Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site
Summary: Microsoft has closed its central resource site for Silverlight and broken many URLs in the process. Fixes may be coming, but no word when.
Silverlight developers just can't catch a break.
Microsoft has closed its primary Web resource for its Silverlight browser plug-in and development framework -- the Silverlight.Net site -- breaking loads of links out there to resources and discussions on Silverlight, as noted by blogger Tim Anderson on ITWriting. Clicking on those links dumps users into a bare-bones Silverlight informational page on Microsoft's MSDN site.
The move added insult to injury for those developers who are feeling increasingly disenfranchised by Microsoft's decision to back away from Silverlight.
I asked a Microsoft what, if anything, the company planned to do to fix the myriad broken Silverlight links. A spokesperson emailed me the following statment:
“In order to streamline access to online resources for the Silverlight community, we’ve consolidated our Silverlight content with the library of information on MSDN. On October 2nd, we communicated to our customers that we would be merging Silverlight.net with MSDN, and completed this migration on October 31st.
"We realize that some of our customers may have experienced challenges accessing links to content that had resided on the original Silverlight site. We apologize for any inconvenience and we’re working to resolve these issues for our customers.
"The consolidation of this content does not impact Microsoft’s Silverlight offering. We released Silverlight 5 in December 2011 and we’ve committed to supporting Silverlight into the year 2021.”
Microsoft officials did note that Silverlight would continue to be supported for ten years, back when version 5 was released to the Web in 2011. Since that time, Microsoft quietly rolled out version 5.1. Officials have repeatedly declined to say if there will be any more Silverlight releases beyond that. The rumor is no.
Update (December 21); Microsoft has fixed the broken links, as of the evening of December 20, officials said.
From a spokesperson: "Each of the 100,000 Silverlight.net forum threads are now redirecting to their new thread locations on MSDN."
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Talkback
But rembember folks....
Same here
Except that ...
Re: Except that...
Silverlight had two target use cases: RIA apps and LOB apps. RIA app developers have mostly used Flash and can, in some but not all cases, move to HTML5. Netflix is a good example of an RIA app that does use Silverlight and would have difficulty moving to another Web only platform. Instead, they seem to be building Web enabled native apps including nice ones for Windows 8 and WP. Good for them.
LOB app developers, as I stated below, are being left holding the bag. They can either keep using any skills learned on the superior but apparently dying Silverlight platform, or they can just go back to doing ASP.NET Web Forms. There's really no other option for the MS stack that supports the combination of some RAD, zero footprint installation, and cross platform usage.
Exactly
Exactly. My company needed an Adobe Illustrator-like application that could run on Windows and Mac OS X, and that would be available to our clients with minimal installation. We got exactly that, making our own Silverlight application. In fact, it is better than anyone expected at the start of the project. It is really like a WPF application running in a browser, and available also to our Mac clients.
I cannot imagine doing the same with Javascript any time soon.
What does this mean for Netflix?
No problem
Netflix could be gone by that time. HTML 7 would be the new hot standard and javascript would be used only by nostalgic seniors :)
HTML6
javascript
The site seems to be working
Not the only one
Thanks for nothing, Microsoft
Today, we are working to redevelop our app in HTML so that we can abandon our Silverlight-based products. But it didn't have to be that way. There is no technical reason why Silverlight couldn't work in Win8. It didn't have to die. Not so abruptly, at least. For me, the biggest slap in the face is that flash is still allowed in Win8's IE10 metro browser, but Silverlight isn't.
We tried to tell you
Microsoft re-jigs it's MSDN docs every now and then
These
Sinofsky's legacy continues
Unfortunately, someone at MS decided that it had the potential to be too much of a threat to something (their own personal divisional empire? the Windows client OS itself?). So management, lead by Steven Sinofsky, among others, decided it had to be shut down all of a sudden just when it was reaching a level of significant functional maturity. Instead, we now have Metro-style (or whatever they're calling them this week) apps as the platform MS is trying to push us all onto. Apparently MS management convinced themselves that all the cool web hacker kids would fall all over themselves to develop for Windows 8 if they made it so they could do so with HTML/JavaScript. Which just goes to prove the accuracy of what Robert Downey, Jr. said in "Tropic Thunder" - never go full retard. Good luck with that.
Well, Metro style apps, even XAML based ones, are a non-starter for LOB developers for one simple reason - they only work on Windows 8. I actually like Windows 8 a lot and have been using it on both my desktop and laptop development machines since RTM. But I won't be doing any Windows 8 development in the foreseeable future. My clients have a heterogeneous bunch of client machines that I need to support. Silverlight would have covered them all, but since that's a dead end (thanks, MS management!) and I need both RAD (which leaves out MVC) and zero footprint installs (which leaves out Win Forms, WPF, and, ick, native C++), I'm only left with one viable platform - old, dirty ASP.NET Web Forms. It gets the job done, but not without a cost.
MS management has assuredly been doing their utmost to alienate their LOB developers. I wonder if they've noticed?
That they have
“Go then, there are other worlds than these.” Stephen King, The Dark Tower
As for LOB application I wonder if it's time to jump off the MS platform altogether. Too may failing promises and killed products. If you look around you will see lots of amazing things things outside of MS world. I reluctantly looking at F# and wonder if it worth investments. It may be that one day MS would just pull plug on this. I think I would be better off investing my time in Scala and Clojure. Anyway, [Subject]
Oh yeah
Ya think?
RE: “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” Stephen King, The Dark To