Oh, that's handy, I thought MS had stopped supporting it. Good to know that it's still going. I thought they had dropped support in one of the .NET Core versions, before .NET 5+.

Presentation from .NET Conf 2023 last week with some of the new stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1weyWS_pL0

Thanks for linking that. The video description mentions they added WinForms to .NET Core in 3.0; maybe I was remembering the .NET Core 2.1/2.2 timeframe, when it wasn't supported in Core?

I believe prior to .NET Core 3.0, you could have a WinForms application in .NET Core, but the WinForms designer was not available in Visual Studio. While it was possible, having to build a GUI in WinForms without the designer is utter hell.

They don't kill it, they just tie it up in the basement and pretend it never existed.

RIP Silverlight

Silverlight's phase-out primarily stemmed from the browser ecosystem's shift away from plugins. It's worth noting that Silverlight 5 was supported until October 2021, a decade after its release, indicating substantial longevity despite the changing landscape.

Ok first thing first - allow me to vent my existential frustration with few off the cuff (mostly rhetorical) questions ...

You call decade a substantial longevity?

Is this some kind of a joke?

Is your ability to assess being held hostage by js ecosystem expererience?

But seriously - I expect a bit more from platform that could potentially waste my life and my venture. I am still happily supporting some Java (and JSF) code that I have written for clients 15 years ago (don't you just love that sweet support fees that you get mostly for being alive and breathing ?). Meanwhile my friend that build whole company around product written in silverlight almost went bankrupt. Now after few years working in AI (going into it a bit too soon) he is trying to create same product in ... yes you guessed it, Blazor.

Maybe some people do not learn from their mistakes :)?

Yes, I would call that fairly substantial considering its underlying architecture is no longer viable -- not because of Microsoft's fault, but as the industry as whole moved away from the plugin-based AIR.

Silverlight was somewhat of a unique situation, as it was a platform where it heavily relied on the platform that was phasing out. (And to clarify, that "decade" is the period that Microsoft was committed to support for latest Silverlight 5. Their first version was released in 2007, so it had about 14 years of history.)

As with Java or any other languages, you can still run it if the environment it runs can be resurrected. (I would not connect that to the internet, though) And many parts of what actually powered Silverlight still thrive in a form of .Net.

I mean where they can support, Microsoft tends to keep its compatibility fairly intact, for instance modern Windows still can run many of the 32-bit binaries from early days. (And you even could do the same for 16-bit apps on a 32-bit platform, not sure if that's still possible, though.)

> Maybe some people do not learn from their mistakes :)?

Maybe some people do learn, and in this case it's Microsoft, who are not repeating the same thing with Blazor as they did with Silverlight.

The difference is that Blazor is built on web standards (WebAssembly), not a proprietary technology. Sure, Microsoft could discontinue support for Blazor, but WebAssembly will keep running. C#/Blazor are not the only technologies using WebAssembly. I personally wouldn't use Blazor for a public facing website, and would only use it for an internal LOB app where I know I can dictate what browser technologies can be used, as well as knowing the binary blob for the runtime will be cached in most users' browsers. I still use traditional MVC structure with C# for applications that will have a variety of users over different connection types, and use progressive enhancement with JavaScript for things that enhance the user experience (for example, creating multiple items of some type on screen, instead of only being able to create one at a time like with a standard form). The thing is, I've already separated out my application logic so that I can change the front-end technology at any time. That really shouldn't have anything to do with Blazor, and is just a way to make sure your application can adapt to future front-end technologies.

Correct.

Silverlight came when flash was being dismantled shortly after.

Different days back then.

No knock on C# or Java developers meant here, however I find that C# and Java Developers find 10 years of support not long enough, nearly every other ecosystem you're lucky if you get 3 year time horizons of backward compatibility and/or support.

10 years is pretty amazing, all told, IMO.

Blazor is just a new iteration on Volta (2007) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Live_Labs_Volta

That's because WinForms are in active development. But yes, for a while, it was baked.

You can still develop Win32 and MFC apps today - those are more then 30 years old.

Win32 is the main Windows API, and MFC, besides fixing HDPI issues, the hard reality is that after crashing the whole WinRT/UWP story for C++ developers, there is nothing left on the Microsoft ecosystem for doing GUI in C++.

Yeah unless you go non-MS frameworks like Qt.

And yes, the current state of affairs is kinda sad.

Thats not always true, they keep some stuff that is a success for a long time, but they are also not afraid to drop there failures like ActiveX, SilverLight, VBScript, ...

And i am afraid blazer may be next.

Vbscript - deprecated, started 28!! Years ago

ActiveX - same, but 27! Years ago

Those were not failures. But have replacements.

Those are terrible examples tbh. A lot of businesses would sign immediately if they knew something was going to be supported for > 20 years. Additionally, vbscript owners should have long migrated to eg. Powershell

RIP FoxPro.

Silverlight, WPF, OData (was amazing for hooking your backend up to client-side tables, rubbish at everything else), WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation), WCF (thank god).

All dead.

And those are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head.

Plus the terrible excel VBA replacement they made, then abandoned, and now it's some fiddly javascript mess.

I'm sure there's a ton more people can add. Those are just the ones I personally wasted time on.

And let's not forget Window Mobile!

Edit: They've also gone through a stupid amount of changes in the asp.net MVC model in quite a short time. Plus constantly seem to overhaul their consistently overcomplicated authentication/authorization system. The state it's in at the moment is shockingly bad.

Try Silverlight, XNA, C++/CX, .NET Native, UAP,....

The difference is that they stop talking about it, their presence fades away in conference and developer blogs, and eventually from Visual Studio installation workloads.

WinForms can still be used with all of the stagnant issues. Had a faulty touchscreen driver on Windows 10 that only affected the touchscreen event messaging in a WinForms application. Had to wire directly into the messaging pump, construct a custom event system, and override the WinForms event system for everything to work properly.

Also had to wire a custom touchscreen event system for WPF because the Microsoft method would latch on to UI components with quick taps and press with sliding. This caused buttons to stay pressed while no fingers where on the screen.

I cannot recommend WinForms or WPF or UWP. Microsoft is bad at GUI application frameworks. It was recently that they finally shipped VS2022 with proper WinForms designer support and the ability to move away from VS2019. I still need to close and reopen VS2022 daily for WinForms and WPF development.

QT, GTK or some other framework gives the ability for cross platform solutions without being anchored to Window OS. Non Microsoft GUI frameworks are also faster and better when deterministic response time is needed and ability to run on low powered computers.