back to article Windows 8: Microsoft’s high-stakes .NET tablet gamble

There is a long discussion over on the official Silverlight forum about Microsoft's Windows 8 demo at D9 and what was said, and not said; and another over on Channel 9, Microsoft's video-centric community site for developers. At D9 Microsoft showed that Windows 8 has a dual personality. In one mode it has a touch-centric user …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why not wait for an official statement ?

    I mean, its all nice and well to start speculating, but why base your opinion on statements from a techie which are most likely incomplete and fully out of context (no offense to the techie ofcourse) ?

    In this case I think the only reason why people are seriously questioning all of this is because MS has done something like this before. Do we still remember the "Active desktop" on Windows 98 ? And most of all; what eventually happened to it ?

    Personally I seriously wonder if this information is accurate. And if it is how much it would really influence us. I mean; if there's one thing MS learned its that backwards compatibility is important. I conclude as much from several issues like including their virtual pc application and an XP image with every copy of Win7 professional.

    So even if they do try to roll this out in favor of .NET I don't think it means .NET will suddenly cease to exist. Just look at vbscript. They have serious plans of dropping support for it, but not in the near future.

    1. wmarkjones
      Facepalm

      Active Desktop??

      ShelLuser,

      You said, "In this case I think the only reason why people are seriously questioning all of this is because MS has done something like this before. Do we still remember the "Active desktop" on Windows 98 ?"

      It's easy to see, when comparing the significance of Win98 Active Desktop against the significance of Silverlight or any comparable presentation-layer technology, that there is really no comparison. In light of the entire scope of this issue, I must disagree -- No, MS has NOT really done something like this before, certainly not on this scale. All other products they have abandoned have either died a natural death or proved within the market that they were really bad or poorly-executed ideas. They were also products which had little following, therefore the cost of discarding them was relatively low all the way around. Not so at all with Silverlight/C#/WPF/.NET.

      Again, no comparison.

    2. wmarkjones
      Unhappy

      Why not wait for an official statement ? -- I thought we had one

      ShelLuser,

      You said, "Why not wait for an official statement ?". Of course, Microsoft has made the official statement, in overly-brief but still very clear and emphatic terms, that HTML5/JS is the supported development platform for new Windows 8 apps. Period. This is their official story, and they're sticking to it.

      If instead you're asking, "Why not wait for the BUILD conference?", I would just wonder whether you are a developer of phone and desktop apps who needs to make decisions now so they can be prepared for the launch of Mango (WP7.5) later this year, and so they can also be prepared for the launch of Windows 8 next year. If you are in that position, as many many others such as I am, then waiting for the BUILD conference proves to be a somewhat unrealistic expectation.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Good point

        @wmarkjones

        Good point, I'm not operating in that specific segment and as such overlooked the obvious here. Thanks for your comment.

  2. multipharious

    Radio Silence

    There is not going to be anything from Microsoft employees leading up to the Build. If you re-read the moderator post on the SL forum that seems to be sparking the furor, he isn't thrilled about it either. From what I hear this is a top down command to the Microsoft employees to not blog, comment, or anything and it is clear from how he wrote it. All we can do at this point is speculate. I have been keeping my eyes on this since last year when SilverLight was more or less (for right or wrong) declared dead and HTML5 was the future (insert ensuing uproar.) I do want to point out that SL5 is in beta.

    "I'm not dead!"

    "What?"

    "Nothing, here's your 9 pence..."

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Bono estente!

    "CHA-NEL 9!"

    (Actually, the real joke is on everyone buying so far into Microsoft's technologies that if they turn around they can just about make out, through a now somewhat distant opening, the glistening reflection on the water in the toilet bowl.)

  4. DBJDBJ

    Google ante portas

    http://dbj.org/dbj/?p=893

  5. xyz Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Finally we're dumping the kludge

    IMHO.. and in respect of web development, MS completely fucked up the browser based client side starting with .Net 1 and have continued that fuck up until they finally understood what they should have been doing with MVC. .Net web development is a joke, remember every click refreshed the page...Jesus. Then Ajax was shoehorned in but as a bloated monster from hell. And then theres bloody silverlight which is another POS and should have been strangled at birth.

    Just seeing how often you have to reboot your sharepoint servers should have given you a clue that the jig was up for this bloated junk which was probably only ever developed to give old VB client server programmers a future.

    I've been using VS since the original 1997 version and had decided to part company with MS instead of buying VS 2010, because I thought they had got it so wrong. Now this has given me hope that they finally understand what they're doing.

  6. Robert E A Harvey
    FAIL

    Ah, right

    So M$ want us to buy an M$ tablet instead of a robot or fruit based one, because then we get our familiar M$ environment in which all our software runs.

    Then when we get it we discover it won't run all our old software, 'cos it wants everything to be in html and magic fairy stuff.

    Marketing win? or marketing drop? you decide.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Meh

    Why bother with any of this?

    As much as they have pumped it down the throats of as many devs as they could, MS themselves never actually go round to writing any of their bread and butter products in .Net nor did they ever get around to that "fully managed" OS (ha-ha, what a naive notion).

    It doesn't matter what they do. Windows will aways be an unholy mess thrown together in C and C++ and so will their Office apps line. That ain't never going to change. NEVER. They will keep telling you that API calls are "too complicated" to be made in "legacy" languages and you'll all still bend yourselves outta shape trying to keep with with their latest weirdly abstracted layer of whatever-it-is-this-week programming paradigm/fad.

    But wait. What's this over the horizon? CLOUD computing! Oh this is going to be fun to watch.

  8. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    The historical precedent...

    ...is surely not Active Desktop but VB6.

    Microsoft took an entire "platform" and dumped it in the nearest skip. VB6 developers were given the option of re-writing under .NET, which although the closest match at the time was still largely untested and not *that* close if you wanted a new release of a major application Real Soon Now. They got away with it because, like it or not (and many didn't) the brutal fact was that the company best placed to offer migration options away from VB6 was ... Microsoft.

    It's called vendor lock-in, kids. If you weren't paying attention ten years ago, here's a second chance to learn the same lesson.

  9. Sil
    FAIL

    A disaster

    I can't believe Microsoft will do such a big mistake.

    Microsoft strength has always been the ecosystem: developers, IT consulting shops, trainers, that could make a good living on Microsoft platforms with Microsoft APIs.

    To alienate 95% of the dev community for an underwhelming, not finalized HTML 5 and javascript platform when the .net platform clearly is more comprehensive, fast and mature would be Microsoft's biggest failure ever and would absolutely deserve the firing of Steve Balmmer and any senior executive that took part in this decision.

    To promote HTML5 + javascript as an OS platform is to promote chrome notebooks and all its BS.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      I can ...

      "I can't believe Microsoft will do such a big mistake."

      I can.

      You make the mistake of believing that Microsoft is being run by sane, rational people with a sense of historical perspective.

      Phhhhhhh ...

    2. roadhog
      FAIL

      @sil Not disaster inevitable

      "Microsoft strength has always been the ecosystem: developers, IT consulting shops, trainers, that could make a good living on Microsoft platforms with Microsoft APIs."

      Baloney, microsofts strength was that 90% of what people wanted to run required the

      windows API, and that API was so obfuscated that no one really bothered to emulate it.

      Now 90% of what people want is on facebook, which requires a html renderer and a flash

      renderer if you are unlucky. The windows API is now irrelevant to most of the world and is

      a pain in the ass for the rest. .NET never even got close to killing flash.

      HTML can run just about anywhere, javascript is a less load of crap than flash, requiring a

      less load of crap renderer.

      I used to code only DOS/windows centric apps but i haven't coded anythign that is windows

      specific in about 5 years and to do so now would be anachronistic.

      IBM used to rule the roost with mainframes,

      Microsoft ruled the world with desktops,

      the new ruler(looks like facebook at the moment) will rule with internet client machines

      that are chrome like

      ie smart phones, tablets or such

      (you know the devices people like more than computers because they are cheap,

      easy to use and you can carry them around)

      that run the common presentation layer which is html/javascript.

      .NET like java will be confined to the server.

      Microsoft needs to split or start selling off divisions like IBM did.

  10. Geoffrey Swenson
    Thumb Up

    C# is great, ASP.net not so much

    Its been apparent for some time that the overly complex model of ASP.Net has some serious limitations. I've been writing end-runs around the clunky mess of server-side controls, overly complex page states, and the multitudes of ways that it fights you in creating dynamically generated controls. One of my bosses once told me that I wrote too much JavaScript, and I didn't try to argue -- I just found a better place to work instead.

    C# and visual studio are both really nice, and work just fine for back end code. I'm also very impressed with the ASP.Net MVC platform, which has an elegant simplicity that makes it much more flexible for writing complex dynamically generated applications.

    The original promise of the ASP.Net postback page model was that you could link together controls on the server side and not have to worry very much about HTML and JavaScript which were all handled for you automagically. The reality was huge amounts of bugs, complexity, poorly constructed HTML, bloated viewstate stuffed into hidden controls on the page, and more time spent turning off unwanted features and restyling garishly ugly control layouts that it would take to write something much more simple and elegant from scratch.

    I was a fan of the first versions of Silverlight which was a graphics engine that you scripted on the client side with JavaScript much like SVG. I wrote a couple of charting functions that were nicely interactive and much easier to deal with than Flash, and rendered much more quickly than SVG. But then a new version reversed this, broke all my code, and reintroduced the bloated ASP.net model of controlling Silverlight indirectly on the server side with C#. I really didn't want to go there and the early buggy betas made it very hard to code anything that worked. On top of that there were a lot of complex abstractions to learn, and until I had a paying project - or noticed much of a demand for Silverlight developers -- there wasn't enough time to wrap my head around it.

    Some of this makes you almost wish for classic ASP since it was simple. (But not VBscript!).

    HTML 5 is in some ways going back to SVG and the original Silverlight model of mixing HTML elements and graphics together using JavaScript. It is much more direct and flexible. It doesn't supersede C# as an excellent language for coding the back end. But it makes sense to do more scripting on the client side because it scales better and it makes the user experience so much more immediate and flexible.

  11. Mikel
    Flame

    When you're chained to an oar

    Then you expect to go down with the ship.

    Windows developers have proven time and again there's nothing Microsoft can do to make them go away. They will whine and moan on their blogs, and then go back to their cubicles and code away muttering foul obscenities and wishing ill of the Redmond gang just as they always have.

    So boo hoo. They're going to deprecate your certs again and sell you more courses and books and tests all over again you schmucks. And if they feel like it they'll do it again in a year and you will stand in line to take it AGAIN.

  12. Tim Almond

    Simple...

    Silverlight and WPF are basically going nowhere. Look on Jobserve for the number of jobs asking for them. It's tiny.

    The use of HTML and JS for desktops makes sense, I think. Most new development both for internal systems and intranet is browser-based. Allowing those users to reuse those skills on desktop applications makes sense.

  13. John Styles

    Fruiterer analogy (as in 'Hello Glastonbury, we are...')

    Fruiterer: 'Hey, we're going to sell bananas'

    Bloggers and Register commenters: 'oh, no, there are going to be no more oranges, that's a big mistake, we want oranges'

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