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Silverlight: Does the new path lead to the end of the road?


By Patrick Hynds


 Patrick Hynds
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July 31, 2012 —  (Page 4 of 7)
HTML5 has been embraced, to an extent, by Microsoft, but HTML5 is not a panacea and it is not ready to displace other tools in the area of rich Internet applications.

The threat of Metro to Silverlight relies on a specific flow of events. WinRT on Windows 8 has much promise, but betting on WinRT is still a gamble until it proves to be a platform that the market chooses. Even if that happens, it will be years before targeting WinRT brings a majority audience, and there are many assumptions built into that result ever coming to pass.

If your application does have to target WinRT eventually, then Silverlight is an ideal holding action. Virtually everyone who has dug into XAML of WPF, Silverlight and WinRT agree that Silverlight is closer to the WinRT variant of XAML than WPF. Next Version Systems’ Hollis observed that his customers “prefer WPF to Silverlight for internal corporate desktop app development by about 2 to 1. Silverlight tends to be chosen when great user experience is needed, but there’s less control over the machine or more geographical reach.”

There have been some serious twists in the road between the first version of Silverlight and the latest release of this past December. For example, I am not alone in my opinion that the “out of browser” capability seems to fit a square peg in a round hole. If you do not want to run inside a browser, then why not just use WPF rather than Silverlight?

As new versions of Silverlight were released, features have crept in that do not work across all platforms. For example, the new 3D graphics capabilities in Silverlight 5 rely on DirectX and are Windows only. This and other features like it seem to fly in the face of the main selling point of Silverlight: the ability to deliver a consistent experience across multiple platforms.

Finally, there is the version of Silverlight that is used for developing Windows Phone 7 applications. It is really not full Silverlight, so it stretched the brand and confused developers. Now that Windows 8 will be the core of Windows Phone 8, it is not fully clear where Silverlight fits in the phone development strategy. Perhaps the short answer is that is does not fit anymore.


Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, Silverlight, XAML

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