Microsoft suddenly cuts down the cables of official resource site for Silverlight, which now redirects to a generic page on MSDN. As per reports coming in, most of the links to various educational content published by developers, MVPs such as articles, tutorials and videos are broken.
According to official sources at Microsoft, silverlight.net has been moved to MSDN in October 2012. However, Microsoft confirmed that they are working to restore all broken links for the benefit of their customers.
Microsoft released Silverlight 5 in December 2011 and after that there has been no active development as far as new releases are concerned. Microsoft only says that it will continue to support Silverlight and there are no clear indications as to when will they release version 6.
You should note that support is entirely different from development. Microsoft might provide support for Silverlight without active development of the framework.
"It illustrates how fractured Microsoft is, with individual teams doing their own thing regardless," said Tim Anderson, ITWriting.com.
The big question here is - How a current Silverlight MVP will be able to provide a list of links to Microsoft at the time of renewal when all of them are broken? How can they claim that they have done the work on Silverlight the past year? These are the problems which a community evangelist should face as a result of the chaos created as a result of this development.
However, developers who maintain content on their own blogs are safe to some extent - if Silverlight is not abandoned by Microsoft in the next few years.
The old discussion forum maintained on silverlight.net now redirects to MSDN Silverlight developer center.
Bart Czernicki - @bartczernicki
Microsoft closes http://Silverlight.net for good. I noticed my silverlight forum profile was migrated to MS forums
Janakiram MSV - @janakiramm
The end of Silverlight!
Rockford Lhotka - @RockyLhotka
Yet again, Silverlight is dead
Jeff Wilcox - @jeffwilcox
Silverlight wrapping paper
Tim Anderson - @timanderson
Microsoft Silverlight: shattered into a million broken urls
Developers should wait and watch the whole situation for the next few months as far as the fate of the five year old Silverlight baby is concerned. It will most likely erupt again with cool new features. If Microsoft doesn't release any updates for the next one year then you can easily guess its fate. For now, let's think positively.
/filters:no_upscale()/sponsorship/topic/25afca57-6bcb-4c42-9a70-fbea10ce4fc7/MicrosoftLogoRSB-1678874949003.png)
/minibooks/architecture-2023/en/smallimage/logo-1685600892155.jpg){kind=logo}
/articles/azure-functions-quarkus/en/smallimage/azure-functions-on-quarkus-3-1685542580748.jpg)
/presentations/lyft-cd-benefits-challenges/en/smallimage/tom-wanielista-small-1685002834068.jpg)
/presentations/green-software-growth/en/smallimage/Marco-Valtas-small-1685609473905.jpg)
/articles/test-automation-ci-cd/en/smallimage/effective-test-automation-approaches-for-modern-CI-CD-pipelines-small-1685355310638.jpg)
/articles/impact-machine-learning-climate/en/smallimage/minimising-the-impact-of-machine-learning-on-our-climate-small-1685091723283.jpg)
/articles/kafka-clusters-cloudflare/en/smallimage/tales-of-Kafka-at-Cloudflare-small-1684768928637.jpg)
/presentations/refactoring-cleaning-code/en/smallimage/kent-beck-small-1684908700538.jpg)
/presentations/devsusops/en/smallimage/adrian-cockcroft-small-1684908390875.jpg)
/articles/gdpr-with-spring-and-aop/en/smallimage/easy-implementation-of-GDPR-with-aspect-oriented-programming-small-1684505109873.jpg)
/articles/software-delivery-performance-indicators/en/smallimage/software-delivery-performance-indicators-at-different-granularities-small-1684312207072.jpg)
Community comments
What I will miss is not precisely Silverlight
by Néstor Sánchez,
Re: What I will miss is not precisely Silverlight
by Richard Clayton,
Re: What I will miss is not precisely Silverlight
by Faisal Waris,
The end of chaos
by Thang Chung,
What I will miss is not precisely Silverlight
by Néstor Sánchez,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
What Silveright offered to me was the possibility to program a web front-end using C#, XAML and Linq.
I see HTML, CSS and javascript very limited in comparison.
The story would be very different if the industry could have agreed in a safer and more performant plug-in standard mechanism.
Re: What I will miss is not precisely Silverlight
by Richard Clayton,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
I think you will find Javascript (well browsers support HTML5 features) slowly moving towards Silverlight-like capabilities. A lot of the new Single-Page Application frameworks like Ember.js, Batman.js, Angular.js... are really making the client-side development experience a lot better. If you prefer static typing, Microsoft just released TypeScript. Tooling support is a little weak at the moment, but it's been getting better.
The end of chaos
by Thang Chung,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
The end of one technologies, but will open for more new technologies from Microsoft.
Re: What I will miss is not precisely Silverlight
by Faisal Waris,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
I recently did a mobile web PoC (as a learning excercise) using JQuery + JQuery Mobile (JQM).
I did not have to write a line of javascript because I used F# with WebSharper! (websharper.com)
However:
Anyone who is interested can see the demo here: mins.apphb.com/ and the source code is here: ahmobe.codeplex.com/.