Silverlight and Windows 8 RT

Nice of you to keep taking personal shots at me HAL.  You sure are a nice guy.

I never "sold" my boss on Windows RT doing anything.  Windows RT didn't even exist when Silverlight business decisions were being made.  Microsoft never said Silverlight would work on it, nor did I.  But thanks for putting words in my mouth.

Yes, there are technical challenges to the ARM platform.  It is possible that porting Silverlight to ARM wouldn't have been possible.  I doubt it--if Microsoft had really wanted it to happen, they probably could have made it happen.  Or they could have ported made some sub-set work on ARM like they did with Flash.  The Silverlight team (before it was gutted) had a ton of good people--some of the best at the company.   But Silverlight wasn't a priority. In fact, it was the exact opposite.  KILLING Silverlight was the priority, because the Windows division hated it.  It made them look bad.  Why write apps for Windows when you could just target Silverlight instead?  You got a ton of the good parts of writing a desktop Windows app without your client even having to have Windows installed.  Your customer could just run in a web browser, and could even run on a Mac.  That must have really POed some Windows folks.   

The point is, Microsoft created a great platform, and then completely broke it.  It isn't really WinRT that is the problem.  I expect WinRT tablets won't really sell very well anyway compared to the Surface Pro.  The problem is that the "Metro" browser in Windows 8 won't run Silverlight, even on Intel based machines which obviously can run it.  Sure you can run it in desktop mode.  Do you know how confusing it is for customers to have multiple versions of IE on their machine, with one version running your app fine and the other completely refusing to load it?  Especially considering the technology it is refusing to load is a MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY??

Whenever we explain to one of our confused customers what is going on they are dumbfounded with the decisions that Microsoft made, but that seems to be par for the course with Windows 8.  It's one thing to explain that Apple won't let Silveright run on an iPad.  They get that.  But when we tell them that MICROSOFT won't let it run in their own browser?  They are speechless. 

Thankfully, for the time being, once you teach the customer how to get to the desktop browser they are ok, but the whole thing is ridiculous.

Anyway, I apologize for pulling the thread off topic.  In answer to the original post:

 

1)  No you cannot run Silverlight on Windows RT

2)  No you most likely will NEVER be able to run Silverlight on Windows RT, unelss Microsoft suddenly does a complete 180 on everything they have said for the past year.  I am not holding my breath.

3)  Yes, Micrososft COULD make Silverlight run on Windows RT, but they choose not to.

4. Yes, you should complain to Microsoft about this.
5. No, I don't think it will do any good, because Microsoft has shown over the past year that they no longer have any interest in listening to their customer's concerns about anything.

 

But it does run on Windows 8 Desktop version of IE 10 which is the environment on the Surface Pro. I am really not sure Jamie is on sound technical footing with his/her contention that Silverlight would be easily ported to the Windows RT (ARM processor) environment, since I don't believe that there is sufficient .NET sandboxed platform support, nor the requirement of Intel hardware for Silverlight. However, the Surface Pro (and any tablet that is basically a PC tablet using a Core i3, i5 processor) will work.

Have a nice day Jamie and next time get all of the facts before you sell your boss on something like WinRT supporting Silverlight.

Ciao,

HAL

"Take a stress pill Dave and think things over..." - HAL 9000, 2001 A Space Odyssey

Anyway, I apologize for pulling the thread off topic.  In answer to the original post:

1)  No you cannot run Silverlight on Windows RT

2)  No you most likely will NEVER be able to run Silverlight on Windows RT, unelss Microsoft suddenly does a complete 180 on everything they have said for the past year.  I am not holding my breath.

3)  Yes, Micrososft COULD make Silverlight run on Windows RT, but they choose not to.

4. Yes, you should complain to Microsoft about this.
5. No, I don't think it will do any good, because Microsoft has shown over the past year that they no longer have any interest in listening to their customer's concerns about anything.

LOL, what a jerky comment, insinuating I was fired from Microsoft.  No, I assure you after 11 years of stock option grants from Microsoft I didn't leave because I was fired.

As for Silverlight's death effecting me, maybe if you had ever been in the position of setting the technological direction of a company and you had fought hard for a tech (in this case Silverlight) vs. all kinds of other techs, you would understand.  I've got a CEO asking me WTF happened with Silverlight and I still don't have an answer for him other than "We can no longer trust Microsoft to have our back".   The CEO of the company based a whole series of decisions around going exclusively web-based because of the capabilities of Silverlight that he is now having to revisit because he sees Microsoft putting out devices like the Windows RT tablets that can't run it.   And that has him scratching his head, rightfully so.

I stuck my neck out and fought to use Microsoft tech instead of a whole bunch of competing techs and all it did in the long run was damage my personal reputation.  Why should I ever do it again?

Well, if you had taken 10 seconds to look, you would have noticed that I've been registered in the Microsoft forums for almost 7 years.  I would have been involved longer except that before that I actually worked at the company and therefore didn't post publically in the forums.

 

I'm sure reporting my post will certainly help the people trying to run Silverlight on their Windows RT devices. 

I think all of the ranting and raving just won't change a thing, Jamie. I don't know you or what you have personally invested in this technology, but I have been using different database development tools when Microsoft wasn't ready for prime time ('80's, '90's for instance). All of those technologies were either abandoned or marginalized. I finally drank the Redmond Kool-Aid(tm) and developed an application in Silverlight from the '09 PDC because my boss was told that was the way to go. I had to shift gears from wanting to pursue ASP.NET with MVC because he didn't want to go there.

If you look at the WPF and Silverlight (WPF/e) world, it is developed enough to get a LOB app out there. If you don't like the fact that Silverlight has lost its development cycle, then port to WPF or move forward to XAML and C#, or C++, or HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (the latter being termed web-standard development).

Learn to adapt to an ever-changing climate in this field, or you will just exasperate yourself and end up getting (or giving) ulcers. It's not worth it.

So, what will you do? Go to Adobe? Oracle (JAVA)? Google (Linux rip off and JAVA)? (Cr)Apple (He)X-Code?

I'm curious... How damaged are you by Microsoft's sunset of Silverlight? Really... Are you that negatively affected by this?

These days just about every move they make is compared to either Vista or the Kin phone. Hasn't Apple made their fair share of mistakes? What about the LISA? How about the Apple III? Google just gets away with what they do because they're lining the pockets of the current administration.

Why DID you leave Microsoft? Was it voluntary?