Silverlight and Windows 8 RT

What a colossal waste of time and money my surface Win RT tablet has turned out to be.... (blah, blah, blah... to quote Steve Balmer at PDC '10) 

Well, have fun with Java and the Droid Linux Scroogle clone or the i-Me-Mine Narcissistic iPad toy then... I'm sure that the giant enterprise platform behind those devices will grow your garden, expand your mind, and fill your pockets with Monopoly Ca$h!

The fact that Silverlight doesn't run on my ASUS Windows RT tablet hasn't stopped me one little bit. If I was to build a new website to stream video or provide rich content, I would be working with HTML 5, CSS3, and JavaScript (WinJS or whatever new name MS has for it now). Besides, I haven't paid a dime for a single app yet and have found most of them to be very useful. Microsoft is upgrading its entire platform folks! Haven't you noticed that yet? Really!

As it stands now, our users will either have to have a proprietary app written for their iProducts or their Droid/Samsung stuff. So? It's just coding, testing, and deploying...

They'll probably be happier with the end result anyway and those devices are pretty limited compared to the Windows RT equivalents. You'll see... eventually...

Remember, this thing of Microsoft's is only a few months old now. And, now they have a pretty seamless solution between phone - tablet - desktop - enterprise server - private/public cloud (ever heard of AZURE?) Pretty impressive I'd say.

They have an almost identical vetting model as Apple's iTunes store and they are allowing enterprises to manage their own apps under their own control! How cool is that? I keep hearing all of this fan boy and girl "too little too late" and dread over Silverlight being dead. It is enough to make a person nauseated if they stay on that channel too long. So call me an MS fan man! I'll wear that badge proudly! The core applications at my employer all run on PCs (which, by Dell's Q4 numbers are not as dead as the stock boys at Motley Fool would like to contend)... and they all run Windows 7 Enterprise.

If you read, they have both a Barnes and Noble Nook app as well as a Kindle app and both are free! How cool is that?

We are moving forward eventually to Windows 8 but that is the way it is in corporate America. Nothing good happens fast! And the economy (world-wide) is still just pluggin' along... 60M copies of Windows 8 sold in 3 months can't possibly be bad and there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers working on new actual Applications (not just "Apps") for Windows 8 -- and not just noise makers and kewl stuff to show their friends.

I'm staking the remainder of my career on the folks at Microsoft and they haven't let me down yet. But, maybe I'm just not a cry-baby who expects the world to fit my idea of what it should be. I came by this forum to find out if WinRT was going to support Silverlight. Guess not...

Ho, hum... (yawn) Next! Cheers!

Rock on Microsoft! Keep on chooglin'!

HAL_2010 "Doctor Chandra? Will I dream?" - "2010: Odyssey 2" the '80's (too tired to look it up on IMdB) "Get over it!" - The Eagles, "H3ll Freezes Over" c. 1994 or thereabout

What a colossal waste of time and money my surface Win RT tablet has turned out to be. No Silverlight, hardly any apps, no dropbox sync, internal memory almost full with basic OS, can't force downloads to SD card. Why oh why didn't I spend my £500 on an iPad or android tablet where most things work, or you can jailbreak your device to make it work. Complete cr@p.

I'll never buy a windows tablet or mobile ever again. I'll see if I can send this one back.

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. 

Jamie,

All of your Microsoft hate-speech won't change a thing. I'm just pointing out that they still support Silverlight on Windows 8 tablets, but not WinRT. I was hoping that would be different, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that they are just weaning people off of the plugins in general. The fact that Flash runs in limited form is interesting, but it is far less of a job to do that than to port Silverlight. Silverlight is MORE than a Flash-like clone multimedia device, it is a subset of the .NET platform as well to support Line Of Business Applications.

I have written a Silverlight LOB application as I have said before and when I heard Steve Jobs drive the coffin nail into plug-ins (because the ubiquitous executive jewelry computer toys are now dictating IT policy don't ya know?), then I knew that it would be a stretch for Microsoft to support Silverlight on an ongoing basis. After the 2010 PDC it was a well known fact that Silverlight would be retired after a 10 year support cycle in favor of moving toward the stated web-standards that Microsoft is a member of. Look it up, Jamie.

At any rate: What can you really do about it other than complain? They won't support Silverlight on the tablets and phones, even though they used it for Windows Phone 7 as a development tool. Now it is just XAML and C#, like WPF in a way.

They all keep pointing to HTML 5, CSS3, and JavaScript as the future write once, debug everywhere platform of the future.

It all just makes me tired. Is this the first time a technology company has done something different to pivot and face fierce competition? No, it is not...

I'm not attacking you Jamie, just pointing out the futility of your bad-mouthing a giant. When IBM was king of hill we used to joke "Where does an 800 pound gorilla sit?" Answer: "Anywhere it chooses..."

Have a nice life,

HAL "Daisy, Daisy... Give me your answer do... I'm... half.... c-r-a---z----y..... o--v-----e-----r-----t---h----e---l----o-----v------e---------o------f-------y-------o-----------u...." - "2001: A Space Odyssey" during the scene when Cmdr. David Bowman disconnected HAL's memory prior to the announcement of the mission's true intentions.

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