I'd counter that by stating that I work on a .NET codebase that dates back to 2003, it still builds just fine in Visual Studio 2015 and runs without issue on .NET 4.6/IIS8.5.

Well, .NET has been around for 14 years now. There have been all kinds of worried predictions about Microsoft abandoning or doing evil things with .NET, but after 14 years they're starting to sound a bit less worrying.

Remind me what happened to Silverlight.

Silverlight was essentially a polyfill for back when browsers weren't very capable. I did a ton of work with Silverlight - streaming video, vector graphics, cross-platform front-end apps with back-end integration... all stuff that was pretty hard to do back then, but is now widely available in all modern browsers.

Also, both the JavaScript language and runtime were pretty hard to build reliable, performant apps in back when Silverlight was introduced. The JavaScript language and runtimes have matured considerably since then.

If it had been my say, I'd have kept it for a little longer than they did, but by now I'd say it's no longer necessary.

There were always two camps in the Silverlight world, both inside and outside of Microsoft: those that saw it as a way to make browser-based applications more awesome, and those that saw Silverlight as a way to get away from that yucky HTML/CSS/JS dev. I was always firmly in the first camp, and from that side of things I wouldn't take back a minute I spent on Silverlight dev - I got a jump on video, vector graphics, browser-based apps, etc., long before it was practical to do that in the browser. When those technologies hit mainstream browsers, great!

Note: Microsoft employee but definitely only speaking for myself here.

Silverlight was competition to Flash. Once the standards were far enough along that it was clear plugins weren't going to be necessary, there was no reason to keep it alive. Honestly, you should be happy that Microsoft killed off theirs and decided to use open standards instead.

Same here. I wouldn't be surprised if Xamarin died slowly.

That makes no sense. It's pretty clear that .NET is Microsoft's future, and Xamarin extends the reach of .NET.

Look at Winforms, WPF and Silverlight. They are all .Net and all abandoned. I wouldn't bet my long term future on Xamarin.

Silverlight is abandoned, but Winforms (especially) and WPF are mature products; I use the latter two (as well as Xamarin for Mac) in my consulting business to make good profits each year, and don't see anything changing except for better in this respect.

Yes, Silverlight has been abandoned.

I would argue that Winforms is now a mature technology and requires little upkeep, but it is still a part of the stack.

WPF development has slowed significantly, but still proceeds.

None of these are good technologies if you want to stay up-to-date. You could also write your site in IE6 compatible HTML which was quite mature but that seems a really bad idea.

That's not a reasonable comparison at all. Winforms is maintained. IE6 is explicitly deprecated.

And WinForms is never really going to go away as long as Windows is still built around the Win32 API.

I would call Winforms and WPF "mature and maintained" rather than abandoned. Especially if compared to Silverlight.

I can provide a similar list for any big corporation, including Apple and Google.

Hm, I don't think WPF is abandoned.

seems to me, the next shiny thing is what HN is all about

There's a difference between a news site full of nerds being interested in something shiny, and a company dropping an old product for something shiny.

This is exactly what pushed me to the Apple ecosystem.