20 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 45.4 ms ] thread
The only words in the title that didn't make me want to puke are "Building", "a", "Application", and "using".

I think I need to come to terms with the fact that I am becoming an open source bigot.

I don't think it's an open source thing. I'm not an open source fanboy, but I recoil in horror when I see a website using silverlight, and windows on a mobile phone just seems like a terrible idea.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider Windows 7, Silverlight etc to be hacker news. It's just spam.

Pretty sure labelling this spam specifically because you don't like the platform leans more towards open source fanboy than you might think ... would it still be "spam" if it was about building a twitter app on Android?
I don't care if it's open source or not, I care if it works and is well designed.

Silverlight is neither of those things as far as I've seen.

It's worrying some people consider microsoft a credible source of technology and innovation.

They are credible because of the penetration of the brand Windows throughout the world. People will buy win7 phones because 95% of the world are not developers and do not live their lives by technological zealotry, therefore there is a market for a hacker to make a profitable entry into that market should they chose to.

Whether it fits or not with your idea of how the world should work or what the population "should" be doing is neither here nor there. Narrowing the boundaries of where discussion can go is not an endearing feature of any community.

If quality equated market share, herpes would be a good thing.
Come on. Who has a windows phone :/ They've been trying to get some market pickup on phones for years without any success.
I'd say you haven't looked then.

Silverlight is well done. It isn't a half-assed idea. The separation of xaml from viewmodel (using the MVVM pattern) is clean. You can unit test the shit out of everything. The commanding system and data binding implementation is beyond any other tech I've seen. They took the best parts of web dev and desktop client dev and made it work well. Combine that with the .Net framework and the fact that you can develop in a variety of languages and you have a winner. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company but their developer division is sharp. The tools (Visual Studio and Blend) are great too.

I for one am interested ... as I'm also interested in iPhone / Android / Symbian tips, news, tutorials ... since mobile development is a trend that can't be ignored anymore (not to mention it's pretty cool for your non-technical wife to find something you did actually useful :))

What Silverlight does best, is to give a pretty painless experience for developers. For instance, iPhone developers complain that Android's SDK is too complicated (simple things aren't simple to do) and that it lacks an interface designer.

In this regard it seems to me like WinMo 7 is going to kick ass.

As for any other complaints related to Silverlight, keep in mind that WinMo7 was designed for it, and you probably won't have performance or look&feel issues.

> Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider Windows 7,

> Silverlight etc to be hacker news. It's just spam.

I'm truely interested to see how Silverlight (mobile or not) works. It's just as valuable as a node.js or mongodb write-up to me.

My main motive is that you can work with Silverlight using IronRuby or IronPython, which means being able to develop mobile apps and (rather) portable desktop apps (off-the-browser mode) in these two languages.

So yes, I'm really interested in this personally.

Well - why the downvote, honestly ? Is my comment lacking facts in some way ?
Could you develop why you "recoil in horror" when you see a website using Silverlight (apart from "Micro$oft suxx)? I'm building one right now so I'm interested in any insight you have.
For me it's because it won't run on my computer unless I install the Moonlight plug-in.
I guess I can only wish HTML and Javascript were as well integrated into the mobile platforms as the application languages.
Try the Palm Pre!
It's like twitter is the new Hello, World. I believe every SDK should have a twitter client included in the template instead of Hello World.
Good. But I'll be really amazed to see how we can link Microsoft Blend to Visual Studio and be able to build cool, interactive applications.

Now, any dotNet developer with some reading can build his next Windows Phone application

Think of it as every .NET developer, however competent, can build his next Windows Phone application.
Drag'n Drop in a MS demo, who would have thunk it?