The King is dead. Long live the King!

Silverlight Alternative Hosting

Let’s refresh our memory about Silverlight applications hosting ability first>

http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightalthost (Last edited Apr 27 2010):

“Silverlight is primarily designed for hosting in a Web page. However, there are several options that enable Silverlight to run outside the browser or within another host environment. For example, Silverlight provides unmanaged interfaces that enable you to host Silverlight within another Web plug-in or within a Win32 application.”

The First Impression

Looking at the picture presented at “Build Windows” conference, everyone can think that Silverlight is dead:

1. It listed under “Desktop Apps” section which is not mainstream anymore

2. It is the last technology on the picture at right bottom corner

Analyzing News

Look at “Keynotes from Day 1” which available at this location: http://www.buildwindows.com/ (time reference is included for quick content search):

· “WinRT (Windows Run Time) provides over 1800 objects for building Metro applications … are natively built in Windows. This is not a layer on top of Windows. This is Windows.”  (36:53)

·  “You can do your view in XAML” (37:32)

·  “Let’s talk about XAML… Any XAML or Silverlight fans in this room? … This is “ScottGu’s Blog” and couple of years ago he wrote the series of eight posts where he basically described how to build these cool little Silverlight client app… What I’ve done is I downloaded the code from this app and just tried to build it in Windows… What you see it’s running… in desktop browser IE10… but this is Silverlight app though… But what we would really like to do is to make it “Metro” styled app… I’m taking all files from Scott’s project and moved them into Windows 8 app project… We are moving from one runtime environment which is Silverlight into different runtime environment which is Windows 8. Runtime environments are different. You gonna not to expect these things just compiled. But how close its can get… Its turns out actually I’ve only had made handful of changes in the places in these files… and mostly of them just namespace changes … the other things I’ve changed here … relate to networking API…. And the last thing is this app launches in Windows 8… I’m hit F5 and now it looks pretty familiar except that this is actually full Metro app…” (58:45)

It looks like:

· .Net Framework and CLR (Common Language runtime) were transformed from separate product which was run by Windows into WinRT which is Windows. But idea is the same: runtime machine runs .Net framework application.

· Ability to compile Silverlight application against WinRT with some minor changes tells that WinRT is a next version of Silverlight (4.5 if you wish)

Long Live the King

In other words, Metro is not brand new technology but rather rebranded Silverlight.

Yellow Jacket

Is HTML 5, comparing to Metro, leading technology?

Judge yourself:

“In particularly, you know, this sort of bold bet we’ve made to bring these web technologies like HTML and JavaScript to the platform really gonna enable millions of web developers that exist today to participate in this amazing new opportunity to build these apps for Windows” (39:26)