Contrary to Google, MS never kills any tech. You can still develop Winforms apps today.
You call decade a substantial longevity?
Is this some kind of a joke?
Is your ability to assess being held hostage by js ecosystem expererience?
But seriously - I expect a bit more from platform that could potentially waste my life and my venture. I am still happily supporting some Java (and JSF) code that I have written for clients 15 years ago (don't you just love that sweet support fees that you get mostly for being alive and breathing ?). Meanwhile my friend that build whole company around product written in silverlight almost went bankrupt. Now after few years working in AI (going into it a bit too soon) he is trying to create same product in ... yes you guessed it, Blazor.
Maybe some people do not learn from their mistakes :)?
Maybe some people do learn, and in this case it's Microsoft, who are not repeating the same thing with Blazor as they did with Silverlight.
Silverlight was somewhat of a unique situation, as it was a platform where it heavily relied on the platform that was phasing out. (And to clarify, that "decade" is the period that Microsoft was committed to support for latest Silverlight 5. Their first version was released in 2007, so it had about 14 years of history.)
As with Java or any other languages, you can still run it if the environment it runs can be resurrected. (I would not connect that to the internet, though) And many parts of what actually powered Silverlight still thrive in a form of .Net.
I mean where they can support, Microsoft tends to keep its compatibility fairly intact, for instance modern Windows still can run many of the 32-bit binaries from early days. (And you even could do the same for 16-bit apps on a 32-bit platform, not sure if that's still possible, though.)
Silverlight came when flash was being dismantled shortly after.
Different days back then.
10 years is pretty amazing, all told, IMO.
Also had to wire a custom touchscreen event system for WPF because the Microsoft method would latch on to UI components with quick taps and press with sliding. This caused buttons to stay pressed while no fingers where on the screen.
I cannot recommend WinForms or WPF or UWP. Microsoft is bad at GUI application frameworks. It was recently that they finally shipped VS2022 with proper WinForms designer support and the ability to move away from VS2019. I still need to close and reopen VS2022 daily for WinForms and WPF development.
QT, GTK or some other framework gives the ability for cross platform solutions without being anchored to Window OS. Non Microsoft GUI frameworks are also faster and better when deterministic response time is needed and ability to run on low powered computers.
And yes, the current state of affairs is kinda sad.
All dead.
And those are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head.
Plus the terrible excel VBA replacement they made, then abandoned, and now it's some fiddly javascript mess.
I'm sure there's a ton more people can add. Those are just the ones I personally wasted time on.
And let's not forget Window Mobile!
Edit: They've also gone through a stupid amount of changes in the asp.net MVC model in quite a short time. Plus constantly seem to overhaul their consistently overcomplicated authentication/authorization system. The state it's in at the moment is shockingly bad.
The difference is that they stop talking about it, their presence fades away in conference and developer blogs, and eventually from Visual Studio installation workloads.
And i am afraid blazer may be next.
ActiveX - same, but 27! Years ago
Those were not failures. But have replacements.
Those are terrible examples tbh. A lot of businesses would sign immediately if they knew something was going to be supported for > 20 years. Additionally, vbscript owners should have long migrated to eg. Powershell