Comment by WorldMaker
12 hours ago
It's hard to fault Microsoft for doing what they did with WP7, though. They needed to make a statement that they were still committed to phones since WinCE was truly dead. So they made an MVP "Preview" of what the next Phone OS would be.
WP7 was sold to me in more like that language of "this is a quick MVP on the way to the next phone". It was exciting at that time in that way, seeing it as the hail mary pass of "What if we replaced WinCE with all the things we learned from the Zune? How quickly can we do a version of that which will give the right impression and set us up for the next 'real' version?"
Unfortunately yes, it wasn't sold to everyone with that perspective. I think Microsoft may have counted on developer enthusiasm a bit more to get the word across.
Also to be fair, that was still the era where "everyone" bought the new iPhone at launch and iOS compatibility was seen as somewhat equally spotty that if you didn't have the latest hardware you didn't expect the next iOS version to run well and you'd expect to get left behind on apps. It was also the era where Android was often non-upgradeable between versions on hardware (because carriers wouldn't "certify it") and you generally assumed an Android device was version locked to whatever OS version you bought it with. Microsoft may have felt somewhat safe needing a hardware jump between WP7 and WP8 exactly because that was de facto the case with iPhone and directly the case with Android at the time.
The WTF-based^W Silverlight-based UI was also an issue. Nobody really _wanted_ it.
To be fair, Android UI framework in that era was also bad. But it appeared several years before Win Phone 7, so developers had to get good with it.
XAML had plenty of experienced developers years before WP7. Just most of them were in "enterprise" environments.
I had an extensive Silverlight and WPF background by that time, so I still don't quite know why so many developers seemed to have a problem with it. I also did a lot of "convert this screen from WPF to Silverlight" and "now convert it back to WPF" that at the time I also didn't see why so many people were complaining about updating XAML from WP7's Silverlight XAML to WP8's UWP XAML. XAML is XAML. XAML is just stupid, ugly XML. Most of the work is updating XML namespaces, which can be automated with XML tools. Assuming you've used a pattern like data-binding or "MVVM" you shouldn't have much business logic to change between XAML versions, was my opinion at the time. As an Enterprise developer having done a ton of that as company winds shifted and more apps needed to be Silverlight one month and others WPF, depending on shifting winds/moon phases and "we want to just HTTP deploy only now" and "how easy can you embed this in VB6 without going crazy".
> I had an extensive Silverlight and WPF background by that time, so I still don't quite know why so many developers seemed to have a problem with it.
Money on app stores is made by games. In addition to being rewritten in C# games in Silverlight had to wrap Silverlight primitives - there was no DirectX or GL ES equivalent API. There were even quite wacky workarounds for this on built in components (like render tiles to textures from some linked in C++, which are then used by Silverlight) but weren't great for anyone.
The result of this was WP7 was an island, and one which had no commercial proof of worth until it was too late. We would all be better off had WP been and stayed viable.
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