Silverlight 3 and Twitter

The Twitterworld or (Twittersphere or whatever silly shit someone made up today) was all abuzz about the release of Silverlight 3 today, and I was shocked at how quickly it made the trends and how overwhelmingly it was positive.

I kind of knew it was coming already for various reasons (spelled NDA), but it makes me happy to see how excited most people are. I think that individually, the new features have been of average importance, but together, this is a really big deal release. My own pet excitement is attached to the out-of-browser feature, and to a lesser degree the H.264 support, but again, it's an overwhelmingly positive reaction.

But of course the haters are, well, haters. There's a lot of noise and hate on Twitter in general, which is why I fire up Tweetdeck once a week and then let it go for a week after that. The militant Adobe and anti-Microsoft camps started their douchebaggery before anyone ever installed the plugin (let alone the dev tools).

What bothers me the most is that it's a sad reflection on our profession. Platform/language zealotry is like a toxic substance that trivializes what we do. I've had a number of gigs where I happily let go of other projects based on Orcale, Java or whatever because they made sense for the situation. My job was to integrate and connect and ultimately make someone more money, and that's what mattered. If the platform met the requirements, I had to roll with it regardless of what I thought of the vendor or people doing the work. Why is that so hard for some people to deal with?

For the record, I'm pretty excited about Silverlight 3, and its new capabilities immediately bring some uses to mind. I recently deployed a small app to one of my sites for limited use, and install stats went from 25% to 35% in a few days. That's encouraging.

4 Comments

  • Maybe it's my machine, but I'm not noticing the advertised improvements. I went to the demo site for the controls and simply scrolling the text area where the source code was listed bumped the CPU to 100% on one core... really, just scrolling text takes up that much horse power?! The hover effect where an item in a list is highlighted when the mouse is over uses 30% of the CPU and it's visibly lagging the mouse. I can get much better performance out of JavaScript! I'm not a Flash fan, but I need speed and performance, and SL in version 3.0 is still slow, too slow. Could it be my machine? I'm using Windows 7 with a video card that gets 5.5 for Aero and 6.0 for CPU...

  • Do you really look at your CPU when running applications?

  • He doesn't have to be looking at the CPU when he's running applications if he can notice a visible lag. I've experienced similar slow down with both Flash and Silverligjt and I know others have as well.

    As developers we also need to realize that our users probably aren't running machines with Aero scores of 5+ and a lot of times we seem to forget that.

  • @Jeff: If SL3 is advertised as being faster than SL2 then yes, I'm going to look at the CPU :) But, like Rich said, if it's not fast on my machine it's not going to be fast on my clients' either.

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