MIXation Sensation

This past week was Microsoft's MIX conference. I almost went to it, and I would have gone if it was not the same week as my oldest son's birthday. You gotta have priorities. Anyways, the reason I almost went was not because I have suddenly embraced ASP.NET development (even though I must admit my admiration for Scott Gu). No, my interest is all browser related and MIX was browser heavy this year.

On the browser front, the big news was the early preview of IE9. For web enthusiasts, it's fun to wax poetic about the mind blowing speed of V8 or the brilliance of TraceMonkey, but these technologies will always be secondary at best. If you are a web developer the most important browsers are the ones from Microsoft, because they dominate the market. They form the baseline that you develop against. If you want to do something that these browser do not support, you have got to get creative or be willing to live with your work simply being a toy. Simply put, IE9 news is more important than all of the Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera news combined.

Luckily, Microsoft did not disappoint with IE9. It is obviously a far from finished product, and Microsoft was a little too dodgy on sharing its roadmap for my taste, but I can empathize with their position. Still they showed a browser with significant speed improvements and with support for a lot of standards based, visual eye candy. I'm talking about a lot of CSS3 features and most surprisingly, an amazing SVG implementation. They whipped out some classic Microsoft tricks, i.e. using their intimate relationship with their operating system to tap into GPU acceleration. You might think it's not a fair trick for them to do, but who cares? The boys at Mozilla, Apple, and Google have to accept this challenge, even if it will be super painful to pull of across platforms -- and Linux will surely suffer here once again.

I was a little disappointed in some of the other JavaScript features. In particular, I was really hoping that Web Workers would be included with IE9, and I was cautiously optimistic that geolocation would also be included. Neither is included in the IE9 preview that Microsoft made available to developers.

Of course that definitely does not mean that these features are out of IE9. I think there is a lot more to come. Microsoft has done some amazing work to give IE9 a lot of graphics features, but they have left out Canvas. Further intense graphics programming would benefit from the multi-threaded programming model supplied by Web Workers. So it would make a lot of sense for both of these to be added. I'm even optimistic that Microsoft will implement these standards directly, and not offer some proprietary alternative.

All of this makes you wonder about IE9 as a compelling graphics/gaming platform. I think that some serious tooling will be needed to make this viable. That's an area that Microsoft excels at. However, would this not put Microsoft in conflict with their own efforts around Silverlight? It's like the HTML 5 vs. Flash war could be played out in miniature within Microsoft's walls, only it would be IE9 vs. Silveright. Speaking of Silverlight...

The other big news, from my perspective at least, that came out of MIX was a lot more information about the Windows Phone platform. As a mobile developer, I have very mixed feelings about Windows Phone. On one hand, I really like the idea of using Silverlight as the application platform. This is a mature application platform, with fantastic tooling. You get to use a beautiful programming language -- C# (oh an maybe other .NET langs, like F#?) that has a decent runtime that includes garbage collection. However, Microsoft looks like they are copying Apple's approach. A lot of the restrictions being placed on non-Microsoft applications are very similar to the restrictions placed on iPhone applications.

Back to the browsers... Microsoft shipped a preview of tools for building Windows Phone applications. Again, major props to Microsoft for getting this software ready out at MIX, even if it is a little rough in places. I don't like companies using end users as a substitute for QA, but this is different. Getting tools into the hands of developers is critical. In this case, the tools include a Windows Phone emulator, which includes *drumroll please* the Windows Phone browser! As a mobile developer, this is the most important thing that can be included. I'll have to support your browser before I have to support your application platform.

However, the Windows Phone browser is not very promising. It seems to be based on IE7. It does not seem to support many HTML 5 features at all. No geolocation. No local storage. No application cache. No web workers.

Maybe some of these things will be added by this fall, but I'm not as optimistic about this. Even the documentation that is included emphasizes building web applications that are designed to work on legacy browsers. They seem to be saying, don't go looking for coolness in the browser!

Silverlight

Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight seems to have really caught a lot of attention. I'm having a hard time understanding this. What did they really announce that we didn't already know?

• Free storage for streaming video using Silverlight: That's nice I guess. In typical Microsoft fashion, they are subsidizing the switch from an existing technology (Flash) to their own version of the same thing. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that.
• .NET CLR included with Silverlight: This is the big news, I guess. Well not really. Using the CLR as a runtime for rich content over the web is not new. It was always one of the ideas behind .NET. It's a replacement for ActiveX, which even Microsoft seems to hate now (well at least IE7 complains and warns a lot about it.) MS obviously had to include some kind of runtime with Silverlight. Adobe has its supercharged version of JavaScript, ActionScript (Microsoft has this too, it's called JScript.) The CLR that will be included will be a subset of the "full" CLR. So it just means that Silverlight devs can use a stripped down version of C# that will (just guessing here) will perform JavaScript like duties. That's nice. I guess. I'm going to conjecture that for most things you will do in Silverlight, it will be a lot easier to use a dynamic language like JScript (or Python or Ruby, as .NET versions of those were mentioned) instead of C#. Adobe experimented with making ActionScript more Java-like with ActionScript 2.0, and re-thought the decision with ActionScript 3.0.
  
• Silverlight CLR open sourced and ported to Firefox and Macs: Oh wait, this is the big news. Actually I guess it is, but not for the reasons most people think. This is Microsoft's white flag. They are admitting that a lot of people use Firefox now and there's even a reasonable number of people using Macs. So for them to compete with Flash, they need to support Firefox and Safari.
• Silverlight CLR on Windows Mobile: This is actually the most interesting thing to me, though I am somewhat skeptical. The idea of being able to write an application that works on the web, on the desktop, and on a mobile device is very appealing to me. Heck, I basically spent a year of my life writing a language to do exactly that at Ludi Labs (RIP.) I went to one of those grandiose Microsoft launch parties earlier this year just to see what progress they had made on this front with Windows Presentation Foundation err I mean .NET 3.0 err I mean Silverlight. The stuff I saw from Mix only seemed to indicate things like video streaming (more on that soon) than real application development. That's why I'm still skeptical. I've written Windows Mobile apps and it is definitely a differentiated development experience vs. writing a Windows application. Sure a lot of things are similar and you can use some of the same languages (or a subset, does this sound familiar?)

Now part of why I'm not so impressed with Silverlight is that I mostly care about application development. It seems to me that Silverlight will basically enable developers to build Flex-like applications. I see its support for CLR languages as a minor advantage. It will be interesting to see if they give away a Visual Studio Express edition for doing Silverlight development. That would be an advantage over Flex. Otherwise, I see this playing out similar to how the introductoin of C# and .NET played out. Microsoft shops may switch to it, but it's hard to imagine Flex developers switching to it.

There's big wrinkles I've left out. The biggest is streaming video. It may very well be that Silverlight provides superior streaming video capability. If that is the case, then a Silverlight based YouTube would seem to have potential. It would be a real boon to pirated video, like HD episodes of TV shows. That would be huge. If works great on phones, even better.

The last piece of the puzzle is the desktop. Is Microsoft going to push Silverlight as a desktop application development? I did not get this impression. It seems possible, but why would they do this? Adobe is certainly going this route with Apollo, but Adobe doesn't have any presence on the desktop. Microsoft already owns it. So it seems like Silverlight would only be used as a counter, if needed. I'm not really sure it will be needed though.