BUILD conference–day 0

13 September, 2011. It was a Tuesday.

I am here in Anaheim CA attending the Microsoft BUILD conference. During the next 4 days Microsoft will finally reveal details about the upcoming Windows 8. The sparse information that has been available so far left us developers and architects in doubt about the future strategy of Microsoft regarding software development.

Quite some years ago our company chose Silverlight as the platform for the user interface of our application suite. During all this time Microsoft has assured its clients that Silverlight is one of their strategic platforms. New releases of Silverlight have been publish in short intervals. Currently version 5 is available as release candidate. Silverlight was used exclusively on Windows phone 7 and was meant to be the ubiquitous platform on all future mobile devices produced and/or supported by Microsoft. As a side note: you might remember that Windows Mobile 6.5 is a dead end and is not developed an further.

A couple of month ago Microsoft publicly announced that Windows 8 will deeply integrate HTM5, Java Script and CSS into the platform. They also announced that HTML5 will be the main development platform on Windows and that Windows 8 will run everywhere, on servers, workstations, tablet devices , phones and embedded systems. No word about Silverlight though…

All our questions regarding the future of Silverlight were left unanswered.

Ok, today and during the coming days we will hopefully get some more insight into the future strategies of Microsoft. This will be interesting.

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