MS To Push Silverlight Via Redesigned Microsoft.com 710
Marilyn M. writes "It looks like Microsoft is getting desperate about the dismal rates of Silverlight adoption by consumers and developers since its release earlier this year. According to NeoSmart Technologies, Microsoft is preparing a fully Silverlight-powered redesign of their website, doing away with most HTML pages entirely. With over 60 million unique users visiting Microsoft.com a month, Microsoft's last-ditch effort might be what it takes to breathe some life back into Silverlight. The article notes: 'At the moment, very few non-Microsoft-owned sites are using Silverlight at all; let alone for the entire UI.'"
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
Let's make MS Help EVEN Worse (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, Microsoft help is already terrible enough. MSDN right now is such a mishmash, that, when I took the survey to improve MSDN, the survey itself crashed. Like, I don't even bother with Microsoft.com anymore, or msdn.microsoft.com. They broke F1 == Help in Visual Studio... what more incompetence do you need?
Opera... (Score:4, Informative)
Not interested.
Keeps crashing. I have pulled it. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yeah but (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Informative)
Except that basically everybody has a flash player running already, there are tons and tons more resources and libraries available to developers, and it works on every significant platform.... There are even open source players.
Flex/AS3 development is pretty damned easy. How much easier can Silverlight possibly be to justify deploying to a platform with significantly lower market penetration?
Re:News flash! (Score:5, Informative)
I have a Panasonic camera. They could have developed a proprietary memory format like Sony did, but it uses plain old cheap SD cards.
They could have made the lens threads a weird size so they could sell their own teleconverters and filters, but it's plain old 55mm, and people have quite happily screwed Olympus, Nikon, Minolta, etc. stuff onto them.
Some companies do just make useful stuff and sell it, but they're not the ones that make the news as often, since they mostly stay out of the spotlight and just sit around making stuff and money.
In the computer world, Logitech is sort of like this. They've not tried to integrate their speakers with their mice (Microsoft would find a way to do this!), and instead just try to make useful products that stand on their own merit.
Re:Firefox... (Score:3, Informative)
Helping other people? Downloading stuff they need, putting it on a USB stick, and installing it at their place. I remember doing that for SP2 for people still on dial-up.
Re:News flash! (Score:3, Informative)
A new attempt to monopolizing the net ? (Score:2, Informative)
Is Silverlight just another attempt to try and push a Windows-only technology onto the net?
By getting rid of HTML and by using Silverlight, MS are going to sit on the specifications. They are definitely not going to share the Silverlight internals with the rest of us.
Re:Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:1, Informative)
No, that is incorrect. While not truly cross platform, it supports Firefox, IE (on various Windows versions) and Safari (on various versions of Mac OS 10).
See the requirements page. [microsoft.com]
Re:News flash! (Score:3, Informative)
As noted by someone else already, Adobe's website does not require Flash. SOME pages use it, sure, but the site does not become broken and unusable without it. All their pages are ubiquitous HTML/CSS design.
=Smidge=
Re:Yeah but (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/sdk/ [adobe.com]
Re:Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:4, Informative)
on MS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Standardization_and_licensing [wikipedia.org]
Google search for these components and MS Silverlight showing ties between them:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=silverlight+%22Windows+Forms%22+%22ADO.NET%22+%22ASP.NET%22 [google.com]
LoB
Re:Come on... (Score:3, Informative)
Never heard about Ming [php.net], haven't you?
Ok there is no fancy GUI but you can create some SWF contents with your notepad...
Look to the examples here [opaque.net]. I found a page with a lot of very nice examples, but I can't remember where...
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Informative)
Silverlight isn't open source, but you are not restricted to
Also, although still not open source, the source code for
And you are not limited to a single platform to develop on although it is currently difficult to do so on a platform other than Windows
And Silverlight 2.0 will be available on Mac (and, via third party, Linux).
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of tools for Flash-compatible SWF files out there besides Flash. Flex is one. HaXe [haxe.org] is another. Laszlo Systems [laszlosystems.com] has a proprietary product and an open version called Open Laszlo, which IIRC is built on Java. There are probably more I'm forgetting.
HaXe is its own language from the guy who designed the Neko VM. It run on the Neko runtime, and it targets Neko, Javascript browser DOM with its own Ajax libraries, or Flash. I haven't done anything huge with it, but it was pretty quick to pick up for a couple of small projects.
There are also graphical Flash authoring tools besides Flash and Dreamweaver. They range from Swish Max which is meant to be a full Flash replacement for most people down to specialized things like animated banner creators and photo gallery creators. There's also a lot of royalty-free and even some Open Source components you can download and reuse.
Flash isn't as open as JavaScript and HTML, and it is dominated by one company. It's not exactly useful only to people who buy Flash, though.
Even MS partners dislike Silverlight (Score:4, Informative)
It was very enlightening. They left me with the one final note that, in a year, their opinion may change as Silverlight matures. But based on the examples they gave me, there's just no reason for anyone to ever adopt Silverlight.
Going into the political aspects here... this is exactly what Microsoft does well - they clone something, pay people to adopt it, and use their gigantic Windows Update distribution system to put it on 90% of the desktops around the world. Flash's days will be numbered when we get to the point where Microsoft starts to introduce Flash compatibility. That's the embreace-extend-extingush approach, and we should run for the hills when that happens. It's too bad that Microsoft can't just compete by using the open standard instead of flooding the market with an incompatible clone and cramming it down people's throats.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Informative)
This started with the
Re:I'm surprised (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:5, Informative)
Hi, to get the best user experience from this product, you need to install the
I know, I've just been doing that on the new server, getting it ready... 300 MB of download and 3 reboots (that's no counting the rest of the windows updates I needed to get).
Note that the runtimes are optional components in WU, so many of your potential customers will not have the latest and greatest versions (which, naturally, will be required) including those customers running Vista.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Informative)
Neither does Flex. The Flex 2 SDK is a free download.
Re:Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, let's reward such a great company, a company were developers are a tool extending their monopoly, a company competing not by building the best products the industry gets behind but by building similar products which only work on their monopoly platform and have the balls to tell the industry they are open. IMO, only someone with their head in the ground would consider MS Silverlight for anything.
LoB
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't know who Douglas Crockford is, there's a very good chance you have no idea what Javascript can be.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:3, Informative)
Re:News flash! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Informative)
MS already dropping support for platforms (Score:5, Informative)
No, they just developed Secure Digital. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Silver Light is actually pretty damn cool (Score:3, Informative)
Silverlight is an independant implemenation of the CLR and does not depend on whether or not the Full Windows CLRs are installed or not on a machine. The complete size (of the downloads) for Silverlight 1.0 is ~1.4MB and for 2.0 is ~4MB [asp.net]. Also, I've personally never had a reboot when installing silverlight.
Re:"There are open source players"? (Score:4, Informative)
With nspluginwrapper (configured automatically on OS install) Flash Player 9 works as expected in 64-bit firefox. If I didn't know how the system worked behind the scenes I wouldn't even realize there was a 32-bit plugin being used, or that there was a potential for issue.
MS Downloads beta site is using Silverlight (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Informative)
There is no reason to put the SDK on your Windows partition, so if you didn't have 54MB free, you could still install it on, say, a USB stick from the trash outside a convention center or something.
Let's Dispell Some FUD (Score:2, Informative)
First, let's tackle the most common misconception, that Silverlight isn't platform agnostic. The Silverlight runtime is supported on Windows and OSX in IE, Firefox, and Safari. For Linux, there's Moonlight, a Mono-based implementation. Additionally, it's worth noting that Microsoft has supported Novell's development efforts on this.
Okay, let's talk about versioning. The current version, 1.0, is somewhat limited in that it only includes XAML, JS, and media support at this time. The next version, 2.0 (formerly called 1.1) includes a mostly feature-complete scaled-down version of the
As far as tools required, Notepad.exe is all you need if you're so inclined. The basic markup of Silverlight is XAML, an XML-based format.
Web server: Anything. Doesn't matter. Silverlight is a strictly client-side tech.
Regarding being a "Flash clone:" Not entirely. The XAML-based markup for Silverlight is a subset of that used in Windows Presentation Foundation, which is on track to become the
And regarding search engines not being able to index Silverlight sites, that's partially true. XAML is just XML, so it's still readable by search engines. Resolving URLs within the XAML might be an issue, and I too am interested in seeing how that's solved. FWIW, Google's Site Maps tool solves this problem somewhat.
So, overall, I'd say it's a standard worth giving a chance. The folks responsible for Silverlight (ScottGu, among others) are aware of Microsoft's previous mistakes and are working to not repeat history.
Disclaimer: I am not a Microsoft employee or astroturfer. I am a geek who happens to specialize in
Re:Firefox... (Score:3, Informative)
My concern is them pulling a Samba/IE trick.
In the case of Samba, back in the days when SMB was being rename CIFS, Microsoft was pretty open about the specifications. They really wanted NT to replace Netware as the market leader, to do this they realized that they would need a protocol that supported platforms other than Windows and get other companies involved in the mix.
In the case of IE, we're all aware of IE for Mac and Unix.
Now they just need to wait long enough for the product to take over the market space. At this point, they've done their job and can now stop supporting those other pesky platforms that no one really uses anyways. IE for other platforms was left to rot, and all of the Windows network protocols suddenly became trade secrets.
If you can't see a strong possibility for this story repeating for Moonlight, there's something wrong with you.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:2, Informative)
bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
That is exactly what it is.
Mono is junk that gives people a false impression that
Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth, and that's OK. The fact that support
So I downloaded the Mono for OS X package
That's your mistake: Mono doesn't work well on OS X because Apple is playing their own games with deliberate incompatibilities. For example, Apple deliberately keeps X11 on OS X broken in order to force people to port to their crappy native libraries.
Re:Breeze to Program (Score:4, Informative)
You really only need Flash if your more of a designer than a coder.