6 ms·

Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site

25 points by aritraghosh007 14y ago

geetarista 14y ago
Hip hip...
aroman 14y ago
Seems pretty absurd to think that they'll be actively supporting a product for another decade without putting out any new releases... then again Microsoft and I have never seen eye-to-eye about how to sunset and subsequently retire software.
- Alaskan005 14y ago
  IIRC, they have a written (or maybe unwritten) rule that they will not drop support right away. It's probably to encourage adoption of Microsoft's standards and software by enterprise. If a major company adopted this and Microsoft gave them a 6 months notice, they'd be pretty upset and less likely to do business with them again.
jamesaguilar 14y ago
Lesson I would get out of this is: developing in Microsoft technologies where they don't already have a strong or dominant position in a market is risky. These days their embrace extend extinguish tactic isn't working so well. What's included in this? Winphone? Surface? Don't really know what else.
- geetarista 14y ago
  Exactly. Other than Netflix, what well-known applications did Silverlight back? None come to mind for me.
  - vyrotek 14y ago
    There are a lot of private enterprise applications built on it. Its strength was that you could build complex tools relatively quickly. For example, I know of a local company that builds law enforcement software on it. I believe Netflix only uses a small portion of the 'Smooth Streaming' technology in Silverlight.
  - kstrauser 14y ago
    It ran (past tense) MLB.com's streaming games, but they abandoned it in favor of Flash.
  - munger 14y ago
    As I recall, recent X Games and Olympics had all their online video content accessible only through Silverlight players also. I remember trying to watch some of these events and being annoyed because the Silverlight player was locking up Firefox.
  - yonran 14y ago
    Also the Feynman lectures on physics. It’s a shame that they went through the effort to put it online only to release it in an inaccessible format. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.HTML http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.HTML
  - Too 14y ago
    Playboy
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  It's not just Microsoft. If you tie yourself to proprietary technology on the web, you run the risk of having the carpet pulled out from under you. Sometimes that risk is worth it; most of the time, it is not.
- meaty 14y ago
  This. I'm a solution architect at a Microsoft gold partner (a loveless job). We are forever getting screwed. We've just managed to get through the windows workflow engine rewrite that appeared in WF4 and deprecated a shit load of stuff still hanging of asp and vb6 which is falling to bits. This is all changing though. Shockingly, management are starting to buy the fact that we're getting screwed. We already have 25 Linux machines and a few postgres machines in production. They all run OpenJDK on them and infrastructure items such as memcached, Postgres, couple of MQ solutions. That and we've thrown TFS out, moved to mercurial+JIRA, have Eclipse on more workstations than visual studio and are not renewing our partner package next year. This is what happens when you treat your customers like shit and force them through costly audits so they can pay you more money for not understanding very ambiguous license terms.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Certainly winphone. They migrated platforms from winmo 6.5 already, although the development ecosystem was tiny for it (part of the reason why it crashed and burned when the iphone came out). Now there's the upcoming switch with winphone 7 to 8, which introduces an entirely new way of doing things, with limited backward compatability. The funny thing is that MS built their business on comparatively open platforms (closer to the android model), but they've gotten too greedy and out of touch, I think.
hyuuu 14y ago
what about netflix? they are still using silverlight
- geetarista 14y ago
  Let's hope this means they start moving away from it.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    Agreed. I've never watched a Netflix program on my laptop because I refuse to install Silverlight. Flash it bad enough, but, for the most part, I have to tolerate it thanks to its huge market presence. Silverlight never had that, and I certainly wasn't going to help make it.
  - LesZedCB 14y ago
    honestly I read this and that was instantly where my hope went. I mean, picking silverlight in the first place was a bad enough decision on netflix' part. Maybe I'm just bitter because I'm on ubuntu though.
  - JonoW 14y ago
    To what exactly? The problem is that video steaming services need to toe the line with the studios. They want DRM, so what other options are there to stream DRMed video in a browser? until studios give up on DRM, Flash and Silverlight will stick around
vyrotek 14y ago
I've been a .Net dev for many years and I'm generally optimistic and excited about many Microsoft products but I warned everyone to stay away from Silverlight from day one. I knew that couldn't be the future of the web. I think I can safely thank those years of being Flash developer for that. One day Microsoft will realize they can't 'own' all the technology between the server and your monitor. I do think they're doing a great job embracing open source and web standards these days.
yason 14y ago
While Silverlight seems to continue under the umbrella of MSDN, it never took off and basically remained a mere nuisance, so I'm not surprised to see it being "shifted" out as a product. Silverlight was (implicitly?) positioned to compete with Flash and just like Flash, it was mostly an obscure piece of proprietary technology and mostly just a nuisance. What made Flash matter was video streaming and YouTube: suddenly all those who had been avoiding Flash because of stupid games and stupid Flash advertisements had to get Flash to view videos on YouTube. This never happened on Silverlight to a major extent; it always remained a weird alternative to Flash. Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead. They will both churn along for years but their supply of momentum is running out. What practically killed Flash was the highly excretory nature of the Flash codebase. With the huge installation base induced by video streaming the Flash plugin had great opportunities per se but their codebase barely ran on a fast PC, and mobile Flash never materialized for real. First it was slow and when mobile devices got faster, it was a battery hog. So Flash got stuck in remaining the de facto web video player device and that space is slowly eaten out by various HTML5 based video technologies. I hope we can ditch first Silverlight and then finally Flash in the shortest order of time.
- throwaway2048 14y ago
  Off on a bit of a tangent here, but has anyone noticed that Google's efforts to HTML5ize Youtube seem to have totally stalled out for desktop browsers? Progress seems to have stopped after deals were announced with adobe over android flash. It also seems virtually certain Google has the source code the the flashplayer, as it came out relatively quickly for Chrome's PAPI (adobe moves like a snail when it comes to supporting new apis, especially ones where older apis continue to function), and chrome flashplayer appears to receive patches before even the "official" flashplayer releases do. I wonder if that doesn't somehow factor into the seemingly arbitrary flash requirements on youtube.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  > Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead. Game developers beg to differ
kackermann 14y ago
One thing good about Silverlight is that you don't have to use Javascript. Has anyone here successfully developed a JS app with a quarter million lines of code? And maintained it?
- factorialboy 14y ago
  Err.. Gmail. You're grossly underestimating JavaScript. With JavaScript its possible to break your code into logical abstractions, either functional or object oriented or a hybrid of the two. What's stops you from writing maintainable JavaScript apps is perhaps the quality of devs.
  - cageface 14y ago
    Gmail is written in java and compiled to javascript via gwt. Doesn't count.
    - vetinari 14y ago
      Gmail's backend is written in Java. The frontend is written in Javascript, it has nothing to do with GWT.
      - evanmoran 14y ago
        Sorry, you are incorrect. GWT writing javascript is the whole point. http://css.dzone.com/news/understanding-gwt-compiler http://css.dzone.com/news/understanding-gwt-compiler From the article: "The GWT compiler is really a Java source to JavaScript source translator."
        grhino 14y ago
        I don't think GWT is being used for gmail.
        silas 14y ago
        Gmail is written using the Closure library: https://developers.google.com/closure/faq#gwt https://developers.google.com/closure/faq#gwt
dccoolgai 14y ago
Web developers everywhere break down in tears...
dennisgorelik 14y ago
Silverlight team (or more precisely, Silverlight management) is weak. Was weak from the beginning. Delivered poor product. As a result - Silverlight failed to get enough traction. Now Silverlight and Silverlight team is getting abandoned by MS.
jinushaun 14y ago
When these kinds of articles come about, I never understand the big deal. The release of the iPhone 5 doesn't suddenly make my iPhone 4s a useless piece of junk. I can continue using it until it dies and I need to replace it. Similarly, if you're doing SL work, your stuff isn't going to suddenly stop working. Your current copy of VS won't magically stop compiling SL code. Continue to use SL if it works for you. SL seemed to only have mild success as an intranet technology, so my suggestion above is valid. This problem doesn't go away with open source, since projects can die and non-backwards compatible versions can be released. No one is forcing you to convert all your Python 2 code to Python 3

Hip hip...

Seems pretty absurd to think that they'll be actively supporting a product for another decade without putting out any new releases... then again Microsoft and I have never seen eye-to-eye about how to sunset and subsequently retire software.

Alaskan005 14y ago
IIRC, they have a written (or maybe unwritten) rule that they will not drop support right away. It's probably to encourage adoption of Microsoft's standards and software by enterprise. If a major company adopted this and Microsoft gave them a 6 months notice, they'd be pretty upset and less likely to do business with them again.

jamesaguilar 14y ago

Lesson I would get out of this is: developing in Microsoft technologies where they don't already have a strong or dominant position in a market is risky. These days their embrace extend extinguish tactic isn't working so well. What's included in this? Winphone? Surface? Don't really know what else.

geetarista 14y ago
Exactly. Other than Netflix, what well-known applications did Silverlight back? None come to mind for me.
- vyrotek 14y ago
  There are a lot of private enterprise applications built on it. Its strength was that you could build complex tools relatively quickly. For example, I know of a local company that builds law enforcement software on it. I believe Netflix only uses a small portion of the 'Smooth Streaming' technology in Silverlight.
- kstrauser 14y ago
  It ran (past tense) MLB.com's streaming games, but they abandoned it in favor of Flash.
- munger 14y ago
  As I recall, recent X Games and Olympics had all their online video content accessible only through Silverlight players also. I remember trying to watch some of these events and being annoyed because the Silverlight player was locking up Firefox.
- yonran 14y ago
  Also the Feynman lectures on physics. It’s a shame that they went through the effort to put it online only to release it in an inaccessible format. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.HTML http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.HTML
- Too 14y ago
  Playboy
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
It's not just Microsoft. If you tie yourself to proprietary technology on the web, you run the risk of having the carpet pulled out from under you. Sometimes that risk is worth it; most of the time, it is not.
meaty 14y ago
This. I'm a solution architect at a Microsoft gold partner (a loveless job). We are forever getting screwed. We've just managed to get through the windows workflow engine rewrite that appeared in WF4 and deprecated a shit load of stuff still hanging of asp and vb6 which is falling to bits. This is all changing though. Shockingly, management are starting to buy the fact that we're getting screwed. We already have 25 Linux machines and a few postgres machines in production. They all run OpenJDK on them and infrastructure items such as memcached, Postgres, couple of MQ solutions. That and we've thrown TFS out, moved to mercurial+JIRA, have Eclipse on more workstations than visual studio and are not renewing our partner package next year. This is what happens when you treat your customers like shit and force them through costly audits so they can pay you more money for not understanding very ambiguous license terms.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Certainly winphone. They migrated platforms from winmo 6.5 already, although the development ecosystem was tiny for it (part of the reason why it crashed and burned when the iphone came out). Now there's the upcoming switch with winphone 7 to 8, which introduces an entirely new way of doing things, with limited backward compatability. The funny thing is that MS built their business on comparatively open platforms (closer to the android model), but they've gotten too greedy and out of touch, I think.

hyuuu 14y ago

what about netflix? they are still using silverlight

geetarista 14y ago
Let's hope this means they start moving away from it.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Agreed. I've never watched a Netflix program on my laptop because I refuse to install Silverlight. Flash it bad enough, but, for the most part, I have to tolerate it thanks to its huge market presence. Silverlight never had that, and I certainly wasn't going to help make it.
- LesZedCB 14y ago
  honestly I read this and that was instantly where my hope went. I mean, picking silverlight in the first place was a bad enough decision on netflix' part. Maybe I'm just bitter because I'm on ubuntu though.
- JonoW 14y ago
  To what exactly? The problem is that video steaming services need to toe the line with the studios. They want DRM, so what other options are there to stream DRMed video in a browser? until studios give up on DRM, Flash and Silverlight will stick around

vyrotek 14y ago

I've been a .Net dev for many years and I'm generally optimistic and excited about many Microsoft products but I warned everyone to stay away from Silverlight from day one. I knew that couldn't be the future of the web. I think I can safely thank those years of being Flash developer for that. One day Microsoft will realize they can't 'own' all the technology between the server and your monitor. I do think they're doing a great job embracing open source and web standards these days.

yason 14y ago

While Silverlight seems to continue under the umbrella of MSDN, it never took off and basically remained a mere nuisance, so I'm not surprised to see it being "shifted" out as a product. Silverlight was (implicitly?) positioned to compete with Flash and just like Flash, it was mostly an obscure piece of proprietary technology and mostly just a nuisance. What made Flash matter was video streaming and YouTube: suddenly all those who had been avoiding Flash because of stupid games and stupid Flash advertisements had to get Flash to view videos on YouTube. This never happened on Silverlight to a major extent; it always remained a weird alternative to Flash. Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead. They will both churn along for years but their supply of momentum is running out. What practically killed Flash was the highly excretory nature of the Flash codebase. With the huge installation base induced by video streaming the Flash plugin had great opportunities per se but their codebase barely ran on a fast PC, and mobile Flash never materialized for real. First it was slow and when mobile devices got faster, it was a battery hog. So Flash got stuck in remaining the de facto web video player device and that space is slowly eaten out by various HTML5 based video technologies. I hope we can ditch first Silverlight and then finally Flash in the shortest order of time.

throwaway2048 14y ago
Off on a bit of a tangent here, but has anyone noticed that Google's efforts to HTML5ize Youtube seem to have totally stalled out for desktop browsers? Progress seems to have stopped after deals were announced with adobe over android flash. It also seems virtually certain Google has the source code the the flashplayer, as it came out relatively quickly for Chrome's PAPI (adobe moves like a snail when it comes to supporting new apis, especially ones where older apis continue to function), and chrome flashplayer appears to receive patches before even the "official" flashplayer releases do. I wonder if that doesn't somehow factor into the seemingly arbitrary flash requirements on youtube.
pjmlp 14y ago
> Curiously, Flash got killed too. I consider Flash dead in a similar manner that I consider Microsoft dead. Game developers beg to differ

kackermann 14y ago

One thing good about Silverlight is that you don't have to use Javascript. Has anyone here successfully developed a JS app with a quarter million lines of code? And maintained it?

factorialboy 14y ago
Err.. Gmail. You're grossly underestimating JavaScript. With JavaScript its possible to break your code into logical abstractions, either functional or object oriented or a hybrid of the two. What's stops you from writing maintainable JavaScript apps is perhaps the quality of devs.
- cageface 14y ago
  Gmail is written in java and compiled to javascript via gwt. Doesn't count.
  - vetinari 14y ago
    Gmail's backend is written in Java. The frontend is written in Javascript, it has nothing to do with GWT.
    - evanmoran 14y ago
      Sorry, you are incorrect. GWT writing javascript is the whole point. http://css.dzone.com/news/understanding-gwt-compiler http://css.dzone.com/news/understanding-gwt-compiler From the article: "The GWT compiler is really a Java source to JavaScript source translator."
      - grhino 14y ago
        I don't think GWT is being used for gmail.
      - silas 14y ago
        Gmail is written using the Closure library: https://developers.google.com/closure/faq#gwt https://developers.google.com/closure/faq#gwt

dccoolgai 14y ago

Web developers everywhere break down in tears...

dennisgorelik 14y ago

Silverlight team (or more precisely, Silverlight management) is weak. Was weak from the beginning. Delivered poor product. As a result - Silverlight failed to get enough traction. Now Silverlight and Silverlight team is getting abandoned by MS.

jinushaun 14y ago

When these kinds of articles come about, I never understand the big deal. The release of the iPhone 5 doesn't suddenly make my iPhone 4s a useless piece of junk. I can continue using it until it dies and I need to replace it. Similarly, if you're doing SL work, your stuff isn't going to suddenly stop working. Your current copy of VS won't magically stop compiling SL code. Continue to use SL if it works for you. SL seemed to only have mild success as an intranet technology, so my suggestion above is valid. This problem doesn't go away with open source, since projects can die and non-backwards compatible versions can be released. No one is forcing you to convert all your Python 2 code to Python 3