Scott Guthrie on Silverlight

I'd been subscribed to Scott's msdn blog for a while, but hadn't really followed him. But this week I watched his pre-MIX07 Channel9 interview and his keynote performance. This guy is amazing. He (among others) puts the lie to the notion that Google is the only company with smart guys (or even that they are any smarter than Microsoft's guys).

Super interview Robert. I love when you catch guys like Jeff Prosise in a hallway and get grand comments. He also wrote a heck of a good survey book on .Net programming some years after his MFC book so his comments mean something to me as he's not new to the party.

Scott Guthrie blinked when you asked about a Silverlight office version...that must be coming.

2 questions:

- Do you have any insight as to why alpha bits like Silverlight 1.1 don't allow a Go-live license?

- Do you have any plans to use Silverlight for podtech.net?

Videos on Podtech with bookmarks so you could list your questions and skip straight to the interesting parts would be great.

Having given it some thought... whether it's deliberate or not, the strategy of bridging to other platforms via the browser while rallying multiple language developers, is genius. Microsoft has the world wrapped up again in the next 12 months - http://colinizer.com/2007/05/02/blinded-by-silv...

@Jeff P. from the video.

Rewind to 1998, with Java, managed code in a browser.
The Java3d and java media frameworks.
It wasn't very popular. You even had MSJVM rendering it SOOO quickly. Javascript is not an enterprise language?
No javascript code reuse?
There are plenty of libraries in Javascript. Google wrote a nice XSLT translation library for JS and there are thousands of others. Programming windows with MFC?
It sucked, some of the examples didn't even work. MFC sucked too. Document/View sucked. COM sucked. ect....
Message mapping sucked. It was presented as some type of hot feature. So were all the retarded windows macros that make next to no sense and are totally ambiguous.
No Jeff, Your razzle dazzle is over. It's harder to impress people in 2007. Besides, the Linux Gnome libs and even QT are WAY better than MFC ever were. GCC is a much better compiler. You couldn't even so much as compile C++ code you wrote on VC6 when the next version of VS came out with .NET. I will keep my fingers crossed that nobody gets us to work on this framework. If they do, hopefully I will not have to help out on the account.

Oh man, that guy (Guthrie) really was a pain to listen to. But microsoft people usually are (no matter they actually work for microsoft or not).

And the web has not changed - this product is evolution. Not revolution. Java - Javascript - Flash - Flex preceeded this product. What silverlight brings to the internet table are the microsoft army of nerds, they can now write for the browser. Is that a good thing?

It is also very notable how little they know about javascript which is a really powerful language. One example is functional programming and lambda functions which has been in javascript since day one. They are now (sort of) tacking it onto the new version of C# with Linq. And then there is stuff like closures ...

But I've decided to disregard nerds like the one in this interview and work with silverlight and have spent a few days with it now.

My guess is that Adobe will keep the leading edge. And that Silverlight will be the tool of the typical ms shop (which never would have used anything non-ms no matter what).

Chris, your posts are getting more and more shrill with each post. You're sounding like a ranting poppinjay.
Your above post (#5, as I write this) looks like stream-of-consciousness or something. You should just calm down, take a deep breath, and relax.

@Reuch - There has been some great functional language stuff built for .Net even back in the .Net 1.1 days. For example, F# or the various Scheme/Lisp implementations for .Net. If you look at the design of the CLR, you would see that it has hooks here and there for dynamic languages, a little bit in v1 and a lot more in v2. A good example is the .tailcall instruction in v1 which let you write deep recursion without blowing a lot of stack space.

If you look at .Net 2.0, features like Lightweight CodeGen were built specifically for dynamic language support.

It's kind of weird to say Microsoft doesn't understand functional programming when you have folks like Patrick Dussud (he of Lucid and TI Lisp fame) working in the CLR team. :-)

Wow we have enterprise language (c#) in the browser! Long time ago we use to have another one named Java.

@7

I was an MFC programmer back in 98-00, and had to correct the examples in his book because they made mistakes.
I hate how MSPRESS books like his go on about how the technology is the best thing since sliced bread, then the next generation of libraries and compilers don't even compile the code when you upgrade.

I hate the mis-use of enterprise this or that as well. I worked on an IBM account. We used PHP, javascript as well as java for the XML RPC. Are PHP and java entrprise languages?

THEY BETTER BE!

IBM uses them on multimillion dollar accounts every day.
There are tons of frameworks and libraries for Java.
http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/
There are tons of others, but I won't go into them. You can read about some of the newer ones at http://linuxjournal.com

The point being, the language they use is highly deceiving. An enterprise language is anything used in Enterprise development. With the advent of the web interface you BETTER BET javascript is an enterprise development language. It's so elegant, modular and robust too. But aren't they all.

should read "Are PHP and javascript enterprise languages?"
and "There are tons of frameworks and libraries for Javascript."


I wrote java where I should have written javascript. You get the point, Javascript is an enterprise language, and is used in enterprise application code everywhere in the world.

I fail to see how this is so revolutionary. .NET already exists on the desktop, now we have a subset of .NET in the browser. We had Java in the browser a decade ago - how is this different? We already have "webstart" technology with .NET and Java. What percentage of browsers will silverlight run in compared to JavaScript? I'll be impressed when Google announces they'll be building their apps with silverlight :)

http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jmf/

http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/

OMFG, it's 1998-2002 all over again!

You know what the really sad part is. The old J++, which I stupidly used to develop for actually had a lot of this stuff in the MSJVM that ran Java applets, with WFC DirectX stuff back in 1999. There was even a 3d castle and video example in the MSDN stuff.

Rehashing it, and calling it a different name to make it appear as though it's a new flash is the brainchild of marketers, not programmers. The guys that worked on WFC and J++, like Anders totally ripped of Java when they wrote C# to begin with. So there. There.

I’ll be impressed when Google announces they’ll be building their apps with silverlight

lol. don't hold your breath.

@14

They could acquire a site that is using it such as they did orkut or writely. That would be the only way I could ever see that happening.

I wish Scott Gutherie would stand behind his products and come and fix all the customers I had who's MSJVM apps and MFC apps no longer work on Vista. The customers who email me but will not get a response since we only do enterprise work now and no longer support retail applications.

And people wonder why I am against Windows platform as a technology choice. They say Linux isn't backwards compatible?
rpmbuild --rebuild X.SRPM
And you're done. The company whos old products I wrote released the source code and people can't so much as open VC6 files or upgrade it. People can't even work with WFC stuff anymore. MS is a lot of talk, and hands out grabbing, but offers little in the way of long lasting cost effective technology the way IBM and Sun do.

WFC - I remember that.
Big difference between this and Java I think are:
Smaller download (JVMs were a big install).
Better integration with the HTML DOM.
Better integration from JavaScript (to call into Silverlight code).
Subset compatibility with the strategic presentation platform for the major OS.

The last point there is cost savings. Reuse assets between LOB apps and 'experience first' apps in the Silverlight code.

None of this really applied to Java, with AWT or the 3D frameworks. Of course there's also the media support and the fact that the web now exists more as an application platform more than it did back when applets were around.

Windows Presentation Foundation did not really take off so they are now trying to repackage part of it into the browser, add some video spice to it and see if it will fly.

There is probably a place for ultra rich application frameworks (people use to talk of email at the killer app but since gmail and yahoo mail, the killer app has shifted to video editing). The thing that DRAMATICALLY reduces the use of things like SilverLight and Appolo (and which in my opinion kill them) is that they erase/have forgotten about the page/document driven nature of the internet. Silver like does NOT have the notion of HYPERLINK/BOOKMARK!

Think about that. Imagine how you would feel about using an app where you can not bookmark a page or share a page. An app that would not be searchable/addressable by Google.

It would be so much easier to simply enhance Javascript to add better support for packaging, threading and tooling. It would be so much easier to enhance the browser to have SVG/canvas and video as high performance first class citizen.

Instead, we see MSFT and Adobe desperately trying to push complete new stacks to try to once again take control of the API and lock users. Hopefully, Google, Yahoo, Oracle and others (Adobe?) will rally behind Firefox++ and send MSFT home once and for all!

-Edwin

"I’ll be impressed when Google announces they’ll be building their apps with silverlight
lol. don’t hold your breath.
Comment by Sho"

This says it all!

Good interview with Scott.

Looking at streaming with Silverlight, video quality would be important.

What is the video camera that is being used in this Scott Interview? It is quite clear and high quality.