Comment by WorldMaker
8 years ago
As someone that worked on migrations to Silverlight and then to UWP, I still don't understand why these are seen as such big deals. The APIs were more similar than they were different and XAML is still XAML. (The only big loss from Silverlight was being able to browser-host it, but even then that was probably worth losing for the greater good to avoid terrible plugin websites.) The only thing they really dropped was Silverlight as (an unnecessary) brand name.
If they had semvered the whole thing: Avalon => UWP 0.x, WPF => UWP 1.x, Silverlight => UWP 2.x, Windows 8.1 UAP => UWP 3.x, today's UWP ~=> UWP 4.x, I don't think any developer would have blinked, I feel like we'd have a lot fewer people feeling they dropped support for things... Then again, developers like to complain when their cheese is moved, it could be just like Python 2 versus Python 3 or VB6 versus VB7.
At the mean time we are celebrating 10 years with the same UI engine: https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-o...
The only major thing: added Direct2D H/W accelerated backend to support high-DPI and multi-DPI systems. Yet incremental addition of CSS features.
You couldn't just port from WPF to Silverlight. They took away tons of features. WinRT was even worse. No idea about UWP but I don't care anymore.
That's why I mentioned semver. APIs change all the time, backwards compatibility gets broken. Yes, conversions weren't always straight forward, but often were possible, and there was an evolutionary arc to it all, and a migration story to follow, even when sometimes that story was a bit rougher than anyone wanted.
They couldn't have done that because these technologies are not exactly for the same things and don't have the same features.
Silverlight was mainly for apps embedded in the browser. It was very limited compared to WPF and not meant to replace it.
Similarly, Metro was not meant to replace WPF. It was extremely limited in what you can do. You couldn't build serious desktop apps with that.
The fact that all those technologies use XAML does not mean they're newer versions of the same thing. The difference in APIs is not what matters, it's the difference in what they can actually do and how that makes them different.
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There was no migration story. Usually an API gets more features but in this case they took away a lot of critical stuff. A lot of us write applications that need the full power of the OS and not just a small arbitrarily chosen subset.
These frameworks are by no way equivalent. Silverlight was running on multiple versions of Windows and Mac OS. It should have being kept just for that awesome feature.
On the other hand Win8/10 apps don’t run on anything than the OS they were released on. Which is totally laughable because it means choosing the MS stack allow one to target less Windows OSes than third party tools. So these SDK were doomed from the beginning as thay couldn’t leverage the existing Windows userbase.