed. The pain those plugins caused will never be forgotten, even if the current solution is not a plugin but WebASM. DIE JUST DIE.

downerending 6y ago

May we also have modern reimplementations of Bob and CORBA?

tombert 6y ago

Maybe someone here can explain it better to me; why was silverlight a thing? Flash had its problems, but why would anyone instead use another proprietary system that works on fewer platforms?

thawaway1837 6y ago
Because there was no open source alternative, the web was a terrible app platform (and frankly it’s still not as good as Silverlight was a decade ago). In an alternative universe where Silverlight, instead of Flash, had become the de facto standard before the iPhone, I suspect we would likely have moved onto something like OpenSilver instead of HTML5 as the backbone for web applications. Flash was designed for tiny animations and somehow became an application platform. Sikverlight was actually designed as an application platform and it showed, in how much better it was.
- tasogare 6y ago
  I totally agree. I’ve been mainly using the Silverlight-based SDK that powered Windows Phone, and the easiness to made an app with is still unmatched. The ability to make reusable components, complex layout (grids) and design without CSS enabled real productivity. Sure the web now got most of those things, a decade later...
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> why was silverlight a thing? 2005 was a strange place.
- dhosek 6y ago
  2020 is stranger.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  Sometime after Win8 release it was suddenly the recommended desktop dev platform. Until it wasn’t a while later and UWP came along.
6y ago

tluyben2 6y ago

Looks like Framework and Windows only: not so modern.

danShumway 6y ago

Really just a minor side note, but I wanted to say that I was surprised and appreciative to find out that this was rendering real HTML and not just Canvas. http://opensilvershowcase.azurewebsites.net/#/Client_Server http://opensilvershowcase.azurewebsites.net/#/Client_Server Out of the box, the demo is responsive, Ctrl-F search works, zooming in and out of the browser works, my browser scroll settings and keyboard shortcuts are supported, I can load custom fonts through browser extensions. It's not perfect -- buttons are just divs, and there are a lot of divs. But I was expecting that this would just be a shim around Canvas designed to preserve a few old projects; I didn't expect the authors to have put the effort in that they did to do this correctly. Getting cross-platform WASM toolkits to render to real HTML has kind of been my personal hill to die on recently, so it's just a pleasant, happy surprise to load up a cross-platform app and not immediately get a bunch of errors about how I need to enable WebGL to look at it. If OP or anyone else around had anything to do with the project itself, I just wanted to say that I noticed, and thank you for your care and attention to that detail.

geoffreymcgill 6y ago
OpenSilver is built with C# compiled to run on the web using https://bridge.net https://bridge.net
soperj 6y ago
Just curious, does anyone know of anything like this but for flash?
buu700 6y ago
Slightly off-topic, but your name is a funny coincidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumway_(software)
- danShumway 6y ago
  :) I know, right? If you want to go a step deeper, Flash was one of the original things that got me into programming, I currently do web programming, and I found Mozilla's project looking for that specific thing -- a Flash emulator. I've thought about trying to be cute and petitioning them to let me take the name on a fork, but I don't really have any knowledge about writing emulators, so I unfortunately don't think I would be a particularly good steward or would have much to add to the project. And I guess efforts like Mame have come farther with Flash emulation since then anyway, though I haven't checked in a while.

sergiotapia 6y ago

God I miss the WPF/Silverlight/Windows Phone era. It was peak developer UX and brought fresh ideas to the table. Now mobile is all drab flatness. Zero personality. If you have the creative choices for your apps, please make them have some balls again! Go for it!

miffy900 6y ago
This seems like a weird thing to say, considering Windows Phone (specifically v8) introduced the whole flat-design thing.
thelazydogsback 6y ago
Yes, I would have much preferred C#+Silverlight for the FE code I just dealt with to the mess of React crap I did recently. The WPF apps I did at the time were just fantastic looking and gave me time to work on lots of great features.

cosmotic 6y ago

What does "modern" mean?

happyweasel 6y ago

There was this demo written in Silverlight that would basically show the complete Windows Vista Desktop UX, implemented in Silverlight, with calculator, explorer, media player.. anyone remember that one? It also ran in firefox.. I think it was made in slovenia, or so? Can't find it anymore, not even a video of it.. Update: here is an old link: https://savas.me/2007/02/01/amazing-demonstration-of-what-is-possible-with-wpfe/ https://savas.me/2007/02/01/amazing-demonstration-of-what-is...

nopewrong 6y ago
I remember this. This was actually demo for WPF/E (WPF everywhere - but more like the browser tab became the window host rather than any cross platform tech) which came well before Silverlight was released/planned. Hosted in browser WPF - it was the full WPF essentially. It was basically a binary plugin for IE8 (I think it was 8) and certain Firefox on Windows only (had to have .Net 3.5x SDK for WPF too), that used some nasty signed ClickOnce shit to run xbap apps. It was horrid. Silverlight started from scratch if I remember correctly and didn't even have <TextBox/> or similar until v2 or 3, by the time Silverlight was up to building LOB apps it was already dead in the water - HTML/JS frameworks were more popular, iPad had already said no to Flash/Siverlight, .Net was stalling (IronPython/IronRuby killed around same time)..

jeffwilcox 6y ago

As a former engineer on the Silverlight team, this is enjoyably fun...

dang 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527481 The cutoff for reposts is a year or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html