Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

This is pretty typical of Microsoft. They don't actually use all the complex tools they develop for their own products, at least not the ones they care about. Windows and Office aren't written in .NET, for example. They stick with tried-and-true technology while cranking out an endless stream of “bigger and better” new complexity for everyone else to have to learn. A classic example of Fire and Motion in action.

Interesting to note is that Office Web Apps are a *new* thing they developed. Office for Desktop came a long way, it was done in C++ long before this new and fancy .NET stuff existed, so there is some kind of excuse for not porting that (yet). For the Web part though, they developed it from the ground …

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 29.06.2010 um 15:16 schrieb Disqus:

Silverlight is the foundation for the new Windows Phone development. I can't imagine it is anywhere near dead.

okay – is Windows Phone alive?

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 29.06.2010 um 15:51 schrieb Disqus:

Microsoft want to compete with Google Doc on all platforms, if they used SilverLight, it will not be available for every OS and Browser.

Well, what means “all platforms”? Silverlight is supported on Windows, MacOSX and Linux. Which platform is missing?

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 29.06.2010 um 16:04 schrieb Disqus:

As a video and multimedia platform, Silverlight and Flash are probably going to decline. But Silverlight is really best understood not only as an alternative to Flash for web-based streaming multimedia, but primarily as a rich client platform that is more secure than the much-hated ActiveX technology. Because it brings the managed-code platform (.Net) to the web “Rich Client” tools game, it is a very important bit of microsoft technology, especially for organizations where .net based development on the server is already important. Silverlight is the return of Microsoft's Java replacement (.net) to the web browser applet space. Until .Net is dead, Silverlight will never die, and Microsoft needs .net permanently. So, not dead. Note that I am not a big fan of .net or silverlight. ActiveX is dead. Silverlight is its replacement. Until Silverlight is replaced by a competing .Net-compatible browser plugin technology, Silverlight will remain a tiny, but important part of the web development world. What it lacks is any compelling advantage over the combination of current popular technologies like flash, rising stars like HTML5, and that gestalt-that-won't-die segment, AJAX.

Good point. Windows mobile 6.5 isn't quite dead yet, it just smells that way. Nobody can give away a WinMo handset, or even pay people to take them. The new Kin thing smells like failure already. I actually hope WinPhone7 doesn't suck as bad as Kin and WinMo 6.5. Here's hoping.

W

What you say is absolutely right – but why doesn't MS make use of Silverlight? Office Web Apps would have been a big chance to demonstrate SL's power. Imho there are just two reasonable reasons:

1. Microsoft teams don't talk to each other, so the Office Web team missed that there is something like Silverlight.

2. The web team tested Silverlight but couldn't get it to work – or they were told it wouldn't work.

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 29.06.2010 um 16:59 schrieb Disqus:

What I found very irritating was that they announced another “new” mobile OS – based on WM 6.5 (!):
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/201…

Looks a bit like panic on a sinking ship to me

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 29.06.2010 um 17:01 schrieb Disqus:

I think the reasoning behind your argument is wrong.
Why does there be have only one?
Why can't Silverlight exist side by side with other web tech like Flash,HTML5 etc
Just because it's maybe not the best thing for Office Live (Or perhaps wasn't when it was OL development was started) doesn't mean it's dead.
It's just an alternative, it doesn't have to be universally used by anyone, MS included, to have a future.

Silverlight 4 only works on Mac OSX and Windows. Linux is only supported with Moonlight is behind on many fronts. Silverlight is only supported on windows phone and no other devices. Office Web should run on iPad with the current technology but a silver light version has no chance.

So the iPad is the reason that they don't use Silverlight? Come on

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 29.06.2010 um 20:04 schrieb Disqus:

If you consider Silverlight dead by that reasoning then you must consider .Net dead. MS haven't rewritten all the Office apps or Windows in .Net, is .Net dead?

Have you heard about the Windows Phone? It wil only runs Silverlight and XNA.

I find Rob Connerys talk from #ndc2010 very interesting. He should be talking about web forms vs mvc, but I still find it relevant to your question. http://bit.ly/8Z6m6h

Man, sorry for my bad english and sorry for saying this but you sound like an angry old guy… Your argument its absolutely rubish. MS sells ASP.NET just like it sells silverlight. Now they have to use silverlight for everything? Do you use that horrendous delphi datasnap for everything? No? oh my, datasnap is dead, the ship is sinking, etc… give me a break, and act like a professional… or is because delphi is running behind MS since .net 1.0 and only now (not by its own merits, but RemObjects) is coming close of a decent solution, do you hate .net? Whats your problem?

The problem is most people look only at consumer smartphones because that's the only market they see and know. Windows Mobile/CE has a large share in industrial handheld devices. WinMo7 would require to rewrite all the applications actually running on WinMo 6.x (or older) from scratch, and it makes sense to keep on supporting those devices, even if they have no eye candies and “cool” (and slow) animations.

It is about distribution. Even as platform may be better, they will have to write for SL based browsers a version and for mobile phone version (like iPhone's one), another. Which would make it waste a lot of time with no real outcome. This is also why the Windows Explorer is not written in .NET. It is because the “old” plugins like Turtoise SVN or in general a lot of extensions will not be written in .NET and will not work that smooth. In a similar note, MS did eat it's own food using .NET in Office and Visual Studio (partially) where it make sense. To rewrite everything in .NET just for the sake of .NET, is like Embarcadero (or RemObjects) will rewrite the entire class library in Delphi Prism, and the interfacing code to be written in Delphi. Or DBArtisan to be rewritten from C++ to Delphi (or Delphi Prism). Even may be productive when is started from scratch, if you take it as a whole, just not being feasible in one case for MS to use this or that techology it does not mean almost nothing. It just mean this: for Live Office Microsoft decided that Silverlight was not the best technology, not more, not less.

I don't think that Office Live will be of any use for mobile phones at all. The payload for the simple test document above is about 2.1 Megabytes. That on GPRS …

If Windows Phone 7 is really Silverlight driven, then again – why did MS drop the chance to show that SL is really capable? Esp with offline features certainly very interesting for a beast like Office. They had the choice – and it was not about a “re-write”.

I don't belive it was because of lacking browser support – SL IS available on all *important* platforms. Small devices? The HTML/Ajax solution won't (realistically) work on these anyway, maybe except the iPad.

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 01.07.2010 um 01:31 schrieb Disqus:

If you think the business segment, as Office Live is targeting, the big players are Blackberry OS, Android, Mac OS, Symbian. None of them will likely able to use Office Live as there is no SL support. Just ignoring them in this market segment it will be foolish as the browsers are today capable (they are low end desktops to say so). I have an Android phone with 600 MHz ARM7 CPU (low end from Android devices) and works somelike P2 at 400 MHz, which is enough to do some advanced browsing.
Also every time I would have to chose between Google Docs and Office Live, if I will have no choice to use it from all devices, I will pick Google Docs as works just as Html + Ajax. I use Google Docs to see PDFs on the phone as my device have no default viewer for them.
The reason about distribution is the same as Google do not use VP8 everywhere, and remove Flash as for Youtube, and forcing you to just pick HTML5 everywhere. It is not that HTML5 is not that capable, is that you will make people angry if you will say: you must quit tomorrow IE6.
As a software engineer I used InnoSetup because is easier to handle than Wix Installer. I know that Wix is much better, but as IS does the job and will work flawless regardless you have or not installed MSI Installer tools (which will also limit the distribution to XP SP2 or so, and user will need to do extra work to install some runtime), the Inno installers are made just as a .EXE package that will work more or less flawlessly from user point of view, regardless of OS version. It does not mean as an analogy that I thought ever that either Wix is not more advanced or is dead. Just was this thing that makes things more complex instead being easier.

So you are seriously saying that Office Live will be of any use on Blackberry OS, Android or Symbian? As I mentioned in my previous comment, the payload for a simple document is about 2.1 MB – I guess native apps are much better suited on those devices. A Web App for office documents wouldn't be very productive here in my opinion.

Android is certainly special here, because it would also run on “larger” devices. And it has been mentioned at several sites, that MS is probably working on an Android Silverlight version. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/could-silve… MS even mentioned that on last year's PDC.

Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien

Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net

Am 01.07.2010 um 08:34 schrieb Disqus:

In my opinion Silverlight is mostly targeted to the Enterprise application developer and vertical markets. Currently Silverlight is installed on roughly half the browsers: http://www.riastats.com/ which is still not quite enough for a general purpose application, but for an Enterprise or vertical market application it is not an issue. The corporate IT manager can push it onto all the machines overnight (if they are managing it right).

Silverlight isn't dead. It's only failure is it hasn't killed Flash yet. But it occupies a nice space for companies that have standardized on the Microsoft development stack who want something more like a desktop application, but that runs in the browser.

Like all Microsoft technologies, they bill it as changing the world, and it only changes a corner of the world. Not a failure, but it didn't take over the entire market to be sure. JQuery and similar frameworks and HTML 5 are very powerful alternatives, but they are much different development paradigm than Silverlight (when compared to WinForms or other desktop application development).

Silverlight is definitely NOT supported on Linux. There is an effort to be able to run SL applets on Linux using Moonlight, but it is not developed nor supported by Microsoft. Also, being “supported” doesn't mean “runs out of the box”, which is true only for newer Windows versions, and Windows' share of desktop market will only decline in time.

So, MS Web Office team would only shoot themselves in the foot by relying on SL. Even now nobody is really sure whether they will be able to steal any significant amount of users from Google Docs (especially knowing that making online spreadsheet and word processor is not a rocket science anymore and lots of startups could really pull it off as well).

As whether SL is dead or not: I'd say it will continue to be used for MS-based intranets, and therefore will depend on their destiny. But as a Flash replacement, I really wouldn't put any money on it, I'd rather bet on HTML5.

The idea of distributing a web application is about the runtime you will target to. And in this respect a web application in some cases may be better if you run it as plugin agnostic. I was just wrote the parallel between Delphi and Eclipse as they look and behave differently. And even supposedly Delphi is better than Eclipse (or vice-versa), will make a company to pick the other's product, just for the sake of to be better in one scenario as code sharing, less maintenance problems (yes, I can imagine that Delphi's codebase is huge, so why not to pick the Eclipse's codebase and let them to make the bug-fixing).
Depends what means better. I can agree that 2 MB may be much or not, because you embedded a photo in the document, may be a big deal, but if you have 3G + GPRS, may be enough to edit it. About native/web technologies, think that not the CPU is the speed limiter, or in one way not the phone as hardware, but the “hard drive” as IO and connection, which makes the device not feel that “native” anyway regardless is compiled previously or not. Also you may consider that all browsers in one year from now will have at least a “hot-spot” like JIT (for Firefox), and all other browsers (HTML5 capable) will have a full JIT. In this respect I can consider that the difference between native/web based application speed will start to diminish.
Silverlight have a lot of advantages over HTML4 with or without Flash, at least regarding the 3D capabilities, 2D accelerated toolkit, guaranteed JIT in executing number intensive computations (so there was a demo about how many nodes you can run under some time). Does them apply necessarily to an office suite? I remember that Office 97 was running just right to a 486 at 66 MHz with 16M of RAM, probably this Office Live which ave similar featureset may run to an ARM at more than 400 MHz using the browser JavaScript, and may offer all needs without making that much problems on distributing and bias. Probably JS is just enough to run it and is much easier to distribute as is browser neutral.

You got the point Jim. Silverlight is nothing else than what the Java guys would call a Web RIA profile. Why should people not take it? I see no problem. I do not expect the client profile will see lot's of XP machines and a Sharepoint for just mangaing documents is not the big howl on the server-side.

Silverlight is for the existing Windows customer base, why not. Everyone is free to use something else and people are doing this.

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[...] 3 months ago I asked “Is Silverlight dead?“. Main point was that there are almost no substatial SL app – besides some video [...]

Silverlight isn’t dead. It’s only failure is it hasn’t killed Flash yet. But it occupies a nice space for companies that have standardized on the Microsoft development stack who want something more like a desktop application, but that runs in the browser.