Re:OpenSilver is a modern, plugin-free, open-source reimplem...
by alkonaut on Thursday May 28, 2020 @02:30AM
(#23334120)
It was an answer to both java applets and Flash, which obviously were someone eleses technologies. Among other things, it supported a pretty good ui system with XAML and easier threading than ActionScript.
So if you desperately wanted to do the "render stuff client side to a canvas on the web using a good programming language" then Silverlight wasn't half bad. The programming model/layout/concurrency handling etc was every bit as good in 2005 as modern js/react is 15 years later, but the tooling was much better. Think of it as vb for the net. You could fire up your development environment and create a new interactive app and compile it to a single deployable file in minutes.
I used it quite a lot, but that was for things like internal apps. It was pretty good as a deployment model for e.g. a complicated dashboard on an intranet page.
So if you desperately wanted to do the "render stuff client side to a canvas on the web using a good programming language" then Silverlight wasn't half bad. The programming model/layout/concurrency handling etc was every bit as good in 2005 as modern js/react is 15 years later, but the tooling was much better. Think of it as vb for the net. You could fire up your development environment and create a new interactive app and compile it to a single deployable file in minutes.
I used it quite a lot, but that was for things like internal apps. It was pretty good as a deployment model for e.g. a complicated dashboard on an intranet page.