For the past few years any one that had to visit a Microsoft website has seen, odds are, an advertisement for them to install Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash competitor. You see, Microsoft has wanted a chunk of the “web app” pie, and for the longest time, that was Flash. If you wanted to do an App or a Movie or such that was easily done and put in to a web page, Flash was the Champ to use. But Microsoft wanted to change that, and this was actually what may be considered the Downfall of the .Net programming language toolkit…
For years Microsoft told developers, that is, the people who write the programs that you use, that Silverlight was the best way to do web-interaction. For Years they crammed it down .Net developers throats. You see, .Net is Microsoft’s Programming Platform of Choice. Want to write an app in C\C++? Use .Net. What about for a VB app? Use .Net. What about a new language that has the Ease of Use of VB, but was as versatile as C++? Use C#, again, Use .Net.
Eventually Microsoft left the “core” real programming languages, and made .Net do Flash type apps (hence, Silverlight) and Web Development (HTML, XML, ASP, JScript, etc…). Microsoft seems to have forgotten that .Net was once for writing what I term “real apps” that is, apps that need a compiler to produce an executable file, not a Script, AKA, all of that web stuff. But that’s just me ranting.
But Microsoft has Killed Silverlight. Killed it so badly that even Mono, the Open Source interpreter of pretty much all .Net apps, has declared it dead also. Granted, Mono said pretty much that “no one uses it, no need for us to care about it”, but thats a sideline issue, because sadly, Microsoft has decided to kill off more of .Net.
But as Windows 8 gets ready for a launch, Microsoft is doing some interesting (Interesting does not always mean good, BTW) things to .Net. As how “Metro”, Microsoft’s new UI toolkit is enforced on all of the .Net languages, you’re going to start seeing more and more “Metro” style apps. That is, Big Fonts, full-screen, Sparse Graphics, and horrible layouts. thing is, that if you want to develop Traditional Desktop Applications on .Net, then you need to see if you can find a download archive of .Net 2010. Because Microsoft has removed for all of the paid-for, and the free Express editions of C++/C#/VB/etc… the ability to make Desktop Applications.
If you go download a free Express version from Microsoft and it is Express 11, your stuck doing Just Metro Apps. And the drawback to that is that your apps will only work on Windows 8. All of the people who run XP (China…), Vista and 7 can not run your Metro App.
So my suggestion to you is this, go now, while you can, and find a .Net IDE for whatever language that you like/want, and make sure that it is 2010.
Seems to me that I have noticed a pattern here…
1) Create new technology
2) Market the hell out of it
3) Everyone gets hyped up, next big thing etc
4) Microsoft drops technology
5) repeat step 1
This has been their standard order of business for decades. Watch for the same thing to happen to “Metro” Microsoft’s latest big thing..
