4 ms·

Totally fair, anyone in the Microsoft development ecosystem has to learn to be incredibly skeptical of anything new. Anytime I spent on adopting Silverlight was

Totally fair, anyone in the Microsoft development ecosystem has to learn to be incredibly skeptical of anything new. Anytime I spent on adopting Silverlight was essentially wasted. I had one client that had adopted a random WYSIWYG released by Microsoft to design WCF services, when anyone experienced in the ecosystem knew it had abandonware written all over it. Of course, other ecosystems have their own versions of this. But Microsoft might be the only one that essentially controls an entire ecosystem and still manages to give devs whiplash.

qz2 6y ago
Exactly. Yes I interviewed at a company where Silverlight and WCF was the future and they'd just rewritten everything in it. I didn't see it with the way everything was going. I dread to think of what happened to their business when the rug was pulled out overnight. "Microsoft says you need to start funding your entire product to be rewritten from scratch"
- teh_klev 6y ago
  I don't know how long ago you're speaking about, but Silverlight and Flash were at their end of days even back in ~2006. Apple just nailed the coffin shut. That's not Microsoft's fault, there was a sea change in the industry away from browser plugins and these types of platforms. Apropos WCF, well we got JSON and no-one outside of "enterprises" were doing SOAP/WSDL et al any more and it was pretty much done. That's not really a fault of the vendor, the world moved on. At the end of the day, as a software development house you have to make strategic choices, regardless of vendor. And you can still build WCF apps today, sure maybe not in .NET Core, but they'll still be supported for donkeys years by MS, but who'd want to?
  - bruckie 6y ago
    Silverlight wasn't even born until 2007, so it's hard to see how it was dead in 2006. :) Or maybe you're saying it was DOA?
    - teh_klev 6y ago
      > Or maybe you're saying it was DOA? Pretty much. The only time I've ever seen Silverlight apps in the wild were for streaming use (Sky/Now TV for example).
spaetzleesser 6y ago
Very true. I don’t trust anything new MS is putting out. The risk of being abandoned soon is just too high.

qz2 6y ago

Exactly. Yes I interviewed at a company where Silverlight and WCF was the future and they'd just rewritten everything in it. I didn't see it with the way everything was going. I dread to think of what happened to their business when the rug was pulled out overnight. "Microsoft says you need to start funding your entire product to be rewritten from scratch"

teh_klev 6y ago
I don't know how long ago you're speaking about, but Silverlight and Flash were at their end of days even back in ~2006. Apple just nailed the coffin shut. That's not Microsoft's fault, there was a sea change in the industry away from browser plugins and these types of platforms. Apropos WCF, well we got JSON and no-one outside of "enterprises" were doing SOAP/WSDL et al any more and it was pretty much done. That's not really a fault of the vendor, the world moved on. At the end of the day, as a software development house you have to make strategic choices, regardless of vendor. And you can still build WCF apps today, sure maybe not in .NET Core, but they'll still be supported for donkeys years by MS, but who'd want to?
- bruckie 6y ago
  Silverlight wasn't even born until 2007, so it's hard to see how it was dead in 2006. :) Or maybe you're saying it was DOA?
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    > Or maybe you're saying it was DOA? Pretty much. The only time I've ever seen Silverlight apps in the wild were for streaming use (Sky/Now TV for example).

spaetzleesser 6y ago

Very true. I don’t trust anything new MS is putting out. The risk of being abandoned soon is just too high.