Comments on: Is Silverlight 4 moving away from cross platform?

By: billreiss

billreiss — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:50:31 +0000

I don't see any requests for Stopwatch on http://silverlight.uservoice.com so you should probably request it if it's important to you. If you're saying that they're focusing on the wrong things then you can make your voice heard. Office integration was a big request from business customers and this was how they decided to provide it.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:29:09 +0000

Silverlight is turning into a crippled .NET framework (where the hell is System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch?). If I want Windows-only support, I will use the much more complete .NET framework thank you very much. This was a stupid addition.

By: billreiss

billreiss — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:27:17 +0000

For the commenters that are against the new COM interface in Silverlight 4, would you be less against it if there was an AppleScript interface as well? On a conference call today I asked Scott Guthrie about Mac native API integration and he said that they're looking at AppleScript and other integration techniques for the Mac platform. So would it still be bad because it's different on both platforms or does offering similar functionality on other platforms make it better?

By: Art

Art — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:57:58 +0000

I think solving real business problems is the right direction and COM support does this. Most applications are not web facing — most are software is developed for in house consumption or serves vertical market where the reach of HTML standards is not critical. Now SL can do both. If you want to target Mac + Windows, you can. If you want to target Windows only, you can.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:53:49 +0000

Adding COM support to me is a major step backwards. Open standards are the best direction for Microsoft to take.

By: Axel

Axel — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:54:24 +0000

>Otherwise, I can already see some killer apps coming to Silverlight 4 and getting heavily criticized for only working on Windows

No app was *ever* heavily criticized for only working on Windows, on what planet are you living? COM access from Silverlight is a good thing, and developers seeking cross-platform compatibility can simply avoid using it, and/or provide alternatives on other platforms, it's that simple. I wish SL offered full plaftorm access, not only COM access.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:09:03 +0000

Mono is doing this today. Kind of.
P/Invoke: http://www.mono-project.com/Interop_with_Native_L...
COM Interop: http://www.mono-project.com/COM_Interop

By: John

John — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:41:06 +0000

Although I don't care much about this issue, I have to point out that this is not the issue. The issue is that, once you start providing extra features on one specific platform (esp. one as widespread as Windows), then it becomes too tempting to build apps only for Windows.

I love Silverlight, and I wish it could become the Web 4.0, but that requires strict cross platform support. Don't ask me how, but I wish they will find a way to support COM's equivalent for Mac & Linux (transparently).

Otherwise, I can already see some killer apps coming to Silverlight 4 and getting heavily criticized for only working on Windows.

By: Art

Art — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:26:29 +0000

I agree that COM support does not take anything away from the cross-platform nature of SL. I make data driven business apps and in my case I was being forced to WPF solution because of some specialized hardware devices our software can use (but not essential to most users). So COM support in SL means I can now off 99.9% of my app's functionality to Mac users and give Windows users the 100%. The alternative is 0% to Mac.