Microsoft Mixing it up…

Hi Robert.

Good to see/hear you in the blog room. I’m surprised more people didn’t show up.

A summary of Silverlight and what’s cool: http://colinizer.com/2007/04/30/silverlight-what-is-cool-about-it/
All my posts on mix including the not so good aspects of Silverlight:
http://colinizer.com/tag/mix07/

“hinting at pay services to come”
No hint required – they have said there could be ad-supported or paid services:

“While the product is in pre-release, storage and delivery is free up to 4 GB, with outbound streaming up to DVD quality (700 Kbps). As we move out of Beta, developers/designers will have continued use of the service with up to 1 million minutes of free video streaming at 700 Kpbs per site per month. Unlimited streaming will also be available for free with advertising, or with payment of a nominal fee for the service for use without advertising.” from http://silverlight.live.com/

yeah, if you browse the sessions at visitmix.com, the system they have is fairly robust and it looks like they are getting the recordings up really quickly!!

I thought the RSA conference had a neat remote viewing setup with their custom app, but I think this year’s mix is the best tech conference system so far….

Robert: when will you have your 12 a.m. moment at MIX? Will you be doing interviews with any of the big guns at MIX? Certainly you pulled the Adobe-opensourcing-flex (not flash) one really well and I watched the video. But it seems that the announcements at MIX are really big indeed (compared to Adobe’s)

Looking forward to your podcast at MIX!

“(Flex is only JavaScript).”

I thought flex was action script?
not that it really matters to me.

I’m not so sure jumping on the whole youtube.com thing 2 years late and the whole activeX vector graphics thing about 7 years late is really going to cut it?

They posted big numbers recently but those were off of deferred sales. I could defer the next 10 years of our sales and post multi-million dollar figures at that time. You only need sufficient operating income to do that and MS has plenty.

Has anybody posted a 5 minute summary of mix, for those of us who don’t think it’s very important, but would like a recap none the less?

Robert,

What do you mean by…

“How much of .NET has been moved to Silverlight? What won’t work?”

Rob

Silverlight 1.1 includes a sub-set of .NET 3.0 (plus some other stuff to do with browser object model integration it seems).

So the question is what sub-set?

I love reading your posts so I don’t have to scour the web myself to stay updated. It will be interesting to see how Silverlight turns out – I too was disappointed about the 10 minute limit for free content but it’s a move that doesnt surprise me coming from Microsoft…

I don’t know if you know about the Blogger’s Choice Awards but they have a “Best Geek Blog” category that you should check out. If you’re not already nominated, you are welcome to nominate yourself. If you’re already nominated, you can grab some embed code that puts a “vote for me” button up on your site so that your readers can make sure you win and get sent to the awards ceremony in November.

Worth a shot to get something back. Anyway, best of luck, and keep on blogging.

@5,

It’s clear he’s not a developer, so I would leave this be.

“Jeff Sandquist tells me that every presentation at Mix has been recorded and will be uploaded to visitmix.com over the next day or so.”

You can only take so much marketing.
Between watching a cat trying to chase a ball of yarn on youtube, and Sandquist’s promo videos, I’ll take the ball of yarn any day of the week.

Isn’t this why MSDN sends people those webcast DVDs every month?

Sorry about the action script comment as well Robert, I know you are not a programmer, and this isn’t a publication requiring editorial accuracy.

see this demo – http://silverlight.net/fox/

“Anyway, this stuff will be picked apart for months but the developers who were here were very impressed.”

Whaddaya know — Microsoft can compete! Hope you didn’t sell that stock…

“Anyway, this stuff will be picked apart for months but the developers who were here were very impressed.”

Whaddaya know — Microsoft can compete! Hope you didn’t sell that stock…

@5,6

See http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=304508 (the link is available on the front page of VistMix.com), for a great interview with Scott Guthrie on the subset of .NET that is included in Silverlight’s CLR and .NET libs.

“(Flex is only JavaScript).”

Ummm, what? Flex is written in ActionScript which, along with JavaScript, is based on the ECMAScript standard.

I could be wrong, and maybe something changed today, but I think Silverlight currently uses JavaScript. Flex can interact with JS, but is definitely not written in it.

Chris,

Action Script and Javascript are very close and converging in “2.0″. This differentiation does not add/remove anything to the multi-language support.

You should try to focus on making some points instead of continuously criticizing.

-Edwin

@Ben

Silverlight 1.1 lets you use any managed language you want (VB, C# along with newcomers like IronPython, IronRuby). Of course, all this is optional – you could choose to code in Javascript as well.

The Fox trailer site was cool. the video looked pretty good and the full-screen was nice, but it errored out on Firefox.

What do I think? On my Linux computers, a platform for which Silverlight is not offered by Microsoft, Microsoft makes me feel like a 3rd rate netizen; as opposed to feel like 2nd rate one for most of the time At least Adobe is promising Apollo’s technology for Linux by the time version 1.1 is released, and the Flash 9 plugin works perfectly under Linux today.

Microsoft promises Silverlight to be “a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in”, but sadly I don’t see that from my end.

@16

Linux, especially Desktop Linux market is just too small to put any effort in porting a system to it.

BTW, I saw a lot of Linux people claim that they proudly have a OPEN SOURCE .NET runtime on Linux, why the hell they need another official runtime so bad?

“What do I think? On my Linux computers, a platform for which Silverlight is not offered by Microsoft”

I am a good paying customer of MSDN subscriptions. I also do not use Microsoft products personally. I only use Red Hat and Fedora. So why am I excluded?

I only use MS products for customers, and now I am afraid I must tell them not to use Silverlight, because it’s simply incompatible with Linux, which most people on Digg use. Digg now has a million plus users, and can not be discounted as a niche market anymore. Everyone on mugshot.org also uses Linux, and they have tens if not hundreds of thousands of users as well.

Adobe flash is simply still a better bargain at 3 for 1 versus 2 for 1. It’s the same with Java, which is why it is still the dominant managed code infrastructure to this day.

Also, Microsoft underplayed the ability to use multiple languages to write these kinds of apps (Flex is only JavaScript).

However, the languages are not the main point, the frameworks are. The languages you use for .NET are immaterial, you also need the frameworks present/accessible on the platform you want to use whatever the code you’re writing with. Python is everywhere, however, Python silverlight applications are not.

JavaScript is more portable than anything really, but again, if you don’t have the Silverlight frameworks/plugin available for say Linux, that’s rather immaterial.

FLex/Flash/etc is far more ubiquitous in a useful fashion that Silverlight is. Telling someone they can write silverlight code in N languages is useless if you can’t use it on the platform you need it to run on, and Microsoft’s bullshit stance of “Linux is for third parties” is not going to play in the Web space.

John @ 18, You are right. Silverlight has no chance without Linux support.

Just look at how the unavailability of iTunes for Linux really crippled it.(and i think i must have missed your views on Apple’s bullshit stance on that one)

It’s not the desktop .NET run-time. It’s another.

So, regardless whether or not this will be appreciated by those developing on Windows using .NET (forget about the Mac effort, it’s just lipstick), what it means in practice is that code will have to be developed twice, debugged twice, tested twice, deployed twice. And, it will need special development tools, environments, and so on./

I have also spotted on this post (http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2007/04/30/announcing-net-framework-support-for-silverlight.aspx) that it includes a new security model. Not sure what it means exactly, but if anything it certainly sounds like the return of deployment hell to me.

On the other hand, Adobe/Macr should invest in providing a XAML,XAML/E import/export filter to tear down the walls and make it easy for everybody out there to work with all this stuff together (read: their pseudo-open source Flex initiative will prevail as much as RealNetworks open-source helix initiative, i.e. DOA).

@18, John C. Welch

You have to consider the different development spaces. Silverlight is exciting for corporations using .NET because they already have a staff of experienced .NET developers that can now produce applications for Macs. I know in my corporate role we’re often asked if we have a native Mac version, which we don’t, but maybe once in 5 years we’ve been asked about a Linux version. For certain large business sectors being able to leverage existing .NET applications on the OS X platform will be huge. I know there is a huge Linux community and I’m sure there are some business opportunities being lost but to be honest, after doing an ROI a lot of companies just don’t see any benefit from investing in a Linux version, while a Mac version often does yield returns.

I do agree though that the language is immaterial, up to a point. Everyone talks about Ruby as if it’s this language to save the day yet it really is the Rails framework that propels it along. On the other hand if someone said there was this great framework but you have to program in VB again I can tell you right now I’m walking away from that beast.

Where language *does* play a role is in easing the transition between different application models. I’ve seen projects slow to a crawl as a prior desktop or backend developer now has to learn the ins and outs of JavaScript. Not only do they have to learn how JavaScript it slightly different they now have to put up with spotty debugging and poor or out-dated documentation for even the better js libraries. It’s enough to kill a project. On the other hand offer a dev the same language, in the same IDE and they’ll come up to speed a lot quicker.

Lastly, I don’t really think you can say that Flex is more ubiquitous than Silverlight, since I don’t see either of them in the wild right now. I mean one just came out of beta and the other is in Alpha. Flash is ubiquitous obviously but even though Flex stands on it’s shoulders I don’t think you can yet call the fight.

Hi from Germany Robert

Thanks for your report. Saw your webstream too. The new stuff from MS looks very promising.

Keep up the good work.

Best wishes, Oli