Admits Moonlight/Silverlight are basically dead
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jhansonxi Feb 14, 2012 12:37 PM EDT |
Swapnil: One of the ambitious and promising Mono projects was Moonlight. What is the future of Moonlight? Miguel: We are somewhere between Silverlight 2-3 support . The reality is that Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and at this point they are not going to continue developing it and they are not going to continue to push it. So the point of having an open source implementation of silverlight is greatly diminished. Hindsight is 20/20 but the development effort probably would have been better spent on Mono itself. Charge of the light brigade? Perhaps. But it may have helped encourage Adobe to support Flash for Linux. |
| Fettoosh Feb 14, 2012 4:15 PM EDT |
Quoting:The reality is that Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and at this point they are not going to continue developing it and they are not going to continue to push it. So the point of having an open source implementation of silverlight is greatly diminished. So, if or when MS abandons .Net, is Mono going to suffer the same fate? Is Microsoft going to abandon .Net developers? Microsoft’s Silence is Infuriating .NET Developers |
| tracyanne Feb 14, 2012 5:16 PM EDT |
Quoting:So, if or when MS abandons .Net, is Mono going to suffer the same fate? Answer:not necessarily. Mirosoft abandoning Silverlight is a quite different kettle of fish from Microsoft abandoning .NET, and any affect of Microsoft doing that is quite different from the affect of Microsoft abandoning Silverlight. .Net is a Languange framework, and a runtime library (it is what Java had the potential to be). Silverlight is little more than a clone of Flash, better in some ways, but still just a product built on top of .Net, and designed to replace Flash. Thankfuly inertia saved us from a Microsoft monopoly in this area. Both those headlines above are typical clickbait, Metro doesn't even come close to making .Net unnecessary, and therefore ripe for abandonment. Metro is built on top of .Net. The latest version of Visual Studo depends on .Net for building Metro applications. But lets assume Microsoft for whatever monopolistic reason they choose, decides to abandon .Net. Lets assume they have pent millions on building something that replaces the .Net Framework and runtime, that once again gives them a more desirable lock in on Windows (after all the .net is inherently crossplatform, surely that was a mistake, surely they did not intend for this to happen), just what affect would this have on the development and continuance of Mono? Well it might slow the development of Mono down initially, as the Mono developers rely on Microsoft for the continued innovation of Mono, so would it be a bad thing if De Icaza and his team had to innovate all by themselves? Would it be a bad thing if Mono was no longer dependant on Microsoft fo the innovation of the technologies in Mono? Remember Mono is, by virtue of it's inherent cross platform capabilities can be made available on all platforms .Net is not available on any platform but Windows, and due to Microsoft policy is unlikely to be. So as I see it if Microsoft were to stop supporting .Net, that would potentially make Mono stronger, after all ther are millions of lines of code that are already written for .Net, that can with often little change be made to work with Mono, unlike the situation with VisualBasic (the pre.Net version), where there are and were no VisualBasics on any other platform), and remember even when a Company stops supporting a product, that product doesn't immediatly become unusable... I can still get jobs as a VB6 developer, maintaining old code, right now, and earn a damn sight more than I can as a .Net developer, if I'm prepared to move interstate. The consequence of this is that companies who were heavily dependent on .Net can move to Mono, which makes Mono a viable product, and a replacement for a non supported .Net, and it gives the Mono Devs time to develop in the framework code that is not yet in Mono (from the perspective of those shops that use the latest and greatest .Net innovation) So in the very very unlikely event of Microsoft discontinuing support for .Net, I see a very rosy future for Mono. |
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