122 Is This The Next Silverlight? The Silverlight Myth

Microsoft abandoned Silverlight, right? Is Blazor the next Silverlight? Isn't Silverlight proof that Microsoft only cares about money and hates developers? These are the questions we are going to answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Is this technology the next silver light? That's a question I get a lot about a lot of new technologies. So when Blazor Server came out, that was the question. Is Blazor Server the next Silverlight? When Blazor WebAssembly came out later, they said, well, is Blazor WebAssembly the next Silverlight? And when.NET Maui came out, it was, is.NET Maui the next Silverlight? And the question keeps coming up over and over again, is this technology the next silverlight? Should I invest in this or is this going to be horrible? So in today's episode of Dev Questions, we're going to look at really the myth around Silverlight that came out of a bad situation, but not what you think probably. So we're going to look at that, look at the actual situation, what actually happened, and then look at what we can learn from that and how we can protect ourselves going forward so we don't get caught in the next Silverlight. So let's start with what was Silverlight? Well, Silverlight was a tool that Microsoft created to create web applications that were dynamic, that were really ahead of their time in a lot of ways, and yet, in some ways, were just a copy of another company's uh thing called Flash. Adobe had Microsoft had Flash on the web, and it became kind of this thing that everyone used. And then Microsoft said, hey, we can copy that and we'll create Silverlight. So we're gonna get into more about what that is, but the basics are that Silverlight was discontinued and abandoned by Microsoft. Or well, that's the thought. So the thought is that looking back at that, Microsoft put out a product called Silverlight. They got everyone hyped and invested into it, and then say, you know what? Never mind, we're yanking the rug underneath you and forget you. We're all about just money and we hate developers. That was kind of the thought behind the current ideas of Silverlight. We're gonna look at how that's not quite what happened. But before we start, I want to go over a couple things right off the bat because this is an inflammatory topic, one that there's a lot of charged opinion on. And there's a lot of people who have a lot of strong opinions that might not be correct that I'm gonna take on. So let's start with who I am, because you can often say, well, or you could say, you know, Tim, maybe you're a Microsoft apologist. You're a Microsoft MVP, therefore they must pay you, right? They don't pay me. Um, in fact, Microsoft MVPs are known as being the opposite. We're actually pretty hard on Microsoft when we need to be, because we want what's best. We want to see what's best for Microsoft. So this isn't a defense of Microsoft. In fact, you'll see there were some significant mistakes Microsoft made. And we're gonna address those and talk through how do we avoid those in the future. But at the same time, if you just get mad at Microsoft, and there's a lot of reasons why you can be mad at Microsoft, but if you just get mad at Microsoft and apply that anger to everything, you're not really being honest. Because there are some things that even bad companies do well. And I'm not saying Microsoft's a bad company or a good company. What I'm saying is that not everything they do is perfect and not everything they do is horrible. So let's look at it objectively how they address this, how they handle this, and look at the pros and cons of it. So let's start with a timeline so you have a better understanding. Because this, these events started about 20, 25 years ago. Now, Silverlight came out 15 years ago. But before that, we have to understand the state of the web. You see, and I lived through this. I've I was a Silverlight developer, I was a WPF developer early on. I was in the trenches for all of this, and I was really looking forward to Silverlight taking over the world. And unfortunately, that's not the way it went, but in some ways, fortunately, that's not the way it went. So, starting off, the the web used to be this very static thing. We used to have web pages that were basically just information pages. They were the equivalent of PDFs, where you just got information and that was it. And we started to have a little bit of interactivity with forms, and we could do a little things, but really people still just used it as here's the information. So if a store had a web page, it was here's when we're open, and here's you know what we sell. But there was no like buy this stuff now. It was more like just here's the information. And there's a lot of limitations around the web as far as what it could do. JavaScript was still in its infancy. It was there, but it was really just for doing things like making the time change. And so you see, you know, we used to think that was awesome. The time was actually changing the website. That's not really a whole lot of stuff going on. And then Adobe came out with Flash. And Flash really revolutionized the web because Flash was essentially an application that could run on the web. It was kind of, it made a mess of everything. We couldn't have search engine optimization, we couldn't really have accessibility, all these things. But you could run that on the web and have some really great interactive websites. All of a sudden we could have games on the web, actual like play them games on the website. And then we can have video on the website, and we could have other interactivity, this rich interactivity that we take for granted now, but we didn't have the ability to have back then. And so in 2006, before all this started, Flash reigned supreme. I mean, Flash was really synonymous with web development. Now you could do web development as well with HTML and CSS. It was HTML 4 and CSS2, but it was really just, again, not a lot of interactivity. It was mostly just here's our stuff, or maybe some server-side work with PHP or um ASP, those kind of things. But that was really the extent of our interactive pages. They were pretty boring. They were, they were, there's not a lot of life to it. It was not a desktop application. Desktop applications, far and away, were better than web applications. But with Flash, that all changed. And so in 2006, Flash was kind of synonymous with interactive web development. In fact, if you're watching this video instead of listening to a podcast, if you're watching this video on YouTube, YouTube started with Flash video. That was its foundation. That's where it started, and that's where a lot of video on the web started was with Flash. So YouTube, the very thing that you're watching on today is based in Flash. That's where it started. Now, in January 9th of 2007, the very first iPhone came out. The very first. And this was, you know, a revolution in how phones were looked at. It used to be that phones were about making phone calls. And even texting wasn't a huge deal because you had to punch the number like five times in order to get the right casing of the letter you wanted. And it was just a mess. And who would ever do that? Why can't you just call? And then all of a sudden the iPhone came out and it's a phone, but it does everything else too, including having a web browser, which doesn't run flash. And that was a little bit of a limitation, but it was just a little phone, and who's going to browse in the web, anyways? We're everybody's website stuff on the desktop. Until that didn't happen, until that switched. And now, of course, you know that the web is more important on mobile than it is on desktop sometimes. So that was in January 9th of 2007. September 5th of that same year, September 5th, 2007, Silverlight was released. Now, Silverlight was essentially WPF on the web. So we had just started to get used to WPF, and WPF, if you're not familiar, is a C sharp GUI that it uses XAML to design layouts that makes it more web page-like as far as flexibility. It's a big step up from Winforms as far as the UI is concerned. And we had started to fall in love with this tool that allows us to do so much more with the web, or I'm sorry, with the desktop. And Microsoft said, you know what? We can make that same tool or very close to it. It was XAML and it was almost the same XAML, but it wasn't quite. But we could use that same XAML or most of it on the web. And now all of a sudden you have a web application that has that same desktop type interactivity. And again, we did not have HTML5 or the new stuff that we're used to now with all of the client-side frameworks. We didn't have all that at that point. And so this is a really cool alternative to Flash. Now, instead of writing all of our websites in Flash, we could write them in C sharp and XAML. And since they kind of mirrored what the desktop application was, we could almost take our code from the desktop and put it in the web. There was just a little bit of tweaks. It's kind of like what we do now with.NET MAUI, where we had the ability, it was a little rougher back then, but we had the ability to kind of reuse a lot of our components in more than one scenario. It was really a great idea. There's a couple of problems with it though. First of all, we couldn't just run Silverlight. It wasn't like it would just go to a web page and it would just run on its own. It needed a plugin. So it needed a tool that Microsoft created that would interpret the Silverlight files into a web display. And that had to be installed on any browser. Now Microsoft controlled a lot of the world's browsers. Internet Explorer was in its peak and its height. And so Microsoft's like this is no big deal because we control my Internet Explorer. Now, Chrome, not so much. And so we'll have to create a plugin for that. And they did. And they even had a plugin, I believe, that worked on Mac. So now we had a cross-platform type application. But that's all reliant on the browsers supporting those plugins. Now again, Microsoft created the plugin, but it was reliant on Safari and Chrome and Firefox and even Internet Explorer, you know that they owned it. They rely on all of those to support that plugin, to allow them to have the access they did with that plugin. So that was September 5th of 2007. Civilite first comes out. It's a big deal. And it was a really great product to use when you looked at the end result. The end result was awesome, and even creating it for the end result was pretty great. Um, so it was it was pretty awesome. Now move forward to January 22nd of 2008. So we're talking five months later, HTML5 comes out. Now, HTML5 was a big step forward for HTML. It took it from those just a web page to the have interactivity ability. And that's where we started to get a lot of the you know, runs native video on the web and has more interactivity abilities. So all of a sudden we now have really the ability to do a lot of the things that Flash and Silk now Silverlight are doing in the web. We could recode them to use HTML5 instead and do it natively. So this new thing comes out. But remember that browsers don't just support the new standard day one. So there was some adoption time in there before it was fully supported. And even now we got some limitations in our support. But there's also this um idea of is this really going to work? Is it going to stick around? Is this worse switching if you already have an established standard? So there wasn't just a line of saying, oh, in January it's all over, HTML5 is one. Looking back on that, that's what happened, but it wasn't right away. So five months after Silverlight is released, HTML5 is released, and it really shows off that it can do a lot of the things that Silverlight can. Not all of them, and not all the things that Adobe Flash can do either, but it can do a lot of those things, and more will be coming down the road. Now, fast forward two years. Now, Steve Jobs is still the head of Apple, and the iPhone has gone from this new thing that people are excited about but weren't sure about. And you know, some people said that this will never work, and you know, this phone, what is what is this phone? It's not going to work, uh, to the iPhone being the model for all phones going forward. I mean, the iPhone revolutionized the industry. Before this, there wasn't really a lot of all glass front phones. There was just the iPhone. That was kind of like the first. And then all of a sudden, now going forward, we have Android and all the rest that kind of just copy what the iPhone was. And now we don't have physical buttons anymore on almost any phones. So the iPhone has really taken over the market. And with it, people have started to use the iPhone for more activities than just making phone calls. They're starting to browse the web more on it. They're starting to do more things. And there's also the iPad that has come out. So the iPad is basically a big Windows phone. And again, now people are starting to do more tablet things than they ever have in the past. So all of a sudden, you've got more people that are starting to use the web on a mobile device or on a tablet device, not on a Windows device or a Mac. So all of a sudden, we have now this kind of separation between desktop and everything else. And the everything else category is growing. And it's growing rapidly. So in 2010, in April 29th, Steve Jobs writes a letter to the editor called Thoughts on Flash. And yes, Flash had nothing to do with Silverlight, really. But in that letter to the editor, he basically said that Flash was done. Now, he didn't say Flash was done, but what he said was that there were security implications with using Flash and there was speed issues. And so they were not going to support Flash on Apple devices going forward. And so all of a sudden, this growing market of iPhones and iPads, they're not going to support Flash. But really, what it was was not support those broad browser plugins that allowed you to do all the things that Flash does, which included Silverlight. Now remember, Microsoft created Silverlight, Microsoft supports Silverlight, Microsoft has built Silverlight up, Microsoft is working with Silverlight, they're enthusiastic about Silverlight, but they're dependent on the browsers supporting their plugin. And two major browsers, the iPad's browser and the iPhone's browser, no longer support those plugins. Because they're not supporting any plugins of that nature. Now, the communication was, well, it's a security thing. But there is more to that story. Yes, that is part of the story. But another part of that story, and one that would not be said out loud, was that at the time Apple was really pushing hard for their app store, and their app store being the only app store on the device. However, remember that Flash could do games as well as interactive applications? What that means is Flash got around the App Store. You could use games and other things on your Apple device if you could if it would support Flash. And the same thing was true with Silverlight. So by killing off those plugins, yes, it closed some security, potential security vulnerabilities, but it also made it so that the App Store had exclusive access now to all iPhone and iPad devices. So there was another maybe ulterior motive as well, but it's not the only one. The other thing was that yes, Flash and these other browser plugins did also drain battery life. And especially in those days, battery life was a big deal. It still is today, but they wanted to put a small battery to make the device as small as possible. But that meant that if you had something draining your battery with usage and it was popular, it made your phone look bad. And so by not allowing that thing that drains the battery to be on the device, all of a sudden your phone looks better because it lasts longer. So there's a lot of reasons why Apple decided, yeah, we're done with even allowing or going down the path of allowing things like Flash to run on our devices. But with that, Silverlight gets caught in the crossfire because Silverlight is also using the same things that Flash is doing. It's doing the same style of plug-in that Flash is. Flash was dependent on a plugin as well. It's not like Microsoft or society to do that. That was a common thing to do. But all of a sudden, the industry has changed and those things are no longer allowed. So at that point, essentially, Microsoft had a choice. They could either say, yes, we know that our a big chunk of our audience is gone with the iPad and iPhone, and probably more of our audience will go over time, but we're going to stick with Silverlight, or they could kind of cut their losses. They didn't do a great job here because they kind of sat in the fence. In fact, one um one executive did talk to a reporter at an event where he said, I wouldn't depend on Silverlight. And all of a sudden he gets fired. Yes, you probably shouldn't be talking about things and killing your company's product before the company announces it, but maybe the company should say those things out loud, uh, since people are basing their businesses off of Silverlight. So with the the death of Flash and those plugins on the iPad and the iPhone, that started the trend. And now, if you note, there's, I'm not sure any browser supports Flash anymore. Now, Flash has been dead as of I think 2017. Um, it's still alive in I think China. But those type of plugins aren't allowed on Chrome or Edge or Firefox or Safari. They're not allowed because there are security implications. They do use uh more battery life on mobile devices and laptops. And so there has been this overall limitation where people say, you know what? HTML5 is good and going to become great. So we're gonna move that direction. And so in 2012, now again, Flash, I'm sorry, Silverlight uh launched in 2007. So five years later, Microsoft deprecated Silverlight for Windows 8. They said, you know what, we're not gonna do Windows 8 development with Silverlight, we're going to use HTML5 instead. But they kept Silverlight around. And it wasn't until 2015 that they finally said, you know what, you need to start moving off of Silverlight. And so from 2007 to 2015, Silverlight was a fully supported and fully moving forward. Ecosystem in Microsoft. Now, of course, at the end they trailed off and they kind of slow rolled things, but they were still working on it, just not as invested in it as they were. So that's kind of the history and process of Silverlight, but we're not done there. Because people often say, well, Microsoft abandoned Silverlight right away. They kind of dumped it really quick and just abandoned people. Remember that Silverlight was first launched in 2007? Do you have a guess when the last update for Silverlight came out? If you guessed 2019, you'd be correct. It was 12 years later. Actually, 11 years because it was in January of 2019, but um 11 years later that they put their last update out. Do you know when Microsoft stopped supporting Silverlight? Again, it came out in 2007. They stopped supporting it in October of 2021. So that was 14 years after the initial launch. Now, at that point, there's very few places you could run Silverlight because that plugin wouldn't work in very many places. It only worked in, I believe, um, Internet Explorer and the older versions of that. So you could say, well, it wasn't working before then, but that's not Microsoft's problem. That's all those browsers who wouldn't allow that plugin to work. Now, should Microsoft have built it on a plugin? Maybe, but that's not really Microsoft killing it. That's the industry saying we're not going to support or allow this type of functionality anymore. I mean, Adobe Flash was on the same boat, it's just Adobe Flash had had a longer lifespan up to that point. So Adobe Flash was the way to create web content for a number of years. Microsoft really just copied their model and just said, we'll use it with C chart. It's just that that model went away. And Microsoft got in kind of late to the party. So that's the history of Silverlight. It's not quite as clear-cut Microsoft's a bad guy in here. It's not quite so clear-cut that Microsoft abandoned its product. It didn't do that. What happened is that the industry abandoned the pattern that Microsoft was following that other companies followed too. So that's the history. So let's talk about my thoughts on Silverlight. So my first thought is Microsoft has some bad timing. They saw what happened with uh with Flash and said, hey, we have something now in the.NET framework with WPF. We can pretty much just port and make work on the web in the same way Flash does. And it worked really great. And it was really cool, and it had a lot of functionality, and it was pretty awesome what you could do on the web with Silverlight before there was other options of doing that on the web besides Flash. So they built a great product, but they had terrible timing because the industry was changing. Now, could they have predicted that? Yeah, I'm not sure they could. Yes, HTML5 came out soon after uh Silverlight did, but how long was Silverlight in development before it came out? And could they know during that time that HTML5 would catch on? It would actually work and would actually be adopted by the browsers. But again, HTML5 coming out doesn't mean HTML5 works. There were a number of years where even though HTML5 was out, it was not supported. So just because a new technology is coming in two, three, four, five years, uh, as far as support for it goes, doesn't mean you shouldn't do something now. So that's that's one thing. Um, but it's just bad timing. They couldn't have predicted the iPhone would be this awesome device that changes the entire landscape of everything mobile. I mean, who thought that? When the iPhone first came out, there were so many people saying, that's not gonna work. That's stupid. It's not a phone, it's a toy that could also make phone calls. Now, there were a lot of people that were like, yes, this thing's awesome. So that caused a stir. And then really, the first iPhone wasn't that great. But by the time the iPhone with 3GS came out, that thing was awesome. And all of a sudden it was changing the industry. But how do you predict that years in the future when you really don't know that's even coming, let alone that anyone will buy into it? So, Microsoft, they had some really bad timing. It happens. Now, also, and there's some examples of other things they've done with timing. For example, the Windows phone. If you remember that, um, that was actually a really good phone. I'm not sure if you remember because it's already dead. Because they waited until after the iPhone had a firm grasp on the market. And then they waited until after Android came in and took a chunk off the market and was holding on to it. And they said, okay, now that everyone's established, let's go ahead and bring out a new phone. And that didn't go so well. Not great timing. They waited until too late to bring that out. So it's not the first time I've had bad timing. Even Azure. Azure was bad timing. I mean, it was, they just weren't, they didn't put it out when they should have. Okay. AWS kind of cornered the market. They're like, we've got this, let's do this, let's build this up. And Microsoft said, oh, yeah, it's a good idea. Let's do that too. And in that case, it worked out for them. I mean, it worked to put something out later. And now Azure is a great product in a lot of ways, it beats out AWS, but it was still late to the party. And so Microsoft does have some success doing this, just not all the time. In Silverized case, they didn't have any success. They really gave themselves a black eye. Now, the other point I want to make is Microsoft tried to create their own standard. Now, this is not uncommon. That's what Adobe did with Flash. They had their own standard, they had their own plugin. They tried to create something that was proprietary to Adobe's product. And Microsoft said, we're going to do that too. We're going to create something proprietary to Microsoft's product. And they made their own standard. There was nothing that was industry standard about it. They're like, we're just going to create this and hope that it stays supported. And it didn't. So there's a couple of things that you can look out for when it comes to any company when they're trying to do something and you're wondering, is this the next Silverlight? Um, is it good timing? And also, are they kind of working with others or are they kind of on their own and hopefully relying on others to support them? And that's not a good thing. Um that comes to the third point. Silverlight depended on others. It depended on a plugin to run. That's super scary because it wasn't under Microsoft's control to make Silverlight work. It was partially under the control. It was partially under the control of really their competitors. It was under the control of Chrome, of Firefox, of Safari, of the mobile devices. And so Microsoft was reliant on that plugin style being supported and their plug-in specifically working. That's super dangerous. So when you have big products like that, be careful what it depends on. Because if its foundation is built upon something that might go away, you have to evaluate that thing that might go away and say, is it going to? Or is this rock solid? So, for example, I build my sites on Azure. Is Azure going to go away? I need to evaluate that. It's not. And it's rock solid and it's one of the cornerstones of Microsoft's business. So I'm pretty good. However, I don't put things in Google's cloud because Google is notorious for killing things. I would not build any part of my business with a reliance on Google because they kill things all the time. And so I would be just hoping that Google's good graces continue and that the thing I'm using is still gonna be supported five and ten years out. There's been a lot of things that Google has supported that long, but there's an even longer list of things they haven't. So what you build your product on has to be rock solid. In this case, it wasn't. Now, uh Microsoft did, and I want to give credit where credit is due here. Microsoft did go above and beyond with their support. Silverlight was dead really in 2012. Five years out, it was done. Now, it took until 2015, I think it was, um, before Microsoft said, yeah, move off of this thing. But the handwriting was on the wall before that. But even so, they continue to support it for years afterwards. So from 2015, when Microsoft said, yes, get off this. They didn't give you a year or two years or three years. They gave six years of heads up. That's a long time. Remember that support is not free. Microsoft had to have people dedicated to supporting a product that was dead. They had to pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of employees committed to, or maybe millions, I'm not even sure, but a lot of money dedicated to updating Silverlight. Remember, the last update came out in 2019. So people at Microsoft were still working on it in 2019. And they had to pay support people to maintain Silverlight and have it work in that plug-in through 2021. That's an incredible history of support. So sometimes when people say, is this the next Silverlight? I kind of half jokingly say, I hope so. Because from the Microsoft side, what they could control, they did a great job at support. So yeah, it's kind of a bummer that they got caught in the crossfire of the Flash in Apple Wars. And they had bad timing and they based their product on something they couldn't, they couldn't uh control with those plugins. But at the same time, what they could control, they did a great job on. It's just that they couldn't control everything and they got, you know, killed off. So um when you talk about new technology and say, hey, is this the next Silverlight? And that's a valid question to ask. But you need to understand the history of Silverlight and really understand what you're really asking. So I want you to evaluate this on a couple of criteria. So it's not the next Silverlight unless it's based upon proprietary technology, based upon something that is locked into only one company. So where it's you know, no one else has access to it except for that one company, and they're kind of controlled and walled off. It's a closed source project. And two, it depends on external companies supporting it to keep it running. So again, Chrome, Firefox, all those others had to support the plugin structure in order to maintain Silverlight. So those are the criteria that you have to look at if you want to compare it to Silverlight. Now, there can be a lot of other criteria you can evaluate good or bad applications, but when it comes to comparing to Silverlight, those are the things you need to look at. So let's look at some uh examples of things that are not Silverlight. So we're gonna look at two that have come out recently: uh Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly. These have both been compared to Silverlight, they've both been suggested they're like Silverlight, they've both been talked about derogatorily like they might be the next Silverlight. So let's look at why neither of these is a good comparison. It's an apples to oranges comparison. So Blazor Server, let's start there. Blazor Server is a C Sharp web application that talks to the browser via an open connection. And that open connection is uses Signal R. And it uses that connection to say, hey, let's do some interactivity in a client like Angular Reactor View, where you have that rich client-side interactivity, but yet all the data actually goes to the server and the server side processes it. So it's a server-side language where you have all the benefits of server side, but you still have that rich client-side interactivity. But it's dependent on the signal R connection between the two. So is that the next Silverlight? Well, what is Silverlight? I'm sorry, what is Signal R? Because we need to understand what we're building our foundation upon to see if that can be pulled out from underneath us. So Signal R is just a wrapper and it wraps around WebSock and other web standard communication technologies. And so it just makes it easier. It's kind of like an interface to those technologies to make it easier to fall back when a client does not support a certain technology, or allows it to just make it easier to open a connection, close a connection, and so on. So that signal R is really just a wrapper around web standard technology. When I mean web standard, I mean the industry as a whole, not Microsoft, the industry as a whole, has said these are the things that will work on the web. WebSock is one of those things. It's in the HTML standard, which means it's not just something that Microsoft depends on. It's something the entire industry depends on working the way it does. Therefore, if you were to say, hey, you know what, we're going to not allow WebSockets anymore. It wouldn't just hurt Microsoft. It wouldn't just hurt uh Signal R itself. It would hurt the entire industry. It's not something that can just be done lightly. In fact, it probably can't be done at this point because if it did, it would take down thousands, hundreds of thousands of applications that have nothing to do with Microsoft. So while you are building your foundation upon something, that something is pretty rock solid. And that is the WebSocket connection. So that's the single R part. Now, there is an interactivity on the client side. Where does that come from? It's a JavaScript library. So you're basing it upon JavaScript, which again is an industry standard and something that the entire industry works upon. I mean, Angular, Reactor, and Vue, they're just JavaScript. So if you destroy JavaScript or take away how it works, you're going to destroy pretty much all client-side interactivity, not just Blazor Server. So Blazor Server doesn't qualify for the Silverlight test. It's based upon web standards. And yes, there is some Microsoft proprietary stuff, but it's on top of the web standard stuff. So the only way this becomes even like a Silverlight is if Microsoft decide, hey, we're going to abandon Blazor Server for some reason. But if you compare it to Silverlight, again, I would love for it to be supported like Silverlight. The idea that even after it's dead, it's supported for years and years and years. So that's the track record of Microsoft, they supported it very well, Silverlight. So if you compare that to Blazor Server, if they support Blazor Server the same way, then we're going to be great. We're going to have a great future with Blazor Server. Now let's look at Blazor WebAssembly. That's another Blazor technology, but this one uses WebAssembly and it runs the C code fully in the browser. It's a fully client-side language. So you take your raw C sharp, send it down to the client, and have the client run C sharp. So what's that built upon? It's built upon WebAssembly, which is not a Microsoft thing. It's again an industry standard. It's a web standard. So anything that uses WebAssembly will be affected if WebAssembly were to go away. And that is a wide range of products that have nothing to do with Microsoft. Microsoft just used that same web standard and built on top of it. Now they built a system to take the C sharp code and translate it into something that the WebAssembly could then run. But that's Microsoft code that they support. And it's talking to WebAssembly, again, built upon the foundation of an open standard. So again, the only proprietary stuff is the stuff that's fully under Microsoft's control. Therefore, the only way Blazor WebAssembly goes away is if Microsoft says, we don't want to support this anymore. And the only way that happens is if Microsoft makes a decision that is worse than what they did with Silverlight. Because again, Silverlight was an example of Microsoft doing as much as they could to support a dead technology. An alive technology, I would hope that Microsoft would have even more support for. Now, Microsoft can always make a different decision. The decisions of the past do not always dictate the decisions of the future. We've seen that with Microsoft. Microsoft used to be a bad old Microsoft. The M dollar sign, people were right for a lot of time. But Microsoft has made significant strides towards being a friendlier company. They have not always succeeded and they have made some regressions in points. However, they but those decisions they've made in the past five years have been significantly different than the ones from 10 and 15 years ago. So we can't always say the decisions of yesterday will be the same as the decisions of tomorrow. So there could be a case where Microsoft says, you know what, we're just done. We're not going to do Blazor anymore. We're just going to kill it off today. I highly doubt that's going to happen. Based upon their track record, that probably will not happen. Microsoft is, again, not Google. They support for a very long time, even after they decide we're not going to continue. One of the examples of this is the.NET Framework. The.NET framework has been fully and utterly replaced with.NET Core, now just called.NET. And when it first came out,.NET Core was just a partial replacement. It was moving towards that. But by the time we had.NET Core 3.1, we had a pretty much a rock solid version of.NET Core, and it was much, much better than the.NET framework. So at what point did Microsoft abandon the.NET framework? Because they have.NET Core now and it works better. And they've gone now to we're almost on.NET 7. So at what point did they abandon.NET Framework? Well, they haven't. And they continue to support.NET Framework. And in fact, the way they have put it is that the.NET framework will be supported as long as Windows is, which is a long time. Now, I have some thoughts about whether or not that's actually true, but those are just thoughts and ideas and speculations. But they have continued to support the.NET framework as it is, even well beyond where most companies would. Now you may say, well, Tim, they're not doing anything new with the.NET framework. They're not. But it's really kind of feature complete. It's it works just fine. It runs just fine. You can do anything you want with the.NET framework. It's just not getting new stuff. So they don't need to really. They're still doing security fixes on it. So the.NET framework is again a great example to look at of what they're currently doing to support their systems. So again, looking at Silverlight, the.NET framework, they've actually supported for better and longer and more than Silverlight. So I think that we're in a good spot here with Microsoft when it comes to the support of their products. So when you look at the history of Silverlight, I wanted you to have a bigger picture of what really happened and where you really stood with Silverlight. The thoughts behind it were Microsoft abandoned it and Microsoft just hated developers and really pulled the rug out from underneath them. And that's really not what happened. There was some bad timing, there was some bad decision making, but in the end it wasn't entirely their fault. And yet what they could control they did very well. So when you see a new technology, maybe don't compare it to Silverlight or ask if it's like a silver light because it's probably not but if you want to evaluate it evaluate based upon what they did with Silverlight in order to give you a better picture of whether or not you should move forward with a given technology. Okay? So I hope that answers the question. I hope that you have a better picture of what on a Silverlight. And I think that going forward I hope that you can have a better tools in your toolbox for evaluating new technologies come out from any company. All right thanks for listening and as always I am Tim Corey.

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