What's to stop you from putting a Silverlight APP in the tiled interface? Silverlight runs OK now in HTML pages so in theory it should work in the HTML + JS Win8 box as well :)
I think what is more troubling is that Microsoft has apparently signaled a major shift in the preferred way to develop programs for the Windows platform and simultaneously refused to address the implications for developers, asking them to wait for further announcements in September.
That's a recipe for fear, uncertainty and doubt within the tribe itself.
Put another way: it's hard to reconcile "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" with "We're changing things radically concerning the way you develop, but we won't tell you how-- hold tight until September, 'mmm-kay?"
At this point Microsoft is just pre-empting Apple announcements at WWDC. It's all hubris until they deliver something more concrete. There will be internal debate about HTML5/JS vs .NET, and their choice of strategic platform has changed enough times in the last few years to make me take this announcement with a pinch of salt.
There's a huge number of business developers this won't affect. .NET and "normal" desktop, web and server apps are still the bread and butter for these folks. Not everyone is on the bleeding edge.
There is a turf war at the moment between MS, Apple and Goog. Developers take time to tool up and skill up, and amidst all the gunsmoke and fog of war, we all have to decide who to pledge our allegiance to. By not mentioning Silverlight or WPF, MS is effectively switching sides from developers who have invested in exclusively MS tech to those who are far less partisan, and it hurts.
MS is effectively switching sides from developers who have invested in exclusively MS tech to those who are far less partisan, and it hurts.
Microsoft does seem to be inching away from its traditional developer base to broaden its appeal.
Lightswitch seems to be another example. I doubt that it will be as empowering for non-developers as the marketing suggests, but it should reduce the effort/expertise required in creating well-architected CRUD apps, making in-house development easier and exerting downward pressure on project costs. This will hurt some consulting shops.
But Microsoft's duty isn't to look after its loyal developers, it is to maximize shareholder value.
Lightswitch is Silverlight wrapped in a good practice framework, just like Wavemaker generates code on Spring.
I had a play with Lightswitch and I liked it. It is like MS Access. I'm surprised they positioned this at the developers rather than power users though. Perhaps there is a wall between the tools division and the Office division.
On the topic of loyalty, platform companies are like the Mafioso. Loyalty or the lack of it cuts both ways. MS tech is not the easiest to learn. The reason MS got away with it for years is because Sun was even worse.
I had a play with Lightswitch and I liked it. It is like MS Access. I'm surprised they positioned this at the developers rather than power users though.
They are positioning at power users, but it does seem like more of a developer tool. I think it will appeal to less-skilled or time constrained developers more than to power users. I've turned down side projects, where Lightswitch would have been extremely helpful because of time constraints.
I have worked in consulting places where income is generated, especially during lulls, with the sort of apps that Lightswitch is supposed to generate. I expect, if Lightswitch works as advertised, to see less of those projects.
MS tech is not the easiest to learn. The reason MS got away with it for years is because Sun was even worse.
My personal hope is that Microsoft feels threatened enough to produce some silver bullets for business application development, or at least to try.
I dunno - .NET has long felt like that silver bullet to me. It's rare for me to enthuse over a programming language, but C# is fantastic and F# great in its own niche, and .NET tends to have all the bells, whistles, and gongs that I feel benefit me as a developer.
That is the problem. The system is very complicated and verbose to use.
Lets say you want to write a program that extracts all links from a web page. How would you go about this? First, you look up in the documentation how to load a web page over http. This requires several lines of code, and it's complicated enough that you don't know it by heart after the first time you've done it. From there on it gets easier: you get a library and read the documentation to parse HTML and use an xpath or css selector to load all the links and then read of the href attribute. All of this probably requires around 15 lines of code, with various method calls that you have to look up.
I know how to do this by heart because there are just a couple of things to remember. Not having to look at any documentation to do simple stuff like this saves a lot of time.
The guy who architected WCF needs to understand that MS developers have to be competitive against other technologies or they would start losing out because of cost. The competition isn't Java. It is Rails, Django and PHP.
