I've been watching with concern the MS de-emphasizing of Silverlight ever since Muglia shot his mouth off last year. Like everyone else, I've been confused, concerned, pissed off, hating the prospect of devolving to HTML/JS, and completely unable to understand Microsoft's motivations in giving the finger to its developer community. All the emphasis on HTML/JS was pretty worrisome, but recently a somewhat clearer, less bleak picture began to emerge that Build has brought into focus. During and after Build I did a lot of reading and thinking about what MS was saying and not saying. Initially, my impression was that it's not so bad. Today, I had a further thought that takes the form of a question I wanted to pose to this community:
How exactly, other than the deployment mechanism (app store vs. your own website) and perceived platform "reach" (no OSX, I guess), is developing a Windows 8 Metro app in C# different than creating a Silverlight out of browser app in C#?
The both use managed C#. They both use XAML. They both use WCF RIA services. They both make use of isolated storage. They both can access local devices. If anything, the Metro app can do more than the Silverlight OOB app. Am I wrong here? I'd really like to see what everyone has to say about this question.
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Of course, why the use of the word "Silverlight" to describe their "new" app model by an MS employee is probably a firing offense is a whole other question.
Discussion on:
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