http://twitter.com/MossyBlog/status/23980976666

Is this guy is for real? (Former Product Manager (Silverlight/WPF) Microsoft Corp, UX Specialist)

I guess that balancing healthy internal competition between teams vs benefits of cross fertilisation vs dealing with the * is never going to be an easy job.

from the outside it looks simple-though - they all have to be developed further by MS. 

But when we look back in x years we will see that WPF kind of fell by the wayside, Silverlight got marginalised and HTML5 won through as the mainstream web development platform.

It kind of narls me to say the above as I believe that Silverlight has loads more potential, especially in the short term.

In any event the best way forward, at least for now, is to commit to all 3 and continue the competition/cross fertilisation/* management process as best we can.

Of course I have never run a conglomerate myself.

WPF being dead...I can kind of believe it. It's been around for almost 4 years now and it still hasn't really taken off. I like it, and it makes drastically changing the look of standard controls extremely easy, but for most developers that's not enough of a reason to move away from WinForms.

spivonious said:

There is so much more you can do with Silverlight/Flash than you can with HTML 5. I'm not even sure why they're mentioned together.

 

WPF being dead...I can kind of believe it. It's been around for almost 4 years now and it still hasn't really taken off. I like it, and it makes drastically changing the look of standard controls extremely easy, but for most developers that's not enough of a reason to move away from WinForms.

If Silverlight doesn't get it's act together, that won't be the case for much longer. I've criticized Silverlight for a lack of ambition before, for example HTML 4 is far better for laying out text than anything in Silverlight or WPF. But in HTML5 there is not only the Canvas element that will let developers do most of the 2d graphical operations they couldn't do in traditional HTML, but it will (most likely) have WebGL which gives web developers a proper immediate-mode 3d API for the first time. Silverlight could have given that to developers years ago, but right now even Flash 10 has a more powerful 3d facility than SL.

As for the complaint from twitter, Microsoft is a big corporation with multiple divisions. HTML5 is getting a lot of attention with the IE9 team. It's clear that the Windows division hates WPF (and probably .NET in general) and has no intention to ever use it, hence the development of Direct2d, DirectWrite and that animation thing that nobody is ever going to use because there's no authoring story for it. Meanwhile  Silverlight, WPF and .NET in general come from Developer Tools Division (correct me if I'm wrong) where they still have plenty of support. Basing the Visual Studio 2010 shell and editor on WPF is their attempt to get people to take it seriously, but it's not had much impact so far as I can tell.

Has Microsoft forgotten they are in the business of building the developer foundation and NOT in the business of upchucking a new consumer product (iPhone) every 6 months?

rhm said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

If Silverlight doesn't get it's act together, that won't be the case for much longer. I've criticized Silverlight for a lack of ambition before, for example HTML 4 is far better for laying out text than anything in Silverlight or WPF. But in HTML5 there is not only the Canvas element that will let developers do most of the 2d graphical operations they couldn't do in traditional HTML, but it will (most likely) have WebGL which gives web developers a proper immediate-mode 3d API for the first time. Silverlight could have given that to developers years ago, but right now even Flash 10 has a more powerful 3d facility than SL.

 

As for the complaint from twitter, Microsoft is a big corporation with multiple divisions. HTML5 is getting a lot of attention with the IE9 team. It's clear that the Windows division hates WPF (and probably .NET in general) and has no intention to ever use it, hence the development of Direct2d, DirectWrite and that animation thing that nobody is ever going to use because there's no authoring story for it. Meanwhile  Silverlight, WPF and .NET in general come from Developer Tools Division (correct me if I'm wrong) where they still have plenty of support. Basing the Visual Studio 2010 shell and editor on WPF is their attempt to get people to take it seriously, but it's not had much impact so far as I can tell.

"HTML 4 is far better for laying out text than anything in Silverlight or WPF"

How so?

One bad e.g., in HTML, if you have a 100x100 div, with a span inside it with a loooong Url as text, the Url/text doesn't break to fit inside the div, it just stays on one long line.

Maddus Mattus said:

I prefer HTML 5 and javascript because it does not require a plugin and is availible for all.

That's really a myth though isn't it? It's weird that when you call something a standard, people then automatically credit it with being built into browsers and not needing a plugin, when in reality Flash reaches far more desktops than HTML5 does or will even in 2 or 3 years. Even Silverlight, well behind Flash, almost certainly has more installations than browsers that have HTML5 features.

Certainly developing content that requires a plugin isn't inherently attractive, but when I see things like Apple's streaming event last week and Google's Wave that require a large percentage of their potential audience to install a whole new browser, that's the very definition of a "boil the ocean" strategy.

Harlequin said:

rhm said:

*snip*

"HTML 4 is far better for laying out text than anything in Silverlight or WPF"

 

How so?

 

One bad e.g., in HTML, if you have a 100x100 div, with a span inside it with a loooong Url as text, the Url/text doesn't break to fit inside the div, it just stays on one long line.

Actually, I've overstated that complaint in the case of WPF because you do have the FlowDocument there - not as powerful as HTML, but useable for most scenarios.

Silverlight however is as basic as VB3 for text layout - text is just formed in rectangles. Want to wrap it around an image, or any other content? Forget it. The RichTextBox added in SL4 allows for some styling, but you still end up with just a RichTextBox, like old-school VB. And the styling system of XAML, while good for laying out controls, is both cumbersome to use and not as powerful as CSS when it comes to laying out content.

I don't think this is the case -- WPF is a superset of Silverlight and not everyone wants to write apps that are runnable through a web browser.

Herbie

Dr Herbie said:

I seems to me that people are prematurely calling WPF dead because they have seen Silverlight now running as a desktop client (OOBE) and they immediately think that MS will therefore kill WPF.

 

I don't think this is the case -- WPF is a superset of Silverlight and not everyone wants to write apps that are runnable through a web browser.

 

Herbie

 

I guess the question is which technologies will end up being the main stream web development technology (as opposed to which technologies are going to die)?

MS is already positioning WPF in its own niche (well able to step up to the challenge of being used in the development of world beating desktop based applications such as VS).

I personally hope that none of these technologies will be going away any time soon.

Regarding Silverlight and HTML5 I happen to agree with http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/the-future-of-silverlight/

Silverlight has it's specific uses, and there it is currently a much better choice than HTML5.

mawcc said:

I really don't understand what "WPF is dead" should mean. Silverlight and WPF are basically the same technology (XAML + Code),  they just happen to run in different environments.  So what the guy probably wanted to say is ".NET desktop apps are dead", but that is clearly not the case.

 

Regarding Silverlight and HTML5 I happen to agree with http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/the-future-of-silverlight/

Silverlight has it's specific uses, and there it is currently a much better choice than HTML5.

Use the right tool for the job at hand...

That simple advice is timeless and generally always correct.

This person does not work for Microsoft and therefore his musings are his own and are not representative of what Microsoft is doing/thinking/planning/etc.....

There is nothing wrong the idea of Silverlight AND HTML5. 

WPF only runs on Windows and provides more horsepower than Silverlight (like support for true 3D, access to the underlying system, etc...).

Speculation may be fun, but it's generally a waste of time.

Use the right tool for the job at hand...
C

That's b4 we even disucss the feature gaps b/t SL and WPF when building real world complex APPs rather than some mickey mouse websites pretending to be web apps.

spivonious said:

There is so much more you can do with Silverlight/Flash than you can with HTML 5. I'm not even sure why they're mentioned together.

 

WPF being dead...I can kind of believe it. It's been around for almost 4 years now and it still hasn't really taken off. I like it, and it makes drastically changing the look of standard controls extremely easy, but for most developers that's not enough of a reason to move away from WinForms.

I'm probably not your typical "Microsoft-ecosystem developer" but I think the reasons I don't use WPF are the same reasons few other developers use it too:

First and foremost: the WPF designer in VS sucks. You have to use Expression Blend, but that's a separate product with its own learning curve. WPF is hardly as simple as WinForms in getting something up-and-running.

I'm also put off by the lack of WPF applications that aren't ugly. WinForms makes it easy to make something that looks presentable. Pretty much all the WPF apps I've seen in the wild (with the exception of Expression and VS2010) are horrible abominations. Developers are not designers.

Other things, like the extra initialization delay put me off.

And yeah, even VS is using WPF now. And nice looking stuff like Blend is long already WPF. And WinLiveApps finally get rid of XP support, which may likely going to move to WPF in the future. (BTW, yeah, XP can do WPF, but, most people will not upgrade as already happened.)

W3bbo said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

I'm probably not your typical "Microsoft-ecosystem developer" but I think the reasons I don't use WPF are the same reasons few other developers use it too:

 

First and foremost: the WPF designer in VS sucks. You have to use Expression Blend, but that's a separate product with its own learning curve. WPF is hardly as simple as WinForms in getting something up-and-running.

 

I'm also put off by the lack of WPF applications that aren't ugly. WinForms makes it easy to make something that looks presentable. Pretty much all the WPF apps I've seen in the wild (with the exception of Expression and VS2010) are horrible abominations. Developers are not designers.

 

Other things, like the extra initialization delay put me off.

You don't need to be doing any kind of crazy whiz-bang animation or custom UI for WPF to be useful. The data binding and validation tooling alone is worth the price of admission. I've used it to great success in some LOB applications with nothing other than the stock templates. So far, I'm much more productive in WPF than I ever was in WinForms.

Learn Silverlight (from VS) ->

Learn Silverlight (from Blend) ->

Learn WPF?

was good, allowing me to be productive from the off (but gradually enrich my skills over time).  I suspect that the market will demand that spot 3 now becones learn HTML5

I am at spot 2 at the moment (I actually like Blend now and find it a big help - in part thanks to the enthusiasm of people like Adam Kinney - my starting point was one of fear!).

I have a similar approach to server side (which culminates in Azure), although I have less demands on that track at the moment.

Not sure why I am sharing this (other than the fact that it helps me to understand my own position in all this)

W3bbo said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

I'm probably not your typical "Microsoft-ecosystem developer" but I think the reasons I don't use WPF are the same reasons few other developers use it too:

 

First and foremost: the WPF designer in VS sucks. You have to use Expression Blend, but that's a separate product with its own learning curve. WPF is hardly as simple as WinForms in getting something up-and-running.

 

I'm also put off by the lack of WPF applications that aren't ugly. WinForms makes it easy to make something that looks presentable. Pretty much all the WPF apps I've seen in the wild (with the exception of Expression and VS2010) are horrible abominations. Developers are not designers.

 

Other things, like the extra initialization delay put me off.

Here is a shameless example of mine

http://jmchome.web.officelive.com/default.aspx

Please let me know what you think. Obviously I am not a good designer, I have bad tastes, but, I tried my best. Pretty old program as a testing ground to learn WPF .

kettch said:

W3bbo said:

*snip*

You don't need to be doing any kind of crazy whiz-bang animation or custom UI for WPF to be useful. The data binding and validation tooling alone is worth the price of admission. I've used it to great success in some LOB applications with nothing other than the stock templates. So far, I'm much more productive in WPF than I ever was in WinForms.

Having played with Silverlight for WP7 with the Beta tools, I can see that putting together a WPF form might be faster than doing so with WinForms - typing out some XML with VS2010's excellent intellisense it pretty rapid and the layout and alignment does seem to be better in WPF because it's more 'built in' than WebForms.

... conversion to WPF fan is 10% complete ...

Herbie

What he said.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eternalcoding/archive/2011/06/13/html-5-vs-silverlight-5.aspx

The very fact that SL is stuck in 32-bit while WPF on 64 guarantees the latter stays around as long as it takes for the former to catch up.

Silverlight is only 32-bit on the Web - it's 64-bit or 32-bit on the desktop (and you'll struggle to find a Windows user using a x64 IE/Firefox/etc)

Also WPF isn't dead, but it is now dead on the web. Microsoft have effectively been silently killing XBAPs over the past couple of months - the IE9 RTM won't run them from the Internet zone and a Windows update last night basically took them out of IE by making the user go through an "I'm downloading a program, are you sure" dialog box.

Silverlight issuposed to be a subset, but it isnt. they keep adding new features that are not available in wpf, while leaving out things from wpf that you'd really need in silverlight (such as proper TPL support)

3d is a very the perfect example of this.. SL5 will have fat better 3d support via XNA than wpf ever had. so what to choose? not so easy anymore..

this is really the problem with these two platforms, they need to be unified. devdev has talked about that for a long time,  but never delivered :/ for every step towards unifacation, a bunch of new features gets added to silverlight but not made available in wpf, even as external libraries

One more thing which I haven't found an answer anywhere. Is/Will SL5's 3D API be supported on the Mac?

EDIT: grammer

Sep 09, 2010 at 7:36 AM, rhm wrote

*snip*

Actually, I've overstated that complaint in the case of WPF because you do have the FlowDocument there - not as powerful as HTML, but useable for most scenarios.

In WPF, FlowDocument is what you're supposed to use to do an HTML like document, WPF as a whole is more of an application-centric rather than document-centric platform. Which is why I think it more fits the need of app development than does HTML.

Plus, if anything doesn't exist in WPF you can create it on your own from scratch, and you can't really do that in HTML. WPF is just a much more powerful, much more flexible platform. HTML has a rigid DOM, WPF just is a very abstract platform, with some defined controls.

If the worst nightmares were true that Microsoft is moving to the HTML5 DOM, and they appear not to be, we would be sacrificing a lot of flexibility on the dev end.

17 hours ago, Deltakosh wrote

To add to this discussion, a technical comparison to help make a choice for a
given project:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eternalcoding/archive/2011/06/13/html-5-vs-silverlight-5.aspx

Thank you for the link. Please just open a new thread next time because it is harder to detect a dead thread and tracing the current topic that you started.

BTW, SL5? Kind of don't want to install the beta. Unable to view the stuff unless I update, but, I prefer the final release. Thanks for the link still.