[piskov]

My nation-wide C# Silverlight app lasted almost 12 years. And it had grid, animations, what have you in 2010 better than most html5 in 2018. Not to mention tooling.

And you know what? No matter the browser, no matter the OS it all worked and rendered the same.

Probably Adobe Flash was like that also.

First app we rewrote to AngularJS. You know what happened to it. So then we rewrote it to Vue.

The same effing app just to keep the stack “modern”.

I don’t know what is wrong with all these people.

God I wish something like Silverlight returned in a way that is mobile battery friendly.

[stanac]

> God I wish something like Silverlight returned in a way that is mobile battery friendly.

Not exactly the same, but there is Blazor, it is using html instead of xaml. Also there are third party solutions (I have no experience with) like Uno and Avalonia, both are xaml-based.

> mobile battery friendly

Do you have some specific framework in mind that is not battery friendly? Probably anything is built on js/wasm isn't battery friendly.

[piskov]

Battery and mobile performance is what killed flash and silverlight as an aftermath in the first place.

See “Thoughts on Flash” by Steve Jobs

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

—

As for Blazor, we ain’t fools to rewrite the RIA app the fourth time.

I just wish these “innovation” MF stopped reinventing the wheel.

The code from 2008 was perfectly fine and should have worked in 2025 if all these guys stopped making web frameworks like hot cakes. Some of us with an actual job have products that last more than a couple years (15+ in my case)

[cap11235]

I feel like flash could have been adapted to low battery quite easily (it isn't like JS has some super smart concurrency; it is literally the basic common denominator unless you are using a Z80). Rather, Macromedia was in the toilet, then purchased, and Youtube (and Vimeo and others) started to be useful, making a more appealing platform (and probably the first other than newgrounds) for animation. Having someone else host media was a big +++

[jslaby]

Silverlight was awesome, too bad Microsoft abandoned it. You think they could've done something with it like decoupling from the browser, instead of making all these different UI frameworks that are fizzling out.

[piskov]

The whole reason was working in the browser.

WPF was great for desktop, albeit Windows only.

So that was wrecked after .net framework became .net core (and thus needed crossplatform).

Then some shitheads at Microsoft got the “release new UI framework to get a promotion” annual bug: winui, maui, etc.

All that instead of making WPF crossplatform.

That’s why C# succumbed to server API only (and games of course, but those blokes suffer as most great C# features are not supported in Unity).

That was the grandeur of Windows Vista: not the OS but completely new dev stack (wpf, linq, wcf, etc.) that was feature rich for a few decades to come. And they fucked most of it up instead of building further on the same foundation.

And after you keep abandoning the technologies devs will say FU and go to something more stable to build a business.

Even now, .net is keep getting rewritten (meaning existing features being abandoned) because board wants those sweet-sweet money from the cloud functions and what have you instead of you being self-hosted and not vendor-locked

[breve]

> All that instead of making WPF crossplatform.

Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net/) and Uno (https://platform.uno/) are cross platform UI frameworks for .NET.

Both work in the browser with WebAssembly. Avalonia renders to canvas. Uno can render to canvas or the DOM. Here are a couple of Avalonia demos:

https://solitaire.xaml.live/

https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/