A Decade Later, NET Developers Still Fear Being ‘Silverlighted’ By Microsoft Slashdot

Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.5 is based on Silverlight 4. On Linux and FreeBSD, the functionality was available via Moonlight and Pipelight, though both projects have since been discontinued. Moonlight is available for the major Linux distributions, with support for Firefox, Konqueror, and Opera browsers, provided it was obtained through Novell. Miguel de Icaza has expressed an interest in working with developers from other operating systems and other browsers to ensure that Moonlight works fine on The Secret History of Women in Coding The New York Times their systems. Availability of Moonlight version 1.0 for FreeBSD was announced in March 2009, but has since been reported not to actually work.As of 2011, the current version of Moonlight does not officially work on new versions of Firefox (newer than 3.x) on Linux-based operating systems. However, it can be installed in an unofficial way (for example using the Add-on Compatibility Reporter Archived May 1, 2012, at the Wayback Machine add-on) and with Firefox 11 it works correctly when installed.

That layer of quality online content is supplemented by a large number of community-based support ecosystems such as StackOverflow, which are not as consistent when it comes to content quality, but are, nevertheless, far more helpful than not. SQL Server excels at its primary role of a data keeper with a myriad of features for transactions, referential integrity, backups, mirroring and replication, but what sets SQL Server apart from competition is how well it integrates with the rest of the Microsoft stack. For rapid development, there is the Entity Framework, currently in version 6, passed adolescence and delivering well on its promise of streamlining data access. If you need computing power, the .NET Framework is loaded in-process with SQL Server, meaning you can embed .NET code as stored procedures, functions or aggregates without sacrificing performance. Pair that with the fact that SQL Server 2014 comes with in-memory tables, and you can come up with some pretty slick real-time solutions that could not be made fast enough solely with SQL and regular tables. After years in the industry, SQL Server is still on top of my list of RDBMSs.

Beyond the Boundaries of Visual Studio 2010 with WebUI Test Studio

The changes with Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Core 5, aka vNext, have churned up quite a bit of conversation, but something I overheard recently caught me a bit off guard. The gist of it was that Microsoft hates enterprise developers because of the sweeping changes in .NET Core 5. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt was my immediate reaction in response to such a claim. But before I could find my soap-box and make a stand, a wise young man who oddly reminds me of Justin Bieber said, «Any change is anti-enterprise.» He is right. Where Silverlight really doesn’t work is in Windows RT (e.g. the ARM version of Windows).

Silverlight was from a time when Microsoft was trying to have its own version of the web. It filled the internet with pages that you couldnt use unless you downloaded that crappy extension. I actually try to avoid anything they make that is consumer facing. Its 11 Best Freelance Mobile Developers Hire in 48 Hours constant churn and death there and with no big corporate users ready to scream when the rug is pulled there is nothing to stop it. I recall when Windows 10 came out of beta, MS quietly dropped support for infrared that had been there all through the beta.

It’s worth noting that the Linux variation of Silverlight is not developed or maintained by Microsoft. Moonlight, which is the name of the Linux variation, is developed by the Mono project with aid from Microsoft and Novell, and is primarily targeted for Linux and other Unix/X11-based operating systems. In addition, your Silverlight application doesn’t have to stay inside the browser. Using the out-of-browser capabilities of Silverlight, you can take your application out of the browser and into the desktop, but we will learn more on that later. While Microsoft officials have stated that the new Windows would also support applications written for older icon-driven versions of Windows, some developers have wondered if their desktop applications will still get the same support from Microsoft in the years to come. These welcomed improvements come from a company that has long-established processes for releasing software that’s tested, documented and supported.

However, I respect them as an alternative to my preferred platform. People who choose .NET have their reasons to do so and it’ s a perfectly competent platform to do what you need. It’s not my first choice, but I greatly prefer it to node.js or python for business development.

Supported platforms

In our sample, the Silverlight runtime engine will have to download two external files to get the application running. You may be wondering at this point how the Silverlight runtime engine knows that we used the assembly caching option, and that it needs to download a list of external DLL files. The answer to this question is simpler than you might imagine—the AppManifest.xaml file. Using assembly caching may greatly reduce the size of your XAP file, providing faster initial loading time for your application. As we will probably need more than one group of controls within our application, XAML supports multiple namespaces within a single application.

• In fact, it is a bit like a 3-year old playing drums on your head all night long while his 7-year old sister is sticking chewing gum in your hair as you are trying to sleep because you have an early morning 7 AM meeting tomorrow in a recessionary economy.Take heart!
• In most cases, the WCF web service won’t be hosted on the same machine in both development and production environments and, thus, will have a different IP address on each.
• From the initial launch in 2007, reviewers compared the product to Adobe’s Flash.
• I’ve seen a lot more teams ship successful products with .NET than Python/node.js.
• But, this will come at the expense of slower decompression of the XAP file on older machines, and the slower the decompression rate is, the longer it will take for your application to start running.

Due to the fact that a XAP file contains more than just compiled code, there may be times when we need to edit its content, which is where knowing the fact that «the XAP files are basically the ZIP files» comes in handy. With this we conclude our overview of XAML, but obviously there is a lot more in the language than what we’ve covered. As XAML is a key concept in Silverlight, we will deal with it a lot more in the coming chapters, so even if you didn’t understand everything we talked about so far, you definitely will, once we get to use it more.

Microsoft Windows 8 demos spur developer worry

A decade ago, I was spending about 50 percent of my time working in Visual Studio and about 50 percent in other tools. Today, the split is overwhelmingly in favor of Visual Studio. Microsoft’s vision for Visual Studio to be a one-stop solution for hosting IDEs is coming to fruition with many Microsoft and non-Microsoft products offering some level of integration with Visual Studio. From database development with SQL Server Data Tools to writing iPad and Android apps with Xamarin, Visual Studio provides a familiar developer experience with a consistent user interface. The same can be said about working with Microsoft Azure, a cloud platform encompassing a variety of services from database hosting to mobile services. Because Windows Media Video 9 is an implementation of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers VC-1 standard, Silverlight also supports VC-1 video.

More on that some other day, but the real and perhaps the only story in the news is that Microsoft’s partners – from device makers to music services – just got double crossed by the company they choose to believe in. I like to call it Zun-ked (a tiny take off on Punked.)… After being recognized as ONE of the fastest-growing programming languages in last year’s developer report from dev tooling specialist JetBrains, Microsoft’s TypeScript was named THE fastest-growing language this year. It remains to be seen what other replacement options emerge as the end-of-support countdown steadily approaches zero in a couple months. So, some 10 years later, within a few days of each other, two developers have expressed about someone being «Silverlighted» .

DevOps here means “Deploying your code easily” and has nothing to do with Azure DevOps (either Azure DevOps On-Prem, or Azure DevOps on Azure — and no, I’m never letting Microsoft live that atrocious naming down). Anyway, The EF Core team has made it easier to run database migrations in a CI environment. I won’t spoil the story for you, but it’s worth your time to read. No releases this week; but lots of interesting tidbits nonetheless. If you read just one article this week, check out “The Myth of the Treasure Fox”. Angular fucked over all users at every version change, React made going from 15 to 16 as expensive as possible, and KnockoutJS was fundamentally flawed with its DOM relationship.

In a video, Julie Larson-Green, the product manager for Windows – who determines which features are included and which are not – suggests that the APIs for the new touchscreen form of Windows will be «HTML5 and javascript». The knowledge-base available via MSDN, StackOverflow and thousands of forums and blogs is massive. In my years of developing in .NET, I cannot recall an instance where I would get stuck for long on a framework bug; each time, someone had already experienced, researched and posted an answer, not always the answer I was hoping for, but still something that moved me forward. With the upcoming 2015 release, .NET Core will be open-source and available on non-Windows systems. In fact, I think that a bigger problem here is that many Silverlight developers are simply holding on too tightly. In Windows 8 we have a great XAML stack and that’s where we should be paying attention.

They have several hundred projects to kill to even get close to Google’s bloodthirstiness. There are, of course, differing views, as is the norm on Twitter. In terms of today, nothing really relies on Microsoft to continue working on new systems and environments. Something like Blazor WASM should continue to work far into the future because WASM is an adopted web standard.

Silverlight 3 included more controls—including DataGrid, TreeView, various layout panels, DataForm for forms-driven applications and DataPager for viewing paginated data. Silverlight 1 – Silverlight 1, developed under the codename Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E) was released in 2007. It consisted of the core presentation framework, which is responsible for the user interface , interactivity and user input, basic UI controls, graphics and animation, media playback, Digital rights management , and DOM integration.

Line-of-Business Applications Consolidation with Silverlight and Windows Communication Foundation

With version 2, the programming logic can be written in any .NET language, including some nuclear evolution of common dynamic programming languages like IronRuby and IronPython. We are at a transition point, which is why today we have options. Visual Studio 2015 and .NET Core 5 can be overwhelming with its templates and support for multiple desktop, mobile and web platforms. The reason it’s so daunting is because the ecosystem for software has expanded beyond the desktop. The proliferation of mobile devices, IoT, and cloud technologies has created an infinite canvas for software developers.

If you choose a peripheral technology like Blazor or Silverlight, you will likely have problems. There was a resurgence of them in the mid to late 2000s to compete with the OLPC. Of course it was cheap junk from China and parts started falling off. I returned it for exchange but never heard from the seller again, something that happened to lots of other customers. Instead, they got a laptop that mostly looked like windows but wasn’t compatible at all and had even less software available for it than the linux netbooks did. I know a lot of orgs pissed at their killing off VB-classic.

Microsoft planned to terminate Silverlight support on October 12, 2021. Support for IE7–8 was removed between 2014 and 2016, depending on the OS. Support for IE9 and IE10 has also ended «or though the support lifecycle Why a Full-Stack BI Architecture Matters of the underlying browsers, whichever is shorter.» There is no Silverlight plugin available for Microsoft Edge. It has not been supported by Google Chrome since September 2015 or by Firefox since March 2017.

Introduced more than 10 years ago, .NET Framework is feature-rich and thoroughly battle-tested. While it was commonplace to have to combine native development with managed code in the early days of .NET, the vast majority of development tasks are supported out of the box today. Even companies such as Oracle released components that are 100 percent .NET managed code (i.e. ODP.NET managed driver) to interface with their products. Some controls that ship with Silverlight are available under the Microsoft Public License as a part of a separate project known as the Silverlight Toolkit.

Submission: A Decade Later, .NET Developers Still Fear Being ‘Silverlighted’ by Microsoft

They couldn’t even stop Internet Explorer from bleeding, so there wasn’t any mean to help Silverlight devs push forward when ActiveX and plugins were getting killed by Firefox and Chrome. WinForms doesn’t work anywhere except Windows because no one ever wrote an implementation for anything else. Silverlight was the closest Microsoft ever got to putting .NET on MacOS. Mono has a implementation of WinForms, which means it works on Mac and Linux, arguably. Java (including Swing/GUI) works great on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so I don’t know what you mean about Java not being cross platform.