Adobe Flex/Flash versus Microsoft Silverlight. And the winner is… HTML 5!

The last weeks there were some rumors that Silverlight 5 might just be the last version of the technology. Combine this with the fact that Adobe is killing any further development of it's flash mobile plugin and you can only conclude that both Microsoft and Adobe think that the future of web development does not lie in a proprietary plugin technology, but in HTML5.

Flash has long been the standard bearer of richer experiences inside browsers. I’ve always had the feeling that Microsoft only created Silverlight to get a piece of this cake. (Maybe someone still remembers that Silverlight version 1 was based on JavaScript?!). Although I have to admit that Silverlight showed some real potential and allowed to create stunning user experiences , far better than I had ever even seen imagined with Flash. And now that Adobe is refocusing it’s effort to HTML 5, Microsoft no longer cares and I’m guessing that Silverlight 6 will never see the light.

But what about the Windows Phone than you could ask?

It’s all based on Silverlight so it will not disappear right? Even there I think we’ll see Silverlight replaced by a new WinRT alternative(just by guessing that Windows Phone 8 will have the same version number as Windows 8 Smile ).

Should you care as a WPF/Silverlight developer?

No. One XAML framework will be replaced by another. And as long as the tooling for HTML 5 doesn’t keep up, we’ll remain far more productive in XAML development (without even talking about the technical expertise required to build an enterprise level business application, and no that’s not the same as a web application enhanced with some JavaScript here and there…). However in a future were HTML5 will become more and more important, it’s not wise to place all your eggs in one basket.

Should you care as a Mobile developer?

Although a native experience remains the ideal, I don’t see a world where every application will be written for each and every mobile platform. So I think the future of mobile is HTML5 and mobile web applications. For now, there are a few restrictions, but if you know about the device APIs you should realize those few limitations are going away in the near future.

So the safest guess today as a developer is to spend time learning HTML5 and JavaScript and you are ready to build rich user experiences for Web, Windows AND Mobile.

I know how I’ll spend my time the upcoming months…

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...

The art of simplicity

Search This Blog