3 ms·

I think I'm on record pretty well for not being anti-MS, but let me play devil's advocate and tell you what really is happening ;-) I'm going to phrase everyt

I think I'm on record pretty well for not being anti-MS, but let me play devil's advocate and tell you what really is happening ;-) I'm going to phrase everything as fact, although purely speculation (an old parlor game, if you will). I have no insider knowledge. * On the server it will stay .NET. I'll grant you that. * On the client MS only supports HTML for the tile UI. Launching any other apps opens it in the explorer shell. * Why? Windows doesn't believe in .NET. * Why did MS push .NET on the client as recently as a couple of week ago? Because MS is not a monolith. Windows wants IE to be the rendering engine for Windows, while the dev tools group is pushing SL. * Sinofsky is winning the internal battle. He owns Windows and what Windows ships. VS/CLR can ship new versions of the CLR, but they can't control what Sinofsky/Windows does. * Ballmer doesn't have the internal power to face off against Sinofsky, but he can throttle STB. * Everyone thought Muglia got ousted because of Cloud. That was just a part of it. It was because he didn't get inline with the HTML message. He tried to cause a ruckus by getting the message out there, but was shutdown. Everyone in STB now knows to keep their mouth shut. * Guthrie was told that he's a shining star, but stars won't shine coming from SL. Get over to Azure, and you're still on track for President. * WP7 uses SL because IE wasn't ready. The SL team took this as their chance to make a big impact and show that SL was indispensible and desired. Good effort, but at the end didn't matter. It will still be replaced. * MS has no problem killing presentation layers. They killed probably the most popular desktop layer of all time, VB6. They killed WinForms. They let MFC rot slowly with no replacement. WPF was never given much chance to live. * MS is thinking that iOS took off with Objective-C. A more difficult langauge to learn and with no real dev base prior to 2008. Windows feels that HTML is easier to learn and already has millions of devs. If MS builds a great platform with lots of eyeballs, the devs will show up.

yid 15y ago
Interesting analysis of MS politics. Just curious -- is your information firsthand or through careful analysis of third-party sources?
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Mostly analysis of 3rd party sources. I do live in Seattle (most of the time) and literally about half of my friends work at MS. But they're really tight lipped about product plans, and I'm not the type to pry. But some of it is based on past stories I'd heard about the conflict between Windows and the developer division -- and then extrapolating. So take what I say with a grain of salt, and more just fun conjecture. I'm probably more wrong the right. But until MS gives devs more info, I think it's not an unreasonable set of conjecture.
bad_user 15y ago
Microsoft should kill unsuccessful tools; internal competition is not bad, but actually good. WPF is an abomination that was bred to torture developers - basically the Java EE of the UI world. Also, if you ask iOS devs, they'll tell you that it's the best platform for developers, ever - the UI layer has stylish widgets that work out-of-the-box, they can share code with OS X projects in C/C++, they get to use Cocoa, XCode and the development environment is a real Unix. And I'm also going to mention Android - while not as stylish as iOS, the development model is so close to web apps it's actually beautiful. Also the dev tools, since they leverage Java, work on ANY OS. Also, lots of devs create Javascript/HTML UIs (served from WebViews) on both platforms, while there's special glue that accesses low-level functionality. Microsoft would be mad to ignore this trend. They are already on a serious decline in regards to developer mind-share and the environment they provide is really closed to the outside world. Did you know that you can share code between Android and iOS through C++? Both can run C++, both have OpenGL ES. But there's no such thing on WinMo 7, it forces you to use dotNET with Silverlight and Direct3D. That's only one mistake in a whole series of mistakes they've done and I'm wondering how much are their heads stuck up their buts.
- quanticle 15y ago
  And I'm also going to mention Android - while not as stylish as iOS, the development model is so close to web apps it's actually beautiful. Really? To be quite honest, I found Android's development model to be closer to Silverlight/WPF than true web development. The relation between the XML-based layout language and the Java code behind reminded me much more of the relation between XAML and C# than HTML and Javascript.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    I'm not referring to the way UI is described with XML, although as I've mentioned there are people doing UI with HTML/Javascript (see http://www.phonegap.com/ http://www.phonegap.com/ for starters). Android apps can have multiple entry points, just like web apps by means of URLs. From one app you can jump into another app while opening a specific screen. Android apps have a functional back-button that works by default (as in, the developer doesn't have to do anything to benefit from it). Android apps are very composable as normally they expose APIs that can be used by other apps (the environment encourages it by means of intents, services, broadcast receivers and the multiple entry points I mentioned above). Android apps give the impression of being always on, since you can't rely on an app to stay alive you have to implement life-cycle management (e.g. save the user's data and the app's state as soon as you can). What I describe above is by no means unique to Android apps (iOS apps are usually as well behaved, or even more so), but Android makes it natural. On the other hand, Android apps in Google's market look like shit but the stock widgets are getting better so hopefully people will stop feeling compelled to color their buttons blue :)
teyc 15y ago
MS has no problem killing presentation layers. They killed probably the most popular desktop layer of all time, VB6. They killed WinForms. They let MFC rot slowly with no replacement. WPF was never given much chance to live. I wish I could upvote you more. They also killed foxpro, left Access to languish on the client side. Each of these have plenty of traction and should have continued to exist if not for the fact that MS chases big markets.

yid 15y ago

Interesting analysis of MS politics. Just curious -- is your information firsthand or through careful analysis of third-party sources?

kenjackson 15y ago
Mostly analysis of 3rd party sources. I do live in Seattle (most of the time) and literally about half of my friends work at MS. But they're really tight lipped about product plans, and I'm not the type to pry. But some of it is based on past stories I'd heard about the conflict between Windows and the developer division -- and then extrapolating. So take what I say with a grain of salt, and more just fun conjecture. I'm probably more wrong the right. But until MS gives devs more info, I think it's not an unreasonable set of conjecture.

bad_user 15y ago

Microsoft should kill unsuccessful tools; internal competition is not bad, but actually good. WPF is an abomination that was bred to torture developers - basically the Java EE of the UI world. Also, if you ask iOS devs, they'll tell you that it's the best platform for developers, ever - the UI layer has stylish widgets that work out-of-the-box, they can share code with OS X projects in C/C++, they get to use Cocoa, XCode and the development environment is a real Unix. And I'm also going to mention Android - while not as stylish as iOS, the development model is so close to web apps it's actually beautiful. Also the dev tools, since they leverage Java, work on ANY OS. Also, lots of devs create Javascript/HTML UIs (served from WebViews) on both platforms, while there's special glue that accesses low-level functionality. Microsoft would be mad to ignore this trend. They are already on a serious decline in regards to developer mind-share and the environment they provide is really closed to the outside world. Did you know that you can share code between Android and iOS through C++? Both can run C++, both have OpenGL ES. But there's no such thing on WinMo 7, it forces you to use dotNET with Silverlight and Direct3D. That's only one mistake in a whole series of mistakes they've done and I'm wondering how much are their heads stuck up their buts.

quanticle 15y ago
And I'm also going to mention Android - while not as stylish as iOS, the development model is so close to web apps it's actually beautiful. Really? To be quite honest, I found Android's development model to be closer to Silverlight/WPF than true web development. The relation between the XML-based layout language and the Java code behind reminded me much more of the relation between XAML and C# than HTML and Javascript.
- bad_user 15y ago
  I'm not referring to the way UI is described with XML, although as I've mentioned there are people doing UI with HTML/Javascript (see http://www.phonegap.com/ http://www.phonegap.com/ for starters). Android apps can have multiple entry points, just like web apps by means of URLs. From one app you can jump into another app while opening a specific screen. Android apps have a functional back-button that works by default (as in, the developer doesn't have to do anything to benefit from it). Android apps are very composable as normally they expose APIs that can be used by other apps (the environment encourages it by means of intents, services, broadcast receivers and the multiple entry points I mentioned above). Android apps give the impression of being always on, since you can't rely on an app to stay alive you have to implement life-cycle management (e.g. save the user's data and the app's state as soon as you can). What I describe above is by no means unique to Android apps (iOS apps are usually as well behaved, or even more so), but Android makes it natural. On the other hand, Android apps in Google's market look like shit but the stock widgets are getting better so hopefully people will stop feeling compelled to color their buttons blue :)

teyc 15y ago

MS has no problem killing presentation layers. They killed probably the most popular desktop layer of all time, VB6. They killed WinForms. They let MFC rot slowly with no replacement. WPF was never given much chance to live. I wish I could upvote you more. They also killed foxpro, left Access to languish on the client side. Each of these have plenty of traction and should have continued to exist if not for the fact that MS chases big markets.