Silverlight Gets Some VS12 Love, Users Want More
It was just an inconspicuous little reference seemingly buried in the verbiage announcing all the new goodies in the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, looking almost like an afterthought jammed in at the last minute:
"It includes support in Blend for SketchFlow, WPF 4.5, and Silverlight 5."
But it was like getting a note from an old, long-lost friend. "Oh yeah, Silverlight is still around."
Some 16 months since Silverlight 5 has been available for download, you can now use it with the latest Blend hooked up to the latest Visual Studio, just like you used to. It made me want to dive right in and play around with those 3D-like animations built with the storyboard. I had used it for weeks (months?) to build a cool blackjack game with all the bells and whistles, including playing cards flipping through the air onto the card table. I loved it.
But, for a while now, having sensed the winds of change, I've been plugging away at getting up to speed on apps built with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. I hate it.
I know that's just me the hobbyist, and it means nothing. Maybe Silverlight is irrelevant to serious LOB devs. And even if that's not the case, after all, Microsoft has said it's not killing off Silverlight tomorrow or anything drastic like that. And it has been available as a preview download since last August. But still, it was nice to catch up with that old friend and see that others still cared about him, too, fitting him into their plans. I wondered what the user reaction would be, so I checked. It looks like Silverlight still has a loyal following.
There it was, No. 2 on the "Hot ideas" page of the Visual Studio UserVoice site--where you can present and vote on ideas for VS--with the simple title of "Silverlight 6." The OP had written, "Please do work on Silverlight next version. I feel Silverlight is great tool ... but as you guys stopped working on it; I feel that I wasted my time in learning Silverlight." The Jan. 13 post had 874 votes and 54 comments, mostly along the same lines.
But I don't want to give the impression that this is a landslide movement or anything. The most popular idea was to bring color back to VS, and it had more than 12,000 votes, which astounds me, right up there with the ALL CAPS menu fiasco. And Silverlight wasn't even mentioned in the comments section of the S. Somasegar blog post announcing the new update.
So maybe Silverlight is like Douglas MacArthur, an old soldier who doesn't die, but just fades away. An old friend with whom I'll stay in touch but won't meet at the pub for a couple of beers anymore. And that's cool. I know, it's only Silverlight and Blend ... but I like it.
Do you like Silverlight? Please comment here or drop me a line.
Posted by David Ramel on 04/05/2013