Contents
The fact it was chosen as the Windows Phone 7 dev platform has given it a new lease of life. But already it is reaching the stage where new versions are more incremental than revolutionary. That’s a good thing – the technology is approaching maturity.
Visual Studio can be used to develop and debug Silverlight applications. To create Silverlight projects and let the compiler target CoreCLR, Visual Studio requires the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio. But no matter who you are, it’s important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately.
Silverlight, like other web technologies, uses patent-encumbered audio and video codecs. A browser plugin named Pipelight used to provide Silverlight access. Pipelight requires browser support for NPAPI plugins, which newer versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera have dropped. As of 2018, the Pipelight project has been discontinued. The following table presents an availability and compatibility matrix of Silverlight versions for various operating systems and web browsers. According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011.
Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform. Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility. The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue. The marked changes in using .NET if we’re to build applications for the new OS are inevitable. We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable. In February 2012, Microsoft released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
Microsoft Windows 8: How Dead Is Silverlight?
However, it can be installed in an unofficial way (for example using the Add-on Compatibility Reporter Archived May 1, 2012, at the Wayback Machine add-on) and with Firefox 11 it works correctly when installed. As noted above, the Moonlight project was abandoned in May 2012. Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is https://bitcoin-mining.biz/ actually quite gentle. The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic’s excellent white paper, “Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform.” As the authors of that paper point out, Silverlight code won’t just “port” to Windows 8. And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won’t either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative.
They have a new UI framework and plan to support Mac and iOS using a version of FreePascal. If you really wanted desperately to save the pennies worth of disk space, then to cater for the remaining minority of your visitors, wouldn’t it be much easier to provide a link to an installable WebM codec for them to use? How about “MP4 for iPads and IE9, and everything else can have WebM”. You can then use essentially the same HTML5 streaming software, just pointed at a different source video file in each case.
And now, Mary Jo Foley from our sister site ZDNet is urging Microsoft to make sure the platform comes back into the discussion, and soon. Former CNET contributor Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don’s work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications. Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most.
We soon discovered that Microsoft had contracted with Adobe to build a version of Flash inside IE — much the same as Google worked with Adobe to build a version of Flash inside Chrome. Silverlight sites can’t strut their stuff in Windows RT or the Metro part of Win8, no matter how hard you try. All the browsers will continue to use flash, it’s not going the way of the Dodo any time soon. I’m a bit confused here – has Flash ever actually shipped with Windows? Maybe some OEM installs put it in, but I think the retail versions of Windows haven’t had as far as I know.
Actually you can compile your flash app into a iOS app with relative ease. Adobe simply bundles a version of the AIR run time with each app. A tad inefficient in terms of app size, but it works, and Apple’s policy reversal on non-native apps allows it.
In fact, the wiki shows that the toolset closest to WinRT is Silverlight. Silverlight developers are already familiar with a significant portion of the techniques required to develop in WinRT. In fact, one of the demos given at BUILD showed how to migrate Silverlight applications to Metro. Granted it was a demo app, but it does show off the possibilities. Now the messages are clearer, and it’s apparent that Silverlight will be a supported part of the Windows environment for the foreseeable future.
Silverlight doesn’t work on Windows 8
If Flash survives because the users will work around artificial obstacles, it will only get stronger. Microsoft will choke on WebGL since they always considered OpenGL their rival. So far their support of HTML5 is far from perfect. Flash is still going to be ‘better’ at it for a while–you don’t replace something so mature quickly, not with any degree of perfection.
- Its similar to why “linux is awsome” and why “windows sucks”.
- Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation , and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations, and interactivity into a single run-time environment.
- Now that doesn’t explain why IE won’t support a new WinRT plugin architecture.
- An experienced .Net dev can jump on to Silverlight reasonably quickly, especially if they have some exposure to WPF, rather than just classic WinForms.
- There are of course some Rich Internet Applications that use Silverlight, but they will soon disappear one by one, letting new development tools pass by.
- Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most.
Every up to date major browser exudes HTML5 support. I wrote a site in HTML5, people called me stupid for using an unfinished spec not supported by IE. Anyway, most of the new interface seems to be very bare bones.
Microsoft Silverlight
Silverlight 3 included more controls—including DataGrid, TreeView, various layout panels, DataForm for forms-driven applications and DataPager for viewing paginated data. Silverlight was not available on Android or iOS, the most prevalent operating systems on the mobile market. Cross-platform Mozilla Firefox support for Silverlight was removed in Firefox 52 released in March 2017 when Mozilla removed support for NPAPI plugins, bringing it in-line with the removal of NPAPI plugin support in Google Chrome. Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to Windows Presentation Foundation , and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations, and interactivity into a single run-time environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in Extensible Application Markup Language and programmed using a subset of the .NET Framework. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations.
And dumping it now could sound alarms across the Windows development landscape. You might check out this Deep Fried Bytes episode, and there are other blog posts as well to give you some guidance. There’s also an article on the Dev Center focused on Windows Phone 7 Silverlight to Windows 8, but much should be application to your scenario as well. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Also means I don’t have to encode the same video 3 times. Only Twice … saves disk space, and the crunching server has to do less.
It’s unclear if Win32 will even be supported on ARM in Windows 8 and it will certainly be an optional install going forward. When you think about it, this makes a kind of sense. Currently the plug-in architecture is pretty agnostic. It allows basically any DLL which supports the right API to take over a section of the browser canvas. Microsoft (the guys who control 90+% of the desktop) are saying ‘don’t use Flash’.
Feature Spotlight: Visual Studio 2015 Preview XAML Peek and Edit
Microsoft planned to terminate Silverlight support on October 12, 2021. Support for IE7–8 was removed between 2014 and 2016, depending on the OS. Support for IE9 and IE10 has also ended “or though the support lifecycle of the underlying browsers, whichever is shorter.” There is no Silverlight plugin available for Microsoft Edge. It has not been supported by Google Chrome since September 2015 or by Firefox since March 2017. If you’re building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity.
Silverlight for Windows Phone OS 7.1 is based on Silverlight 4. That means if you create a new Silverlight for Windows Phone application that targets Windows Phone OS 7.1, you can take advantage of several new features. Firefox 52 ESR is the last version supported on Windows XP and Vista. In contrast to normal Firefox 52, Silverlight is still supported in Firefox 52 ESR. Silverlight 2 – Included a version of the .NET Framework and implemented the same full Common Language Runtime version as .NET Framework 3.0, so it can execute programs written in any .NET language.
The Future of the Prism Library: Meet the New Team
In case you have upgraded to Windows Anniversary Update, Silverlight can be installed and used. You can find a step-by-step guide on how to install Avance Consulting Services Windows Systems Network Engineer SmartRecruiters it in this article plus the download link. In 2017, Microsoft dropped a massive update for Silverlight in order to support it on Windows mobile.
With the release of Windows 8, the era of touch devices is in full swing. Manufacturers are scrambling to create mobile devices that can run… At minimum, this shows how clearly they DO NOT want to coexist with GPL’d code. Others take a darker view of Microsoft’s intentions and argue that Silverlight is simply a rehash of the company’s 1990s-era “embrace and extend” strategy for pre-empting Web competition. “They’re still playing the same games,” said Michael Nelson, professor of internet studies at Georgetown University. “It’s a way to lock up the content, and it’s not enabling as much innovation as we would like to see.”
Example 1 demonstrates how to merge the ResourceDictionaries so that they are applied globally for the entire application. “Sample Source Code for Silverlight 2 Runtime and SDK Controls”. In conjunction with the release of Silverlight 2, Eclipse was added as a development tool option.