Confessions of a Desktop developer….

I must confess.  I have not always been a fan of Web development.  I have been a developer for over 12 years and most of that time I have been developing Desktop applications.  I always found JavaScript to be more painful than useful. I’ve always been a big fan of WinForms/WPF and C# .NET. I viewed HTML and JavaScript as a limited technology, not suitable for building LOB (line of business) applications.

At my last company we developed a large WPF application that was rolled out to over  1,000 users.  This application had 14 real-time integration points and on average we had 500+ concurrent users worldwide.  WPF allowed us to make a really stylish UIs and I fell in love with Data Templates.

Just 4 months ago I received a phone call from a friend. He explained to me how his company was planning to rewrite one of their core strategic applications.  I thought “awesome!”  After all, what geeky developer doesn’t want the opportunity to “completely” rewrite an application from the ground up?  So, I changed jobs.

At the new job, step1 – choose a technology platform. My first thought was of Silverlight.  It runs on Windows and Mac (and we could say Linux too). For me, going from WPF to Silverlight was a no-brainer.  But, as we researched our customers’ needs and talked to them about technologies they are adapting we kept hearing the same story, “Silverlight is dead or dying, Microsoft is moving away from it”.  My heart sunk. HTML 5 and JavaScript, do I have to go there? L.

Now, I’m not going to argue the merits of Silverlight versus HTML 5.  You can find those arguments all over the web.  And I’m sure they will go on for years.  

With our need to support multiple platforms (Windows, MAC,  and Mobile devices and the current view of Silverlight’s future,  the decision was made to use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript for the UI. Yes, my heart sunk.

Well what to do? Being a professional (I cried at home and did research at work) I started to look at what people had been doing with JavaScript and frameworks.  I was very surprised; I found a lot of good stuff.  JavaScript frameworks have come a long way and there are a lot of them.

It’s been 4 months now and I’ve learned a lot. In the coming weeks and months, I plan to post about my experiences good and bad.  I still like Silverlight but my perception of HTML and JavaScript is starting to change.  It’s not that subpar technology that I hated to work with years ago.  It will be interesting to see what happens to Silverlight in the future but for my current future it’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript.