It is now ten years since Teroid Software was formed and, at long last, I have a blog. Aren't blogs great: you can free the writer in you without the bother of having to write a whole book or having to get past some dimwit publisher who is too stupid to recognise your literary genius :).
Around the time the company was formed there was a big upheaval in Windows software development, caused by the launch of the .NET Framework and C#. There was a lot of confusion and scepticism about the whole thing - confusion because people didn't understand what the .NET Framework was all about, and scepticism because C# was widely regarded as just a rather cynical attempt by Microsoft to rip off Java.
Many people - me included - decided not to jump on the .NET / C# bandwagon immediately, but just to wait and see how it panned out. Just because something is from Microsoft doesn't mean it will be a success (anybody remember Bob?). Incidentally, some people waited a very long time to see how it panned out: it was only a couple of years ago that somebody told me they were starting a new VB6 project!
Well of course .NET and C# panned out quite well quite quickly, and a couple of years later I gave up Visual C++ and started working on my first serious C# project: a Venn Diagram control for WinForms.
Since then I have written a lot more WinForms controls, a few WinForms apps, a few WebForms controls, a couple of WPF apps and a handful of Silverlight apps, all in C#. (I have also done a bit of Java and PHP, but please don't tell anyone about my shameful secrets.)
And now, it seems, we are approaching another major upheaval at least as big as that brought on by .NET and C#, and probably one causing even more confusion. People have been saying for many years that desktop and web applications will one day merge, and it seems this goal is at last in reach. Silverlight - at birth a minor offshoot of WPF - has taken off in a far bigger way than Microsoft or anybody else could have imagined, and in parallel there has been a big increase in interest in HTML5/JavaScript RIAs. Which of these technologies, Silverlight and its XAML successors or plugin-free HTML5 and JavaSript, will dominate I wouldn't like to speculate. Maybe there is room for both - HTML5 Rich Internet Applications and XAML Richer Internet Applications.
I am currently being prudent, sitting on the fence, hedging my bets, being indecisive - take your pick. I am fully committed to the RIA as the way ahead but with one foot in Silverlight and one foot in HTML5/JavaScript. Time will tell.
And what of WPF, at one time Microsoft's Next Big Thing. Well it's not very big is it? It took a couple of years to even show up on the radar and has now been totally eclipsed by it's little sister Silverlight. Why? Well, it was out of date from the start in that, conceptually, it was no more than the next WinForms at a time when people were thinking much wider. Even people who only need a desktop app often don't bother with WPF, seeing no reason to break away from their familiar WinForms. Fair enough!
A big problem I have always had with software development is having more ideas than I can ever have time to implement. Half of the ideas I dream up never get started, and half the ones that do get started end up being prudently triaged to free up time to actually get something finished. I have whittled down my current projects to just two RIAs - Pixentient photo gallery, and Inferno statistical analysis platform. More on these in my next posts.
