Re:MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core
by BetaCygni on Friday September 04, 2015 @10:30AM
(#10170679)
It might not be fair; it's just that in my mind one moment Microsoft was hyping Silverlight and the next moment they were discontinuing it. That's not a nice way to treat your customers.
What Microsoft should have done is to make it compile to HTML5. Something like SmartGWT is a great way to write interface in Java. It may even be the way the Java ends up on the desktop again.
In all fairness all technology companies are like that. Hell even open source groups are like that. If the community disappears why would you continue to invest millions into it when better solutions are coming around the corner? Silverlight, for a while, was absolute king in video streaming (you could squeeze much more quality out of it than flash) but like with everything on the web unless it's strictly standards-based you're going to run the risk of it being discontinued when better standards come around.
I don't think that's really a fair knock against Microsoft.
> It will also make its return to the desktop one day when someone figures out how to make it suck less, as the language and the available libraries are awesome.
Good luck with that; it's going to take a desktop OS who can make a Java GUI framework feel native and not horrible and at this point I don't know why any of them would invest in this.