Cross-Platform Microsoft 348
willdavid sends us to the ZDNet blogs for a provocative opinion piece by John Carroll. He points to Microsoft's evident cross-platform strategy with Silverlight, and wonders whether the company couldn't make money — and win friends — by extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm. "Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."
this might be good. (Score:5, Interesting)
What if the customers became savvy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I see you haven't discovered the "Error List" window. View > Error List (Alt-V-I or Ctrl-/-E). It has 3 toolbar buttons at the top (checked-state type) one for errors, one for warnings, one for messages.
I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Idiots, indeed. Create a new installer project. Tell it to use the output of one or more of the other projects in your solution. (Solutions are multi-project binders, projects are apps, libraries, services, sites, etc.) You can even add wizards and (*shudder*) registry entries in addition to the regular file copying functions. You can specify new files/folders/shortcuts in the program files, start menu, or any other place in the filesystem. From nothing to a functional (but ugly) installer takes little more than 5 minutes. And it handles all the uninstall stuff (and install-new-version-in-place-of-the-old-one stuff) for you too (your program will appear in the Add/Remove Programs panel automatically).
Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment?
Again, you didn't actually learn to use the tool. Tools > Options (Alt-T-O) shows you the typically huge (and rightfully so) options pane of an IDE. It's no larger or more complex than Eclipse's, if you want to get into comparisons. But notably, the first option on the first pane of the first item listed in the tree-control on the left (Environment > General) is called "Window Layout". It has a set of two radio buttons. The first one is the default, labelled "Tabbed documents". The second one is labelled "Multiple Documents". I'm guessing you want the second one.
Can someone please describe what is so great about visual studio? I've heard other people say it, but I really don't see it. (Please compare and contrast to Eclipse and/or Xcode.)
Personally, I find the all-in-one IDE (Eclipse and VS) much more usable than the everything-spread-over-hell-and-creation IDE (Xcode).
VS has advantages in working with
Eclipse kicks VS's ass in supporting eleventy-thousand languages and has a slightly less developed template system, probably due to most of those languages' plugins being in perpetual beta. Code-assist is nearly non-existent in anything other than Java, and is mostly useless because of that. Help files are also non-existent.
Xcode is geared toward C and Objective-C. Ugh. Screw that crap. It complains if you try to use Java, and it seems to ignore your commands if you try to use C++. You aren't doing it The One True Way With The One True Programming Language (Obj-C), thus you aren't worthy of, well, anything. Get off its lawn. I'm not wild about Xcode, mostly for that reason. Apple includes PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (?), and probably a half-dozen other nice little languages with their systems, but they don't get off their ass and add the necessary meta-code to make Xcode work properly for those languages.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that if Microsoft would give Windows up as a good try and focus on bringing
Re:How cross-platform are we talking here? (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering that, it's strange that people keep going with Microsoft, which isn't exactly folding, but has been known to pull the rug from under people's feet once in a while. New OS releases that come with new and incompatible driver models. New Office releases that save in new file formats that can't be read by older software. Visual Basic 6 will no longer be supported. Oh, and they gave you free, automatic upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Right, that means Internet Explorer 6 won't work anymore, and neither will software that requires it. Oh, your app doesn't work in Vista? Well, guess you'll have to update it. And on and on.
Microsoft isn't actually all that terrible when it comes to backward compatibility, but they don't exactly provide a stable platform, either. You know there's something wrong when people complain about Vista being released too _soon_ after XP.
I don't think it's so paranoid... (Score:4, Interesting)
I work for a web services development company that relies heavily of most all of the targeted technologies (AJAX, server side scripting, Flash, etc). Just yesterday this very subject came up as we look at our business strategy over the next few years and what technologies we will need to adapt.
From what I've seen Silverlight is very much like Flash functionally. In fact (and please feel free to correct me) aside from being a WMV wrapper and there-by providing their own DRM system natively I see very little difference. From a developer stand-point it could be interesting. The multi-language support could speed development up in many cases and help create more interactive content as developers get to use tools they are familiar with to achieve the kinds of things they'd like to.
That said Adobe has been in this game for a long time now. Companies don't usually last that long being stupid so I'll be very interested to see if and how they respond to this. They absolutely *have* to see that this is a threat to one of their business models. And frankly I think Microsoft has done some things here that Adobe should have done already. Microsoft *will* get penetration enough to make a serious go if it simply based on their recent acquisition.
Gloves are off. Personally I'd like to see Adobe pull this off, but they are going to have to react quickly and I haven't heard a lot of buzz coming out of their corner. Time will tell. Silverlight is still in Alpha and while the demo's are interesting, I'd stop short of calling them revolutionary. I think it really will come down to developers on this one.
Re:Microsoft's future (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree with the basic premise, except for the Linux part. Apple has clearly taken the lead in this. The open path for migration for a proprietery OS vendor is through the BSD licensing. It allows for you to close whatever portion of your code changes you see fit. This is why Apple chose the Mach kernel for the base of OS/X. Converting to a standard UNIX-based operating system will help the customer more than anything else they could do.
Microsoft has never been strong on solid, stable, and secure kernel development. A BSD base would be a good next step for them. They could begin there and port the look-n-feel of their Vista. They could even continue using their beloved C:\, D:\ file system nomenclature on top of the native "everything is a directory off of root (/)" structure. They would then have to migrate off of NTFS, which should have been gone a while back. There are several, even GPL-released, file systems that they could negotiate a closed license from some of the IP owners or even use as open (most are inherently securable anyway, even open.) Who known, Microsoft may be the ones to finally break through the adoption barrier of adding ACLs to the UNIX FS as the required default.
I'm no Microsoft fanboy. I've been in this industry since they began and so... do not trust them... at all... They have, however, been producing an incredible tool chain for development in the Visual Studio/C#/SQL Server combination that I have enjoyed as much as the original dBase III/IV before Ashton Tate bit the dust. Granted SQL Server was obtained by questionable trade practices from Sybase, but they have not wrecked it like some of their other partner-then-stab acquisitions. Also, the .Net framework scratches the itch that Java just never reached. If I had a Visual Studio/C#/.Net tool chain for OS/X and Linux/Unix I would be very happy.
With new leadership, it is possible that they are trying to play both smart AND nice. I will, however, be much more comfortable when Balmer sees fit to retire as well.
I am hopeful of these new peace offerings to the development community (notice that I didn't say Linux community...) It would be beneficial for both Microsoft's longevity as well as overall quality of the software industry. Understand, however, that if they string this out and then plunge in the knife like before, Microsoft won't last very long. A dog can only bite the hand that feeds it for so long before you have put it down.
Re:I don't think it's so paranoid... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think we all remember (Score:2, Interesting)
now flash is even more common and powerful and wide spread
does this mean MS is gonna buy adobe
geeze I hope not...
Not Adobe... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, if you want to get technical, Macromedia has been in this game for a long time now. Adobe's fairly new at it, unless you count their (relative) success pushing PDF as a de facto standard. Adobe does not have a perfect track record for developing great software, so I'd say the jury is still out as to how Flash will fare under their stewardship. I wouldn't underestimate Adobe's potential stupidity. Didn't I hear rumors about them wanting to tie Flash and PDF together in some way, and make them downloadable as a single (presumably gigantic) plug-in?
Re:bleh (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard people say very good things about Word for Mac, and quite good things about Excel for Mac, but Access for Mac has never existed, making it unsuitable for a lot of corporate use where Access is horrendously abused as a cheap RAD tool for in-house applications.
Internet Explorer was released for Mac and UNIX when Netscape had a decent market share, but when it died they stagnated and died.
Microsoft embraced Java, and produced the fastest JVM on the block for a while. It's just a shame that i was subtly incompatible, so code that was written to run on it wouldn't run elsewhere.
The RTF specification was pushed by Microsoft when Word was a newcomer, to produce a standard format for interchange between word processors. It was latter extended to a huge (and undocumented) degree, making Word about the only thing that had a chance at correctly displaying Word RTF files (see also HTML).
Of course, with Silverlight they might really mean what they say about cross-platform support. Personally, I'll believe it when the Symbian version reaches feature-parity with the Wince version.
Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So the real question is.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is the "let's make use of free labor" step. The Mono guys, assuming they're happy not getting paid, would be smart to ensure that Microsoft grants them full immunity from any legal claims as a result of their development. Otherwise, if they decide to pull out they can simply say "Silverlight on Mono violates a number of our patents, sorry we forgot to tell you".
Novell develops Mono and if you recall they signed a patent deal that so many people got pissed about that protects Mono and Moonlight from Microsoft's patents. So despite all the naysayers, Microsoft's participation in Moonlight development is a good thing. I am usually the first person to bash MS but in this case I can't see a negative. I guess time will tell.
Re:One word... ActiveX (Score:2, Interesting)