Are WPF and Silverlight Dead?

[~Johnny]

Awesome, thanks for the explanation, I looked around teh web and saw what it can do, very limited compared to flash nowadays, but I hope Ms can one up them.

? Silverlight can do MORE than flash these days - it's actually better compared to Adobe Air than Flash. Silverlight is a full, web & desktop application development platform running on a slim version of .NET, with arguably better performance and use of hardware acceleration than Flash has.

I've always liked this old demo of a Windows Desktop running completely in Silverlight : http://www.silveos.com/

[MFH]

? Silverlight can do MORE than flash these days - it's actually better compared to Adobe Air than Flash. Silverlight is a full, web & desktop application development platform running on a slim version of .NET, with arguably better performance and use of hardware acceleration than Flash has.

I've always liked this old demo of a Windows Desktop running completely in Silverlight : http://www.silveos.com/

Couldn't have said it better - thanks for the link, looks interesting?

[Aethec]

Silverlight would be even better if I didn't need to open IE to view it - it looks like it isn't properly installed on Firefox, but even re-installations have no success. :pinch:

[sbauer]

This is a perfect example as to why, as a developer, you should never be a one trick pony. Keep learning. Never be satisfied with your current skill set.

[ViperAFK]

? Silverlight can do MORE than flash these days - it's actually better compared to Adobe Air than Flash. Silverlight is a full, web & desktop application development platform running on a slim version of .NET, with arguably better performance and use of hardware acceleration than Flash has.

I've always liked this old demo of a Windows Desktop running completely in Silverlight : http://www.silveos.com/

That's pretty cool

[+LogicalApex MVC]

This is a perfect example as to why, as a developer, you should never be a one trick pony. Keep learning. Never be satisfied with your current skill set.

The story of our profession. We are always faced with obsolescence. It is why the most important strength of a developer is his aptitude (ability to learn new things quickly). We are required to become masters of the technologies we use, but we need to be able to quickly get up and running when we realize that new thing is now the most important thing and that old thing we mastered is old news.

Without a high aptitude you are stuck... You can't learn every new technology, especially since a lot of them die off shortly after their buzz point peaks. Your strongest competitive advantage is that ability to get up to speed fast in the 11th hour and keep running strong...

[Rory Becker]

@stewart, @Jen

If you guys (in the strictly gender neutral sense) are having any performance problems with CodeRush, please contact us.

We work on some pretty big solutions ourselves and would love the chance to reproduce and fix these issues for you.

If needed, we will sign NDA's to get hands on your code. Naturally this should make locating the source of any perf issues much quicker and easier.

Please feel free to contact me directly if I can be of any help.

You can reach me via email @ roryb@DevExpress.com

or on twitter (if that suits you better) as @RoryBecker

--

Rory Becker - DevExpress

[CentralDogma]

I?m bumping this topic due to the recent development at Microsoft?s BUILD conference.

In a recent topic I was seeing a lot of people misinterpreting what Microsoft?s keynote at BUILD. This might have to do with many not understanding what Silverlight actually is. Silverlight is a framework. XAML is the language used when writing applications targeting that framework. In much the same way that .NET is a framework and C# is a language that can target the .NET framework.

Now, let?s discuss Windows 8 and the changes Microsoft has made to it?s API. Take a look at this slide from the BUILD keynote as it?s a really great summary of what Microsoft is planning to do:

There are a few simplifications: C and C++ can target .NET, Silverlight should probably be a box within .NET rather than with it, IE isn?t really a System Service. But it gets the general point across. There are Desktop Applications, that target Win32 and .NET, and there are Metro Applications, that target WinRT. The Metro interface is one of the big features of Windows 8. Metro apps get access to: fullscreen mode, Snap feature, live tiles on the new Start Screen.

So, where does this leave Silverlight? Well, not in a very good place. Silverlight has never gotten mass adoption and it hasn?t gotten the kind of development support behind it the whole .NET framework has. And now you have a new web capable framework coming out. Which Microsoft is putting all their weight behind and opening new features to. It?s very telling that when Microsoft had a ?we haven?t forgotten about Silverlight? moment at the keynote, it was to show how you can port code from Silverlight to WinRT.

But let?s extend this further. Here you have a new platform Microsoft is pushing that can handle Communications, Data, Graphics, and Devices. A platform that Microsoft is calling the next big thing. One not reliant on .NET. Microsoft is actively trying to get developers to port their code from .NET to WinRT. It?s obvious that .NET is being deprecated for WinRT. Now that?s not saying that .NET will disappear, Win32 is still around in Windows 8. But don?t expect to see the kind of advancements and new features .NET is receiving currently to continue.

[libertas83]

But let?s extend this further. Here you have a new platform Microsoft is pushing that can handle Communications, Data, Graphics, and Devices. A platform that Microsoft is calling the next big thing. One not reliant on .NET. Microsoft is actively trying to get developers to port their code from .NET to WinRT. It?s obvious that .NET is being deprecated for WinRT. Now that?s not saying that .NET will disappear, Win32 is still around in Windows 8. But don?t expect to see the kind of advancements and new features .NET is receiving currently to continue.

It is more correct to say that WinRT is the next evolution of .NET. The .NET Languages are not going away and are a fundamental part of WinRT. The chart you list shows shows C#, VB, and XAML as part of it. This is why you can port easily between Silverlight to WinRT because its the same underlying framework. This is what is part of the Jupiter Framework that has been leaked for some time.

Silverlight is just WPF Lite and it and WPF never took off as the main UI for one main reason, the majority of code is native using C++. Devs didn't want to port the whole back-end for many reasons but they do want to leverage better UI constructs if possible. Thus, WinRT is born.

WinRT is just like .NET, it is a collection of languages but instead of being only managed based it adds native and web based languages into one framework. In fact, that is the best way to describe WinRT, it is .NET with the addition of native and web based languages. A more proper definition may even be minus WinForms, but I haven't looked into the details yet. But for C# and XAML to be listed very cleary it means the core of .NET is intact.

[CentralDogma]

It is more correct to say that WinRT is the next evolution of .NET. The .NET Languages are not going away and are a fundamental part of WinRT. The chart you list shows shows C#, VB, and XAML as part of it. This is why you can port easily between Silverlight to WinRT because its the same underlying framework. This is what is part of the Jupiter Framework that has been leaked for some time.

Silverlight is just WPF Lite and it and WPF never took off as the main UI for one main reason, the majority of code is native using C++. Devs didn't want to port the whole back-end for many reasons but they do want to leverage better UI constructs if possible. Thus, WinRT is born.

WinRT is just like .NET, it is a collection of languages but instead of being only managed based it adds native and web based languages into one framework. In fact, that is the best way to describe WinRT, it is .NET with the addition of native and web based languages. A more proper definition may even be minus WinForms, but I haven't looked into the details yet. But for C# and XAML to be listed very cleary it means the core of .NET is intact.

Like I said, you have to make a distinction between a language and it's framework. .NET is a framework. C#, VB, XAML, those are languages. Those languages can target various frameworks: .NET or Mono and now WinRT. A language is just a set of lexicon and syntax. A framework is a set of prewritten code that developers can make use of in their program. For instance, if you?re making an application that needs to connect to a SQL server, you could write all the code to do that yourself, but the .NET library already has such a library: all you have to do is link to it and call it appropriately in your program.

So when Microsoft says you can use C# with WinRT, that means you can use things like the for loop and all the semantics you know and love with WinRT. However, there are a whole new set of libraries. When you want to run Silverlight code under WinRT, it must be ported. Calls to .NET libraries must be changed to WinRT libraries (ie. System.Windows must change to Windows.UI). Something similar happened in the past.

And, I have not seen any information coming out of Microsoft that WinRT is built on .NET. In fact that chart pretty specifically shows that they are completely unrelated.

[Soulsiphon]

At least we know the direction now with some certainty, in spite of MS's unwillingness to just come and tell us what we're going to be developing MS stuff with for the next 10 years.. I expected balloons and some party favors when .NET and Silverlight were shown the door. It appears all they got was some space on some keynote slides.