OK, since we're using profanity, here are my thoughts:

How the fuck did this POS get upvoted? I wasted 2 minutes (including the inserted advertisement) watching this video and the guy hadn't said anything. That was way too long for me to waste on a video of questionable value. Secondly, the link-bait HN title is not the title of the video. Submitting, then up-voting this kind of bullshit turns HN to shit. </profanity> Profanity is so overused. It can be artful at times, but it seldom communicates any information, or real emotion, and is a waste of the reader's bandwidth.

If you keep listening, you'll learn a (former) insider's view on who's off the project, that the team is dispersed, etc.

Probably an idiosyncratic take, but combined with the inattention of MS to Silverlight, seems to make sense.

Yes, I had second thoughts about the quote I used. But the article is well-informed (in addition to being profane, appealing to emotion, and to the writer's, let's say, having been around the block once or twice with...web frameworks).

I have to agree. I can understand if this thread was on reddit, but its disappointing to see this in HN.

That aside, isn't this a good thing that Windows 8 now doesn't care (at least, for the new Metro apps) what runtime you're targeting - Silverlight, .Net (full CLR) or Native? - all apps irrespective of whether it was developed in C++, C# or VB with XAML or JS with Html - they're targeted to run in the Windows runtime. For Silverlight developers, they can continue to use XAML for developing their UI's, but yes, they would have learn about the new/different UI controls for the metro style, but that's not the same as learning a completely different language.

Windows Runtime documentation - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh46494...

Edit - Added WinRT link

That's a quote from the video.

Score one for this 2007 rant by Mark Pilgrim:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/05/02/silly-season

Excerpt:

"I used to have the strength to argue against such foolishness. Nowadays I’m reduced to nothing more than Grey’s-Anatomy-esque catchphrases. Seriously? Seriously? Do I really have to explain why this is a bad idea? Again? To a bunch of technological virgins who haven’t been fucked yet?"

To me the real value in that post is this paragraph...

Reactions? “The web just got richer.” Well, somebody’s getting richer, but I doubt it’s gonna be the web. And did you hear the news? You’ll write it one time, and test it one time (for real this time, we promise). And Microsoft “rebooted the web.” I guess that’s all you can do after freezing up for five years. Hey, look over there, shiny objects! That poster may as well be titled “Fucked 6 Ways From Sunday,” because that’s what you’ll be if you buy into any of this.

Really puts today's rave reviews of Windows 8 in perspective (which is just what he says in the video)

The whole post is an enjoyable read.

And you're right, the video and the post above both note the utterly blind initial rush of enthusiasm for these announcements.

The problem with silverlight:

The promise: a replacement for AJAX, Flash, etc., JITted code compiled from modern and advanced languages running in the browser, sandboxed, safe, fast, with advanced design tools and IDEs usable for easily creating beautiful and usable UIs. In theory a great thing.

The reality: just another Flash competitor, used for pushing video 98% of the time anyway. Why bother if Flash is already everywhere and "good enough"?

Mostly a captive market of Microsoft-oriented devs with invested skills in C#/VB, and an ability to push out a client install package through Windows update.

Having developed against both, I found Silverlight development much easier than Flash development. It makes the most sense for enterprise/corporate/internal applications, where end-client availability is much more controlled.

But outside the firewall, Flash is certainly good enough.

Because Flash is not good enough. Flash video playback has an incredibly poor performance, especially with h264 or HD videos, even on average machines or Macs. Silverlight video playback is simply a lot smoother. I'm not sure if it's their codecs or somewhere else in their rendering pipeline, but ultimately it doesn't really matter. What matters is that my users can play back the videos on my site smoothly even on their shitty commodity Dell boxes.

That being said, I'd love to switch to HTML5. If only all the browsers settled on the same codec.

I know a lot of folks who used it to stream video mostly just because it supported PlayReady DRM. I'm not saying thats the right reason but thats one reason for choosing it over Flash. Netflix used (uses?) it for their web streaming.

Your quip about these plugins being used 98% for video is spot on. I think Flash has served its purpose and should go away now, but it definitely did a good job of kickstarting decent in-browser video in the 2000s.

Porn. Is there anything it can't do?

P.S. Also, MS was too scared to use IE to push forward an in-browser silverlight as a thorough AJAX competitor, as google might end up doing with dash.

Oh the irony. I click on this article on my iPad, and the article immediately talks about how this content is only visible with Flash.

I loaded it on a desktop and saw 10 seconds of his intro and then it switched to a commercial. The internet is completely going to shit.

Here are some charts to indicate how many people are running Flash, Silverlight, Java, and have HTML5 canvas/video support: http://riastats.com/#

Interestingly, Silverlight support (~74%) is more popular than Java (~64%) and only slightly less popular than HTML5 canvas/video (~78%).

I suspect that has to do with corporations. I've had nothing but problems with Java's auto update and I don't want to give users administrative access just to update their Java. So I either had to have someone go around every update and do it manually or have the user put up with a little bubble popping up every few hours. So I just uninstalled the whole thing and only gave it to those who notice it was missing.

And no one's noticed yet.

This is quite disappointing to me, as C# and WPF are actually extraordinarily nice to work with. I write javascript and HTML at my day job, but I've done some side projects in C# and WPF, and I find C# and WPF much nicer for building native apps.

A lot of people prefer their own projects to their day job because it's their code. My day job is C# and WPF but love working with JS and HTML. Don't get me wrong JS can be terrible, but my guess is Sass and Coffee will both work with the new Win8 stuff.

Does anyone other than Netflix use Silverlight?

I for one am thankful that Netflix uses Silverlight. For one thing, it doesn't seem plagued with 0-day exploits all the time, doesn't want to update itself every other day, and crashes a hell of a lot less on my Mac than Flash does.

I'd be ok if MSFT won this one.

Silverlight is what crashes for me on the PC, while watching Netflix. I never have trouble with Flash, on PC or Linux. Except that it steals the mouse and keyboard. I hate that.

WotC uses Silverlight for their online D&D 'Character Builder' -- it is effectively a core product along with the standard rule books. (PHB, DMB, MM)

Tis somewhat niche, but D&D is king of that particular niche.

Lots of banks use it for internal software. Also, isn't it what we are all supposed to be using to develop Windows Phone Apps?

Yeah.

I'd be interested to find out the penetration Silverlight has made into the enterprise market, it's actually a fairly popular category on Stackoverflow.

Most of the Enterprise Managers I know moved their desktop applications to Silverlight. It provides reliable local caching (a must), out of browser support and can run on a Mac. More importantly encryption is a snap.

WPF really is dead and it was killed by Silverlight

I'm not sure what's current, but in the past I remember hearing that the streaming Olympics, NCAA tournament, and (2008) presidential debates all used Silverlight.

NBC used it for the Olympics a couple years ago.

Here in Canada, CTV used it to build their site for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. To call it a disaster is not an understatement. The most curious effect, for me, is how many people first discovered what Silverlight was from having to visit that site -- and how universal they all thought the site (and therefore Silverlight) sucked.

I'm missing the back story here, I'm watching it and it's quite interesting but I don't quite understand the context? Can someone fill me in?

MS years ago was getting worried Adobe was inching into the cross platform space (remember Netscape Navigator?), putting a final nail into its Windows franchise. Therefore it launched its own plugin initially called WPFe, which runs a tiny CLR (about 5Mb) with a subset of WPF, targetting WinXP and up plus MacOS. It is based around scenegraphs rather than Repaint(), and promises to make application design more designer friendly.

All this changed when MS realized that Windows has already lost. The web, where we live today, is already cross platform.

Meanwhile, the now-named Silverlight isn't attracting the right developers/desingers - Adobe tools still retains people who love UI design, while Windows developers are primarily still trapped in the WIMP mindset.

Secondly, Apple showed MS that cross platform wasn't necessarily a threat. The threat today is a device that can browse the web and perhaps run some native apps. The cross platform adoption never really took off. Flash based games continue to dominate. Mac aficionados never liked Silverlight. Android tablets don't run Silverlight, and why would MS want to help a competitor anyway?

Meanwhile, the original stable of enterprise customers started using Silverlight in their enterprise apps, citing simpler deployment. In Silverlight 5, MS has finally admitted more Windows specific features like PInvoke, COM automation - all this is enterprise related.

So today, Silverlight never achieved its original cross platform promise, it never achieved consumer adoption, it didn't attract (enough) developers who made beautiful apps, Apple is decidedly against other runtimes running on their newly established beachheads in the iPads. Sales growth of non-PC devices outpaced PC sales. If you include devices (smartphones, slates), MS has already lost its dominance. Plus with ARM devices continuing to get more powerful - there is no future left for a tiny, portable CLR.

My enterprise experience says that corps never really cared to use WPF/Silverlight in the first place. They keep on using WinForms because design is completely irrelevant to enterprise apps that are purely functional.

WinForms or (from my experience) most went asp.net long ago.

When we evaluated Silverlight, we were hoping for a richer web experience, not a replacement for winforms, which we never used.

See this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2994328

Windows 8 is using HTML5/Javascript for at least part of the interface instead of WPF/Silverlight. .Net developers had a tizz a few months ago about it on very few facts, the developer preview of Win 8 was released today so the facts are beginning to emerge. If Win 8 is using HTML5/javascript, one wonders how long the phone OS takes to follow suit.

I'm not entirely sure the extent of where you can use HTML5/javascript as I've not got a chance to watch the launch video yet as ironically Silverlight kept crashing and killing Chrome every time I tried.

But that's the context I watched that with.

There was a demo today at build where they took a Silverlight app, changed a few lines and now it was a "Windows 8 Metro" app. Then you take that app and run in on the phone? How can one say it's dead?!

The comparison isn't valid. I can compile "hello.c" and run it on multiple platforms. But will it work with existing production code? There are Silverlight specific libraries, for example.

I don't see why you think it's not valid. You're taking an app that was designed to run in the browser, tell it to use different namespaces and it runs on this new Metro UI interface, phone, and tablets. You keep the same XAML, same code, and only tweak a few things to make it work on a new platform. It's a similar process to how you tweak your css/js to run in different environments.

And what do you mean with existing production code? I imagine you can run still run it in the browser like it's currently working.

I'm not a Silverlight developer, but I just can't understand the big commotion. Were people expecting for only SL to work wtih W8? I haven't heard a single thing in the keynote to even hint that SL is going away. Not only that, but they made a point to show that the current investment made in SL paid off. What exactly should they have done?

From my understanding, they said existing production code will continue to work on Windows 8. But, if you want the new Metro look and feel for your application, then you need to do these minor changes.

What they say is true, but there will be no further investment in Silverlight. All technologies eventually hit this stage where there is no further investment slated. e.g. DOS. If your app is built on this particular platform, consider that the deathclock has started ticking.

When a ship sinks, you save the women and the children first. As cruel as it seems, the reality is that people who have few years left are considered last.

Whether it's labelled Silverlight, WPF or something else is secondary: Xaml and .NET is will be a first class development environment on Windows 8, as was shown today.

silverlight's baby daddy right now is netflix. Until they go html5 silverlight will have a huge userbase.

Haven't they already begun testing html5 for Linux support?

there's been talk. I'm not sure what the ChromeOS plugin is working of off. But I can tell you from first hand experience that it is primitive and no way ready to replace the silverlight version currently employed on win/mac.

If I were a betting man I'd bet on WPF being dead and Silvelight being retained for Apps.

Silverlight is dead!

Long live XAML!

What's silverlight?

Hooray

Windows Phone still uses it. But yes I agree HTML5 has a brighter future.

Self-respecting coders write in non-proprietary protocols that won't lock them into a license.