Freigeben über

Silverlight Redux: Listening to Feedback...

  • Artikel

Although it was great to see that my post on Silverlight got picked up in a few places (in particular, Digg and TechMeme), it certainly generated a lot of feedback in the comments section! I hope that after reading the comments, you'll at least give us a tiny amount of credit for being open and transparent - I haven't censored the posts that I didn't like the look of :)

It's interesting to read all your feedback, and I can promise you that it is taken seriously. At our next leadership team meeting, I'm sure we'll be poring over all the commentary and trying to incorporate a good deal of it. To address a few points:

  • We built Silverlight to be a cross-platform solution: after all, we have WPF already for the richest Windows platform experience, so it wouldn't make sense for us to build an inferior Macintosh experience. From the very first release in December of a CTP of this technology, we sim-shipped a Mac version, and both releases have had complete feature parity. Any difference between the two is a bug, not a devious attempt to lock out potential customers!
  • To suggest (as one commenter did) that unless we release Silverlight as open source, we can't claim that it's cross-platform is hard to take seriously. I guess Oracle, Acrobat Reader and Flash aren't cross-platform either. I was hoping we might get at least some recognition for the fact that we shipped a solution that works just as well with Firefox and Safari and Mac OS X as with IE and Windows.
  • Just because we haven't announced something now doesn't mean that we're ideologically opposed to doing it. Our engineering team are working hard on building a runtime with broad platform support and a great feature set, but we can't do everything at once. Our current list of supported operating system versions and browsers is a good start, but we'll evolve it over time.

Enough said. I'm not writing this to be defensive: everyone is entitled to their opinion and I'm committed to provided an open channel for feedback, positive or negative. But I also wanted to show that I do read every comment and am interested in the discussion. Our success or failure with Silverlight is contingent on whether we satisfy developers like yourselves - time will tell how we do, but I hope that you'll at least give us a chance to earn your trust.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2007
    Tim, Please make a mac version of Expression Blend to support Silverlight. Most all serious designers use Mac's and I think to exclude them is risky.

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2007
    Hey, Nice job with silverlight. I have a project that can translate c#/msil into javascript at jsc.sf.net. The question what do you think of the idea, and what dou you think the future would be like for my jsc project? As silverlight is now solid enough i think i should start using it my examples. cheers :) Arvo

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 18, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2007
    Guys -- I could see how you could get easily discouraged with the negative comments and feedback you're getting. Don't Be! We are extremely excited to have Silverlight; we have products that we wrote for the web that we're going to use WPF to rewrite in desktop mode. And we'll now be able to use that presentation framework goodness in on the web! Great things all around.

  • jesse

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2007
    Well, if you want some feedback, it could use some Opera support.  Opera needs more love in general, really :

  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2007
    Hey, Silverlight really rocks. I wonder if it supports layers?! For example I have 3 images I want to send the last one to be on top of the other, or the one on top to be behind the others etc.. Do you have any idea how to do that?!

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2007
    What about Windows 9x support?

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2007
    Tim Sneath is awesome, if you don't read his blog , you should. You really, really should. He's

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2007
    Qns:

  1. What are you doing about accessibility? Will this work seamlessly with MSAA so that popular screen readers can pick up content?
  2. When are u supporting Opera? I don't care about Linux, but half the people I know use Opera as atleast a second browser. Its my primary browser.

  • Anonymous
    May 04, 2007
    I'm very interested in mixing XAML/HTML-what you can suggest in this scope?You talked about some kind of windowless frames to bring HTML elements to XAML,what does it means,iframes?Bad,very bad...VML  has true mix with html ability <rectangle><input/></rectangle>,and Adobe's SVG plugin provide this TRUE kind of mix for ages(to be honest,their native behavior dosen't play that nice with html as VML implementation,but anyway integrated more close than Silverlight do,<div><svg/></div>-was completly valid). One step forward,two steps back?I understand browser compatibility and the like,but why not to provide more consistent experince for IE users? I thought Silverlight can provide element/attached seamless behavior experince to developer,but it seems much more difficult...and Silverlight looks like just another vector graphic ActiveX implementation only with CLR support for scripting.But essentially,you're throwing away all BOM/DOM codebase and replace it by XAML/CLR,if I can't use standard html elements in place of Sileverlight controls.You keep to programming models separate,no matter what you say about two-way scripting,object/dom models mixing-what's really could make programming experience transparent. Regards.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2007
    I second the call for a Mac version of the creation tools... Otherwise, a non-starter for me.

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2007
    I love the idea of Silverlight and feel its about time this is being done! For everything I have plenty of positives however to call it cross platform with no linux/unix support is just not true. By definition that means it should run on current platforms and it just does not. A nice start to be sure but I can not devote my time and effort here until I reach the major platforms. (And trust me I would jump at the chance as I use asp/vb 2005/vba elsewhere!!!)

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2007
    The comment has been removed