I'm playing devil's advocate: But Silverlight was too little too late. It arrived right as Flash was effectively dying. I don't blame them for killing it, it was dead on arrival.

I can explain the entire problem with Silverlight using two dates:

- iPhone initial release: 29th of June 2007

- Silverlight initial release: 5th of September 2007

Now, we can argue if iOS killed Flash, but I think between iOS's lack of support and all of the security issues associated with Flash, it was set up to lose popular support (and then HTML5/HTML5 DRM filled in the gap, even if it took years ultimately).

Silverlight was a Flash competitor in a world that decided it didn't need Flash.

Silverlight was a half-assed, brain-dead attempt at trying to compete with Flash. It started out as a cool demo and then blew up into a role that didn't fit it well with insufficient support on the dev side. What it should have been was a competitor for AJAX/jQuery. What it turned into was just another video player browser plug-in.

Indeed, and yet we somehow ended up with a whole bunch of Line-of-Business desktop apps written in Silverlight. I did a brief stint at a windows-shop that made and maintained a variety of such apps.

This is the thing with Microsoft is this is never in doubt. It is Google who ends of life's things and stops support. Microsoft still has supports things in Windows 8.1 that were BUGS in MS-DOS in order to allow programs from that era to run.

Microsoft will support .NetCore for at least 20 years. Without doubt.

They may still support it, but it can be a technological dead-end. Just like Silverlight.

Or Internet Explorer (for Mac).

>Microsoft will support .NetCore for at least 20 years. Without doubt.

On Windows for sure. Not on *nix though.

I think they will. I think we're slowly moving to a post-Windows Microsoft world and MS is taking a leap to be a big part of that through tools.

I do not think Windows will be a thing in 2025.

I think, you think... any CTO, or CEO/owner of a company won't as easily put so much at stake (and IT is crucial part of every major company of any type). MS has a long history of hating and subverting anything other than Windows, it's almost cartoonish when looking back.

This might be just my experience (over 11 years, over +-10 companies) that noone takes MS servers seriously. Only exceptions are Active directory, Exchange and some special reasons where MS SQL server needs to be used (for whatever reasons). Never seen any bussiness-critical app apart from those mentioned running on anything except Linux or Unix.

They're moving in right direction, but thy need to climb really big hill, which they built themselves.

>I do not think Windows will be a thing in 2025.

If they open source it (and they hinted that they might), I think it might.

Heard of Visual Basic 6?

The runtime is still here.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/vbruntime

Silverlight is still supported by Microsoft - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle?c2=12905

I have the largest cable provider in the country and when I click "watch TV on my laptop" it launches Silverlight. (It sucks, by the way). But people pretending the thing isn't used and isn't supported are really grasping at straws here.

If you're going to bring a plastic knife to a watergun fight, at least point it in the right direction...

You know who didn't (and does not) support Silverlight? Developers!

We moved on from Silverlight well before Microsoft did. That's the important distinction when you talk about sunsetting technologies. Microsoft's track record here is FAR better than that of Google or Apple.

Doesn't Netflix run on Silverlight? Or did they change that?

Netflix now use HTML5 where possible (they need Media Source Extensions and Encrypted Media Extensions) but they do fall-back on Silverlight with unsupported browsers[1] (Firefox and old browsers).

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

Supported with bug fixes, sure. Supported well enough to do modern application development (with the latest C#, .NET framework features, etc)? No. The last major release (Silverlight 5) was 4 years ago.

Your username sounds very similar to the .NET Rocks host :-)

Spooky, huh?

Real Spooky Rich. Real Spooky.

This is the CLR and .NET class libs. Unlike Silveright they have been supported for 15 years already, and will be aggresively developed in the future too. Besides, they've just been opensourced, even if this IDE project dies, those will stick around as long as Java will...

One thing that's nice is that it's now open source, so as long as it remains open source, it will likely remain cross platform. Contributers that are on non-windows platforms will likely notice when something breaks on their platform, and get it fixed.

Only core components and now a stripped down IDE are open source (core is actually free software IIRC). I will only be impressed if the entire runtime stack becomes open source. Otherwise it's still a platform for DRM or other forms of lockdown.

If you're not porting a .net application to MAC or Linux, I would avoid this for quite a while still. We don't know where this is going long term.

The entire runtime stack is open source.

https://github.com/dotnet/corefx https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr

Right. Core. No Windows forms, so the only app I ever wrote for it will not work yet.

Windows Forms is only a subset of the framework. I don't think exposing Windows Forms as an open source GUI stack would be worth while. It's old and clunky compared to WPF and XAML.

Even without a open source GUI stack the open source .Net Runtime and Framework provide value to .Net developers like myself who enjoy C# (and the F# lovers too!) to develop on Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X with much less pain than in the past. Not fitting each and every scenario doesn't diminish its significance.

The runtime, Core CLR is is open source with MIT and porting is underway:

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr

Previously discussed @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431368 - Microsoft .NET CoreCLR is now running on FreeBSD 10.1 (amd64)

Has Google/Mozilla made the same commitments to Go/Rust?

It's a bit different when there's a runtime required to run the apps. An app written in Go/Rust today will run on a machine 10, 20, 100 years from now as it's just an entirely self-contained executable. A .NET app will only run on a machine that has a functioning and supported .NET framework.

You can always compile the .NET Framework into your app... https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn584397(v=vs.110)....

This only works for Windows Store applications, which is a tiny subset of all the .NET applications out there.

.NET Native will expand to other app types. See the last paragraph of this section: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/04/29/net-announ... .

> Silverlight was supposed to be the savior that brought .NET to Mac and Linux

Silverlight was supposed to bring .NET to browsers on Mac and Linux. Someone1234's comment is IMHO correct and very astute - Silverlight wasn't all bad, but it solved the wrong problem.

On the other hand, this is all about bringing .Net to web servers on Mac and Linux. particularly Linux boxes and container in clouds. My experience may not be typical, but to me that's the right problem. The MS Azure team probably agrees.