Chris' Coding Fun

A very respected technology journal has reported the death of Silverlight in this article: InfoQ: Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins Of course, if you actually watch the keynote and read other BUILD conference information, Microsoft is doing no such thing. As a matter of fact microsoft has doubled down on Silverlight by not pushing Windows 8 to the phone level and sticking with windows phone 7. My initial take on this plugin-less Windows 8 Metro browser is that its microsoft's attempt at dealing with the performance issue Android is having with supporting plug-ins in the tablet space. Imagine not just flash, but a pdf, a VRML, an applet, a silverlight app all running in the same page, or in even mulitple tabs. Lets just say the browsing experience would probably be less than optimal (not to mention the ding in battery life). For those who want a clean browsing experience (basically the equivalent of turning off plug-ins in an android browser), a quick

Most non C++ developers have had mixed results at best for trying to access Win32 API from their respective languages (external DLL class to user32 and such). Now microsoft is finally replacing it with something called WinRT. Infoq has a nice overview here:  http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/09/WinRT-API Oh, and I also was able to get Windows 8 Developer Preview up in VirtualBox. I am still mulling over what I think about it.

Just finished downloading the developer preview. GetRight and 30mbit down allowed me to get the 4.6GB version in 24mins. I'll be installing it in virtualbox first. If there are lots of hardware accelerated things, i may put it on an old hard drive, or maybe a laptop.

Just an update. I've been down in the "trenches", poking around with various technologies. Below is a short list of things i am checking out: Mono and SWT I am checking out mono and SWT as a UI toolkit vs Windows.Forms, or GTK# or WxWidgets or some other toolkit. SWT is an interesting UI toolkit that uses native widgets. Originally from IBM and now a major part of the eclipse project. It seems that IKVM allows SWT to be run without much effort. I'll post some of my progress on this later IKVM and Eclipse I am also checking out running the current version of eclipse with IKVM. Why? Its an interesting test on how far the project has come, its also could provide an interesting alternative to MonoDevelop or Visual Studio. WindowBuilder is also an interesting feature i'd like to check out. What if WindowBuilder could produce C# compatible SWT code? Could be a boon for Desktop mono linux apps. Solaris ZFS development I am looking at doing some Solaris Develop