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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

> there's been a hesitance to jump on MS web frameworks in fear of a repeat of silverlight.

That's not really fair to MS since all the web frameworks which were born in that era (Adobe's AIR, JavaFX as a web tech, etc.) died because IE died. And also because Apple killed off browser plugins since they didn't work on the iPhone. Chrome and Firefox took over and there was no longer a need to use browser plugins for SPA's. HTML, CSS and Javascript finally got the features needed to create a proper SPA.

While JavaFX did live on outside of the browser both Adobe RIA and Silverlight were far worse positioned for life outside of the browser (even though both claimed to be usable outside of the browser). Simply because JavaFX was meant to replace Java Swing.

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JavaFX never really became a thing, because even at Sun it had a bumpy start with the scripting based language before it got rebooted into Java, just before Sun went down.

Oracle isn't a GUI company, beyond the stuff needed for their database products and IDEs, so they also didn't invest that much into it.

Thus most of the Java ecosystem, kept targeting Swing, and for the extent native desktop applications are still around, Swing is good enough.

Android is its own thing, so even one less reason to care about JavaFX.

javax.window.JOptionPane.showMessageDialog("Hello!");

Forever burnt into my mind from Programming 1008. And in fairness, much easier to get off the ground than the legions of XML required for JavaFX.

You can say that, but at the same time, whenever people complain about technology changing, leaving them behind, they usually mean tech by Microsoft.

The reason Java and JavaFX survived is that they went Open Source, with a large FOSS ecosystem, targetting FOSS operating systems as well, all while there still was interest. And their maintenance and evolution continued. Adobe RIA and Flash were proprietary platforms, just like Silverlight.

In fairness, projects that survive tend to be FOSS, and AFAIK, .NET Blazor is open source. OTOH, the .NET ecosystem tends to prefer Microsoft's solutions, with alternatives languishing, they basically killed Xamarin's projects, and they have had several noteworthy conflicts with the FOSS community. So the jury is still out on whether Microsoft's projects can escape the deprecation curse.

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The lesson here, for all, if you want for your knowledge and work to stay relevant, look towards Open-Source platforms and open standards. If seeking stability, the older, the better, actually. FOSS platforms age like fine wine.

Don't forget all the other products Microsoft managed to screw over developers with. Like discontinuing Xamarin.

Sorry for not being up-to-date. I can't read anything about discontinuing Xamarin on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xamarin

Ok, MS says this: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support/policy/x...

> Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Mac are now integrated directly into .NET (starting with .NET 6) as Android, iOS, and Mac for .NET. If you're building with these project types today, they should be upgraded to .NET SDK-style projects for continued support.

> Xamarin.Forms has evolved into .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) and existing Xamarin.Forms projects should be migrated to .NET MAUI.

So to those of you using Xamarin: how painful it is? How compatible Xamarin.Forms or not is with .NET MAUI? Are they totally different tech?

How easy/hard it is to go from Xamarin.{Android,iOS,Mac} to .NET6+ ?

Xamarin for iOS and Android just works…

Maui on the other hand is a turd. It’s such a pain to work with, workloads just plain suck. And if you install . Net 7 and your project targets 6, It will download .net 7 workloads and fail to build. Then 8 comes out and same problem. Have to pin the SDK.

And by the time Maui starts to mature and work, they will announce a new framework and the cycle starts again. I still don’t understand why they couldn’t keep working on WPF instead of cranking out a new framework every three years.

It's because WPF was too heavily tied to Windows technology.

Only because they didn't want to put the work to make it portable, as proven by Avalonia folks.

It's not just web frameworks - it's all MS UI frameworks. On the desktop there WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, Blazor, MAUI... it's really seems like a mess with no clear direction.

> That's not really fair to MS since all the web frameworks which were born in that era (Adobe's AIR, JavaFX as a web tech, etc.) died because IE died. And also because Apple killed off browser plugins since they didn't work on the iPhone.

Who could have foreseen that hitching your horse to derpy, single-vendor RIA frameworks that were closed source proprietary and worked on the basis of shoving foreign content into the browser to get it to do non-Web things was a bad idea? Oh wait, anyone.

In that vein, in response to the earlier remarks by the original commenter:

> Silverlight burned a lot of small businesses hard, almost everywhere I've worked has had a silverlight horror story of a project they experimented in it with only for it to languish. So now they either have some outdated dependencies they'll never update or had to re-write it back into something else.

Yeah, good. That pain is well-deserved. Almost self-inflicted, even.

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