Silverlight: Lighting up the client

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

Sam — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:38:58 GMT

@Michael Gautier: MySpace is one of the biggest implementation of .NET in the social networking industry. If you start looking and investigating you can find hundreds of more examples of .NET implementations.

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

Sam — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:26:20 GMT

@PHPRocks: Your name implies who is a cheerleader. See how less PHP rocks compared to ASP.NET here:

msjoe.com/.../php-versus-asp-net-ndash-windows-versus-linux-ndash-who-rsquo-s-the-fastest

@Michael Gautier: You and I are comparing different things. While you tout the usefulness of C++ in software/technology companies, I am referring to the rest of the industries - finance, medical, mining, traffic control and response systems, auto industry, and hundreds of more that use .NET, C# and recently Silverlight for internal applications and internal websites. You look at the revenue generated by apps sold by technology companies and I am referring to the apps that are essential for running daily businesses for companies of other industries. Further, you talk about companies like Adobe or Oracle - these companies are clearly not going to pick Microsoft's technologies to build their apps. So your examples don't count.

Some commercial examples for successful products that use .NET are Visual Studio 2010 IDE (uses WPF and hence .NET), all apps for Windows Phone 7 will be written using Silverlight and C# (OR VB.NET). Go and look up all the amazing apps written using Silverlight for the phone platform already. RedGate uses .NET for its products. Bing uses .NET all over the place and Bing is gaining more and more market share. Hotmail uses .NET too. So, you cannot say Microsoft does not use .NET for its own products.

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

PHPRocks — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 19:13:48 GMT

@Sam is a cheerleader - don't waste your time with him.

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

Michael Gautier — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 23:20:48 GMT

Sam,

Examples are lacking of highly profitable or successful commercial software applications that are written in C# and .NET. The next Internet Explorer, the browser plug-ins, the Silverlight runtime, none of these are written in C#. Many developers would like to be more successful with the software they write and sometimes you have to observe the success of others to become informed as to what tools and processes enable success.

In this economy, how are developers going to become more successful? What do successful software companies do. Well, Microsoft writes it's front-line software in C++. Oracle writes it's database in C++. Adobe writes the highly profitable Adobe Creative Suite an Flash runtime in C++. And AutoDesk makes software that gives automobile and aircraft manufactures the tools necessary to design the next car or plane. It is an expensive solution built in C++.

Myself, I have used Microsoft .NET for the last 10 years or so since it was in it first beta form. A great technology for internal IT apps, it is a vast improvement over the old solutions we used to build in ASP and ActiveX. However, my analysis is about how far successful companies and developers have gone with these tools and what that says about the appropriateness of the solution for software targeting the general population.

Successful apps, on average, appear to be built primarily of HTML (ASP, PHP, etc) or C++ on the desktop. Show me a truly success app built in Silverlight that brings in revenues on the level of AutoDesk or Adobe and I'll agree with your position.

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

Bruce — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 23:10:13 GMT

As a developer, talking to programmers, many were excited about the Silverlight technology and just starting to "put their foot in the water". Some common concerts were about Microsoft's commitment to this technology and the traction that Silverlight would gain. I believe that Silverlight was just on very edge of really taking off.

Even the appearance of Microsoft backing away from Silverlight makes people nervous about spending time and money on stomething that might become sort of an afterthought for Microsoft.

I have been waiting for something like Silverlight, nice, clean solutions written entirely in a .Net language. HTML is just one big clumsey work-around with "mishmash" solutions. My vote is for Silverlight!!!

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

Sam — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:52:15 GMT

@Michael Gautier: I know as a fact that the Silverlight framework is written in C++. So, according to your post, Silverlight should be an excellent/solid framework. And it is!

However, don't compare apples to oranges. C++ is used solely for desktop/system applications in both Windows and Linux worlds. It's way too and overly complex for developers that develop websites, web applications and for business world developers. Writing solid code in C++ is complex and requires high level of skill. You can easily mess up and create hundreds of memory leaks. Debugging is another nightmare situation for real-time demands thrown at developers in businesses and media companies. You can't tell a trader - "eh, pardon me, but you have to stop trading while I debug this C++ code and resolve the issue!" You will be FIRED! Most .NET developers can code almost all kinds of business applications in C# in half the time and guess what? The C# app will perform absolutely great - to the order of milli-seconds compared to a similar app written in C++.

Silverlight and other web technologies like ASP.NET work amazingly well for websites and web apps. Have you tried Bing Maps (Silverlight version)? Compare it to Google Maps and see the difference for yourself. I am willing to wait a couple of seconds more if I get rich features like Bing Maps. Silverlight is also used in Hotmail and Live Spaces to show beautiful slideshows. Now, it will be used to develop apps for the new Windows Phone 7. Imagine they built a PDF reader in Silverlight for it!!! Unfortunately, irony is that Microsoft/Bob Muglia made a HUGE blunder by down playing Silverlight at the PDC 2010.

If you have never worked with it or WPF to develop real world apps (writing an app at home to try out a technology is not good enough to draw conclusions), please don't leave unreasonable comments.

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

Michael Gautier — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:27:38 GMT

Businesses and developers need to engage user’s where they are. Your service (a game, an e-commerce portal, social network, or business application) may have some truly great code behind it. Yet, if your client cannot run it or run your software or run it well, then you have reached a real roadblock in the customer relationship. The solution is to plan well enough that your customer can run your software easily and have it run well. When they access your web application or desktop application, it needs to be as solid as Amazon.com or Microsoft Word out of the gate. Software that cannot meet that standard consistently is not going to make it.

Amazon.com is a complex website that everyone can access and few people are ever distracted by its technical qualities. The web application works so well that people remain focused on what they are doing. Microsoft Word runs on a Mac and Windows. The Ribbon may not be popular with some, but the software works reliably for a large number of people. As a solid piece of software, Word is able to shadow complexity to an extent that you are actively focused on creating a document, applying the software.

Silverlight is not a technology that is going to give your users a flawless experience on the level of Amazon.com or Microsoft Word. When you deliver an application in Silverlight 4 and your user is somehow on version 2 or 3 because they are not eager to do Windows Updates, they are sending inquiries into your support department if you have one which is eating into the time you have available to develop new features for the next version. You cannot simply package up the latest runtime with your Silverlight application. The plug-in update process could break depending on the combination of anti-virus, firewall, or other browser security add-ins that could impair the plug-in update process. Should this happen, the user is either going to avoid taking further action with your application or they will give you a call. Let’s say they call, and you walk them through the configuration process, well, if your troubleshooting steps do not work, then frustration ensues or the customer decides it is not worth it or both.

Adding insult to injury, most of the target customers for your application is either spending more of their time on new devices were the runtime will not function, or all the things running on their machine is slowing down your application. In this scenario, you are attempting to do some tremendous things with Silverlight that HTML lacks at a similar level of support. The code works, and it performs well on your development machine with generous amounts of memory, processor, and system bus resources. Users’ both, business and personal, have a different class of machine that is also new, but not nearly as well configured. Most of them have multiple applications running or some malware or both. They are not technically inclined to consider the resource ramifications of their machine or how they use it. Quite simply, they are running your application and are wondering why it does not run as well as that YouTube video they just watched, also in the browser. The bottom line? You are toast.

Collectively, Silverlight and Flash are the right technologies for advancements in technology, but the overall operating environment (across platforms), the scenarios in play, and the politics among tech visionaries may doom these technologies to a niche focus. As a result, investing in these technologies would appear to be an unwise direction.

C++ is not really going away nor is native APIs. It is an approach that will continue with Apple’s Mac platform, Linux, and high-end Windows applications. WPF codes great but does not always run well. Sometimes video playback quality and function is held hostage to the configuration of the machine and no managed coding technique will resolve the situation and you have delve into DirectX and graphics device handles. It does work well in business application scenarios featuring little to no multimedia, but then the rendering of a drop down list may split into a million pieces like static on a TV when a channel is not available. The issue may be a graphics card with a slight bug, but your software is supposed to transparently handle this scenario right? Well, you find that you can’t just ask a user to switch out their graphics card. You have to turn on software only rendering to resolve the problem which defeats part of the purpose of WPF in the first instance.

Microsoft Excel, on the other hand, written in C++ and doing a million complex things under a simple UI has none of these issues. The lesson is that those things that are tested and proven in fundamental, key areas such as C++ desktop applications (web browsers themselves, games, and CAD) and well coded HTML browser applications offer the best mechanisms for connecting users to systems. The question becomes, do you want something that is easy to code but may ultimately be fragile or something that takes significant effort but runs well?

www.michaelgautier.com

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

S.Somasegar — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:22:35 GMT

Thanks Ewing,

I fixed the link to point to the right place. Thanks for the catch.

-somasegar

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

E. Ewing — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:03:58 GMT

Soma,

The link to microsoftpdc.com links to an Outlook OWA login page for Microsoft, not to the PDC as intended.

E. Ewing

re: Silverlight: Lighting up the client

TadAnderson — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 12:16:07 GMT

Personally PDC bored me to death (until Bob did his interview).

I do not need to pay 5K a year to maintain a software license just so MS can help me develop HTML 5. EVERYONE will be doing that. If they have nothing special to offer, like Silverlight, then have nothing to offer.

the rest of my thoughts...

realworldsa.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/silverlightisdeadlonglivehtml5reallyhtml5.htm