Most of you are probably like me when you first heard about Silverlight and saw the pre-release demo. You asked, "Why would I ever do video editing through a web browser, let alone over the Internet?" And you know what, you were not alone. Microsoft has repeatedly screwed up the release of many of its products over the past 3-4 years, and is very aware of how bad their marketing attempts have been. I went to a special and FREE 8 hour presentation on TFS last year where Microsoft admitted that they didn't know what information companies wanted to know about moving to TFS. It didn't matter that TFS is by far superior to the IBM Rational products, or that the licensing costs are only a tiny fraction of the $250,000 licensing costs for the IBM Rational Suite. Microsoft failed to provide information on all the steps necessary to move to it.
Silverlight has it even worse off as it is one of the core technologies that was presented with Windows Vista, which is probably the absolute worst marketing job that Microsoft has done for any version of Windows. Again, Microsoft didn't lay everything out and people learned that the spiffy new computer that they had bought the prior year and screamed under Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server, dropped to about 25% of that performance under Windows Vista. On top of that, it is probably going to be at least another 2 years before all hardware manufacturers write 64 bit drivers for their products. This happened when we went from 16 bit Windows to 32 bit Windows, and its happening now as we've been moving from 32 bit Windows to 64 bit Windows for the past 5 years.
You're probably asking, "When is this idiot going to get to talking about Silverlight 2? You know, the topic of this post." Well, Silverlight is suffering from all of the above. It was mismarketed during beta, it presented a useless video editing application upon release, it only supported a few browsers, the performance was horrendous, and unless you have an MSDN subscription the tools are prohibitively expensive. While the later may still be true (there are 3rd party alternatives now), Microsoft is finally beginning to do what it does best. They have been listening to developers and taken care of all of the other issues. I haven't fully looked at all of the Silverlight web site, but I have known that this release was being geared to the general Web 2.0 developer, and it does support the current release of all the major browsers.
I have a feeling that within a few years that people will stop frequenting non-Web 2.0 sites in preference of Web 2.0 sites like those that Silverlight is now targeting. The Facebook, MySpace, and YouTubes of today may be the Sega Genesis of tomorrow. Who is going to make the cross over, and who is going to crash and burn? Will Community Server make it? Some very interesting questions that will be answered over the next couple of years. Till then, will you survive?
Hey All,
While perusing the InfoWorld site today and seriously considering whether or not I want to drop my free subscription (most of their writers are complete idiots (layman term that they'll understand)), I came across the writings of Randall Kennedy. This is one guy who actually understands what it means to be a developer that works on multiple Microsoft platforms. Unfortunately, most of his critics have no understanding of this concept, thus their comments.
He did the same thing that I did and switched to Windows 2008 Server for use as a workstation. Anyone who does REAL ASP.NET work knows that the only way to properly write a well written ASP.NET server application is to do the development on a server version of the OS. If you don't, you will run into several installation and operational issues when you try to deploy your applications. Since he wrote a "4 month later" post about his experiences, I thought that I should as well. Here are a few links to his posts:
Just as he says, I can verify that there is absolutely no comparison between Vista and Windows 2008 Server. Windows 2008 Server wins hands down and for me has even turned out to work better than Windows Server 2003, though just slightly slower. The desktop performance tests were done in such a way as to try to slow down the OS that is being compared to Vista as much as possible, and trying to increase the speed of Vista as much as possible, thus the actual differences under normal use are even greater. I personally have noticed a 2-4x improvement over Vista when running Windows 2008 Server and that included graphic intensive games (i.e. WoW).
I do need to write an update to my Bluetooth for Windows Server 2008 post as I discovered a way to natively give support to all of the devices that Microsoft chose to only give to non-server versions of the OS. It basically requires you to navigate to several OS driver folders and remove all of the "...1" text snippets that you find. I'll probably write a small app to do it automatically and make the source code available.
If you have an MSDN subscription with access to Windows 2008 Server, I seriously recommend that you use it. You do need to keep the UAC turned on as it is now so tightly wound into the system that turning it off will cause you nightmares. To debug in Visual Studio you will need to "Run as Administrator", but that is just 1 extra click when you start. Once you've converted it for use as a workstation, you will be more than happy with it as a development environment. I have the Aero desktop fully working and it way outperforms another workstation that I have running the 64 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate that is a newer machine.
If you have converted over, let me know your experiences. Take it easy...