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Mirror Mirror on the wall, who's the best of them all?


PDC stands for Professional Developers Conference, an event regularly hosted by Microsoft, often at Seattle. It is a great opportunity for developers who work with Microsoft products to come together under one roof, get to know about new forthcoming products, be briefed about key technologies ruling the market and finally, mingle with one another. At least that was how it used to be all these years. So what was different this year?
This year, when PDC 2010 was being held in the last week of October, Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company's server and tools business, gave an interview to Mary Jo Foley of ZDnet, wherein he stated that Microsoft's strategy with Silverlight has shifted. What he meant, in reality, was actually something different from the way it was interpreted. Mary Jo Foley published the article on Zdnet with these very headlines.
What followed thereafter was a lot of chaos and confusion (in the Silverlight community), firefighting and reassurances (by Microsoft folks). Bob Muglia went on to clarify his position in a blog post on the team site. But for many, the damage had already been done (or so they claimed, nobody knows for real). Bob Muglia's post has drawn around 200+ comments.
For many people, the debate is not about Silverlight vs HTML 5 but Silverlight (Web) vs Silverlight (Windows Phone 7). Those who work on Silverlight development for non-phone Web apps are keen to know what's Microsoft plan for Web development. And if Silverlight focus on OOB is going to increase greatly, then WPF developers are confused where WPF will stand, since it would compete heavily with Silverlight OOB apps. Thus, the controversy and chaos that began with one statement was growing bigger each day. While on the one hand, death knells and obituaries were being laid out for Silverlight, on the other hand, Microsoft developer evangelists went the extra mile in reinstating their commitment towards Silverlight. Its two weeks now since all that happened and the Silverlight community is slowly beginning to calm down. How many of them would still stick around with Silverlight and how many would shift their focus to other technologies remains to be seen. The Silverlight Firestarter event scheduled for Dec 2 may bring some key announcements (and perhaps roadmaps) about the future of Silverlight.
What I personally think is that developers are being too hasty in taking judgement calls just on the basis of one statement from Bob Muglia. They should look at how far Silverlight has come and have faith in its future. Yes, it's very much understandable if huge losses happen if approved Silverlight projects are rolled back but it can be prevented. Convince the CTOs, convince the CIOs, that Silverlight is going to be here quite a long time. Proof for the same may be given on Dec 2 at the Firestarter event. But for the time being, just keep the faith, don't give up on Silverlight.
A few links collated from the Web on this topic:
Tim Heuer's Post
Laurent Bugnion 's take
John Papa's commitment
The Silverlight Saga
A Balanced ViewSilverlight Guys, What should we do next?