First off, congratulations as now the Silverlight plugin is on 50% of all web-connected computers (see StatOwl). Silverlight is a great and much needed addition to the web community. Also congrats on building such a great product in such a short time.
May I suggest that you now focus your resources on tightening up your product and learning resources?
Particularly with respect to RIA Services and the Business Application template, there are few good working examples. The tutorials are out of date, and the source downloads mostly don't work. Even the ones that do work are quite fragile. I've yet to find
one I can't easily break. And there are serious unexplained bugs with VS2010 that cause errors and restarts.
To use a military metaphor, you've been successful in driving deep into enemy territory, but you have outpaced your supply lines. It's time to pause and make sure they are secure.
With Silverlight now an important part of the web eco-system, you are going to have more developers heading your way. You want them to find a plethora of solid and well documented examples that they can build from. This is much more important than getting
the "next best feature".
Please take this as criticism meant only in the most respectful and constructive manner.
I second this..., please slow down a bit. Think a little harder about some of the APIs and make them a little more open (i.e. less Internal).
internal is a statement of "I'm not really sure this is going to stay like this", and I can appreciate there are alot of scenarios where this is true when you are moving so fast.
But think of it from the communities perspective, we are smart people and can probably provide alot of the functionality being asked for ourselfs if we had a little more access. I also believe this approach would lead to smaller downloads, as it would facilitate
far more code reuse.
I have spent alot of my time on each version from 2-4 writing behaviors, etc. to fix or work around bugs, some of them pretty fundamental.
With each version things have improved which is cool, but please just take a little more care, or release more regular fixes.
And take some time to think about and USE new features that are implemented, theming for example, all of the themes have been updated to use implicit styles, yet this won't work when you do things like "New Child Window" in VS2010 because styles are looked
up using the specific type rather than the DefaultStyleKey. In addition to this there is no {x:Type} markup extension, so you cannot easily create a named style based on an implicit style to work around this.
Also, focus on constistency, with the new INotifyDataErrorInfo if you raise an event with an Empty or Null property name it doesn't work the same as with INotifyPropertyChanged.
I don't want to focus on these issues, they are just close to my heart at the moment, and I think demonstrate that more thought needs to be put in...
Again, please take this as criticism meant only in the most respectful and constructive manner.
Please mark as answer if this has helped solve your issue :)
My sentiments entirely. A well thought out and written case for reliable and stable technology with good help and examples. Microsoft are not the only ones guilty of rushing ahead with code.
The assumption that a product that has been 'beta tested' by a bunch of unpaid members of the dev community makes it ready for release is possibly the root of the problems in the software industry. It's like a car manufacturer waiting for customers to tell
them about a fault before they think about fixing it...oh wait I forgot Toyota!
What we want and need is reliable code that works and dev tools that make coding easy and quick to get our clients of our backs and the money in the bank. Visual Studio has gone a long way to providing this but just when one has got one's head around one
version of .NET and the way of doing things, along comes another way to learn, SQL - LINQ, RDO, ADO, etc.
batpox - thanks for the post and feedback. The balance of innovation and pace is something we talk about a lot internally as well with our customers. After MIX10 we met with about 100 customers and this was the first question we asked...how quickly we
have been doing releases. As you could imagine (when you ask any question to 100 different people) the feedback was mixed. There was no clear winner of slow down, keep the pace, or make it faster. In general though, the feedback we received led us to believe
the pace (about annual) was better than most products. No doubt the SL3->4 pace was the fastest.
With regard to resources, this is well put. It is also an area where we have to balance our own resources as well. Add to the complexity that you have multiple people doing multiple resources in various places. Sometimes tracking them down is half the
battle...but that is no excuse. When releases happen we do our best effort to update the code to ensure that it matches any breaking changes APIs, etc. on all the videos on the
http://silverlight.net/learn section. Sometimes we miss some. Sometimes we decide just to deprecate them.
Have you seen the Silverlight 4 training kit? (http://www.silverlight.net/learn/handsonlabs/) -- these were recently updated to match the Silverlight 4 release. If you haven't seen those, please
check them out. Additionally I know the Expression team is preparing some Blend-specific content updates as well. RIA Services is an area we know we can improve upon and I can tell you that a conversation was started a few days ago about this specifically
to get more recent RIA Services updates here in the learning resources.
Thanks for the letter and feedback, it is much appreciated!
If this answered your question, please be sure to click the 'mark as answered' feature, otherwise please feel free to post follow-up questions that are related.
Thanks for the feedback and for stepping up to voice your concerns.
We're currently working towards deploying some significant changes at silverlight.net and windowsclient.net including both new content as well as updated structure. The aim is to make it easier for you to learn, to simplify the process of getting up to speed,
and to make the content more relevant.
That includes culling out old content, some changes in how content is presented, and how it is categorized and tagged. Of course, it also includes creating new, better learning materials.
I'm pretty excited about the changes, and feel they'll help address the majority of the concerns about the training materials. We'll continue to monitor the success of the changes, and focus based on the results. Your feedback is a very key part of that.
Thanks.
Pete
Developer Community Program Manager - XAML, WPF, Silverlight, .NETMF/Gadgeteer
10rem.net - Pete Brown's site and blog | twitter: @pete_brown
I work for the Developer Guidance group in Microsoft. Opinions are my own.
And, yes, I went through nearly all of Ian's tutorials and found them very helpful. At the end there is not a robust application (after all, that was not his intent) but it was a very good learning tool for me.
I think you hit on one point that would be well covered. It is often not at all obvious when an example or learning tool is 'deprecated', or what version it applies to. It would be good if each item listed what the target was in the intro. I would not delete
them, since your hour long video was informative even though it is 'deprecated', but a warning or caveat would be nice.
So on behalf of all Silverlight developers, let me thank you in advance for mature and robust examples and quality learning tools, as well as a quality Silverlight product suite.
Batpox, Suedama and mnew, First, thank you, this is
exactly the kind of feedback that is most helpful: where are the pain-points in learning Silverlight. You have identified areas that we must and are focusing on.
I revel in the fact that we have many audiences, and Pete and I are working hard to come up with organizational and content plans for Silverlight.Net that will meet these needs and that
will be easily discoverable. Among the groups that I tend to keep in my head are
Silverlight Newbies
Silverlight programmers who want to know what's new in 4
Silverilght Programmers who want to start Windows Phone 7 programming
Silverlight Programmers comfortable with features but want to see complete start to finish examples
Silverlight Programmers who want to see how Silverlight fits in with related technologies and industry best practices
While Tim and Pete alluded to some things we're doing for each of these groups, let me also point out a few other existing and emerging resources... not to suggest that there isn't a great deal
more to do, but to encourage discussion about the direction of each of these:
Silverlight Newbies
Programmers come to Silverlight from HTML, Java, .NET, WPF and numerous other backgrounds. We are developing a better set of Getting Started videos, and I've committed to writing a series of Getting Started Mini-tutorials. I've also added a
Key Topics folder on my blog to locate tutorials and articles related to Getting Started. Much more coming here, along wtih dedicated mini-sites on transitioning to various aspects of Silverlight
programming from other backgrounds
What's New
Total agreement that we need to beef this up and have it ready
at release and going forward. Pete and Tim have addressed this and I can only add that this is a major area of commitmentLearn
WP7 While there is an
entire site dedicated to Windows Phone 7 developers we have also been producing
videos and mini-tutorials on the topic, and I've started a
series directed at experienced Silverlight programmers who want to add Windows Phone 7 development. WP7 will also be a central component in the next iteration of the
Silverlight HyperVideo Project.
Start To Finish and Best Practices
This is near and dear to my heart, and I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to create videos and tutorials arising out of the open source
Silverlight HyperVideo Project. In this project we've embraced
Test Driven Development,
Agile and Kanban,
MEF,
MVVM and much more. I've also been documenting RIA Services, LINQ and etc. but nearly as much as I will be in coming months.
All of this can sound very defensive, and it isn't meant that way at all. What I'd like to do is strongly encourage a discussion about whether we're going in the right direction with this coverage (more more!) or whether we need to take a different approach,
at least for some users. Please feel free to reply here and/or in the comments section at each of the links above.Thanks
again Jesse Liberty
@batpox Our organisation depends on silverlight's pace very much. In order to stand out in this competitive world, our organisation embraces new technologies. Silverlight is top in the list. Lot of new technologies and products are depending on silverlight
now. Ex: Web Applications, SharePoint and most importantly Windows Phone. In fact,we are looking out for silverlight 5.
In order to keep the momentum going on, I strongly believe that it is required to keep up the pace wrt silverlight. Silverlight core runtime is well tested and is already deployed in production environments by many. Silverlight team has done really an awesome
job to release new silverlight versions in short span of time. I agree that some of the tutorials are outdated, but silverlight 4 books are already available and more are coming soon.
Blogposts of Shawn Wildermuth, Laurent Bugnion,Jessy Liberty, Tim Heuer, Mike Taulty,John Papa, Dan Wahlin, Victor Gaudioso, Nikhil Kothari, Justin Angel & several other silverlight geeks do have lots of updated silverlight 4 content. Check silverlight sessions
from near by user groups. Check PDC09 & MIX10 video recordings. You can also get help from stackoverflow. There are lot of silverlight geeks out there on twitter and they are always ready to help us out. My recent experience was, I asked Victor Gaudioso on
how to apply more than one bitmap effect on a silverlight element on twitter. He created a video tutorial for me in about 30 minutes and posted on his blog to help me out. Who on the earth is going to be more friendlier or more helpful than this?
@Silverlight team.
Silverlight rocks!!! Awesome job.Great platform,Fantastic tools,Excellent geeks and Fabulous team. Make Silverlight the ultimate platform to develop and experience.
Thanks all for your responses, it really is appreciated. I would like to say I am in no way trying to put the team down. I've been working with Silverlight since version 2 beta, have hit many problems, and worked around (nearly) all of them. I only want this
platform to be the best it can be. When I say go slow and tighten up, I do not mean make less frequent releases, if anything I would like more frequent releases. What I mean is that the releases should contain well thought out, extensible code that has been
thoroughly tested in real life scenarios using best practices such as MVVM, IoC etc. Thanks again for your responses..., when I get off my current project I'm hoping to post more of these issues and workarounds I keep alluding to :)
Please mark as answer if this has helped solve your issue :)
I would suggest to avoid removing and moving to "deprecated" section or flagging as out of date. Just leave it available as it is
sometimes better to see how things were and how they have changed. I'm no specialist but from my perspective taking a grip on a smaller part and then moving on with the changes while knowing the cause of each one is a nice helper.
batpox
Member
25 Points
16 Posts
An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 02:15 PM | LINK
First off, congratulations as now the Silverlight plugin is on 50% of all web-connected computers (see StatOwl). Silverlight is a great and much needed addition to the web community. Also congrats on building such a great product in such a short time.
May I suggest that you now focus your resources on tightening up your product and learning resources?
Particularly with respect to RIA Services and the Business Application template, there are few good working examples. The tutorials are out of date, and the source downloads mostly don't work. Even the ones that do work are quite fragile. I've yet to find one I can't easily break. And there are serious unexplained bugs with VS2010 that cause errors and restarts.
To use a military metaphor, you've been successful in driving deep into enemy territory, but you have outpaced your supply lines. It's time to pause and make sure they are secure.
With Silverlight now an important part of the web eco-system, you are going to have more developers heading your way. You want them to find a plethora of solid and well documented examples that they can build from. This is much more important than getting the "next best feature".
Please take this as criticism meant only in the most respectful and constructive manner.
suedama1756
Member
482 Points
103 Posts
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 03:07 PM | LINK
I second this..., please slow down a bit. Think a little harder about some of the APIs and make them a little more open (i.e. less Internal).
internal is a statement of "I'm not really sure this is going to stay like this", and I can appreciate there are alot of scenarios where this is true when you are moving so fast.
But think of it from the communities perspective, we are smart people and can probably provide alot of the functionality being asked for ourselfs if we had a little more access. I also believe this approach would lead to smaller downloads, as it would facilitate far more code reuse.
I have spent alot of my time on each version from 2-4 writing behaviors, etc. to fix or work around bugs, some of them pretty fundamental.
With each version things have improved which is cool, but please just take a little more care, or release more regular fixes.
And take some time to think about and USE new features that are implemented, theming for example, all of the themes have been updated to use implicit styles, yet this won't work when you do things like "New Child Window" in VS2010 because styles are looked up using the specific type rather than the DefaultStyleKey. In addition to this there is no {x:Type} markup extension, so you cannot easily create a named style based on an implicit style to work around this.
Also, focus on constistency, with the new INotifyDataErrorInfo if you raise an event with an Empty or Null property name it doesn't work the same as with INotifyPropertyChanged.
I don't want to focus on these issues, they are just close to my heart at the moment, and I think demonstrate that more thought needs to be put in...
Again, please take this as criticism meant only in the most respectful and constructive manner.
Web | Blog | Twitter: @JYoung1756
mnew
Member
2 Points
1 Post
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 03:08 PM | LINK
The assumption that a product that has been 'beta tested' by a bunch of unpaid members of the dev community makes it ready for release is possibly the root of the problems in the software industry. It's like a car manufacturer waiting for customers to tell them about a fault before they think about fixing it...oh wait I forgot Toyota!
What we want and need is reliable code that works and dev tools that make coding easy and quick to get our clients of our backs and the money in the bank. Visual Studio has gone a long way to providing this but just when one has got one's head around one version of .NET and the way of doing things, along comes another way to learn, SQL - LINQ, RDO, ADO, etc.
Mark NewtonContributing editor PcPro
heuertk
Participant
1668 Points
524 Posts
Microsoft
Moderator
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 03:28 PM | LINK
batpox - thanks for the post and feedback. The balance of innovation and pace is something we talk about a lot internally as well with our customers. After MIX10 we met with about 100 customers and this was the first question we asked...how quickly we have been doing releases. As you could imagine (when you ask any question to 100 different people) the feedback was mixed. There was no clear winner of slow down, keep the pace, or make it faster. In general though, the feedback we received led us to believe the pace (about annual) was better than most products. No doubt the SL3->4 pace was the fastest.
With regard to resources, this is well put. It is also an area where we have to balance our own resources as well. Add to the complexity that you have multiple people doing multiple resources in various places. Sometimes tracking them down is half the battle...but that is no excuse. When releases happen we do our best effort to update the code to ensure that it matches any breaking changes APIs, etc. on all the videos on the http://silverlight.net/learn section. Sometimes we miss some. Sometimes we decide just to deprecate them.
Have you seen the Silverlight 4 training kit? (http://www.silverlight.net/learn/handsonlabs/) -- these were recently updated to match the Silverlight 4 release. If you haven't seen those, please check them out. Additionally I know the Expression team is preparing some Blend-specific content updates as well. RIA Services is an area we know we can improve upon and I can tell you that a conversation was started a few days ago about this specifically to get more recent RIA Services updates here in the learning resources.
Thanks for the letter and feedback, it is much appreciated!
http://timheuer.com/blog/
-----
If this answered your question, please be sure to click the 'mark as answered' feature, otherwise please feel free to post follow-up questions that are related.
Psychlist1972
Contributor
6802 Points
1079 Posts
Microsoft
Moderator
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 04:03 PM | LINK
Thanks for the feedback and for stepping up to voice your concerns.
We're currently working towards deploying some significant changes at silverlight.net and windowsclient.net including both new content as well as updated structure. The aim is to make it easier for you to learn, to simplify the process of getting up to speed, and to make the content more relevant.
That includes culling out old content, some changes in how content is presented, and how it is categorized and tagged. Of course, it also includes creating new, better learning materials.
I'm pretty excited about the changes, and feel they'll help address the majority of the concerns about the training materials. We'll continue to monitor the success of the changes, and focus based on the results. Your feedback is a very key part of that.
Thanks.
Pete
10rem.net - Pete Brown's site and blog | twitter: @pete_brown
I work for the Developer Guidance group in Microsoft. Opinions are my own.
batpox
Member
25 Points
16 Posts
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 04:25 PM | LINK
Tim,
Thanks for your quick and gracious reply.
And, yes, I went through nearly all of Ian's tutorials and found them very helpful. At the end there is not a robust application (after all, that was not his intent) but it was a very good learning tool for me.
I think you hit on one point that would be well covered. It is often not at all obvious when an example or learning tool is 'deprecated', or what version it applies to. It would be good if each item listed what the target was in the intro. I would not delete them, since your hour long video was informative even though it is 'deprecated', but a warning or caveat would be nice.
So on behalf of all Silverlight developers, let me thank you in advance for mature and robust examples and quality learning tools, as well as a quality Silverlight product suite.
JesseLiberty
Member
511 Points
1013 Posts
Microsoft
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 05:04 PM | LINK
- Silverlight Newbies
- Silverlight programmers who want to know what's new in 4
- Silverilght Programmers who want to start Windows Phone 7 programming
- Silverlight Programmers comfortable with features but want to see complete start to finish examples
- Silverlight Programmers who want to see how Silverlight fits in with related technologies and industry best practices
While Tim and Pete alluded to some things we're doing for each of these groups, let me also point out a few other existing and emerging resources... not to suggest that there isn't a great deal more to do, but to encourage discussion about the direction of each of these:Silverlight Newbies
Programmers come to Silverlight from HTML, Java, .NET, WPF and numerous other backgrounds. We are developing a better set of Getting Started videos, and I've committed to writing a series of Getting Started Mini-tutorials. I've also added a Key Topics folder on my blog to locate tutorials and articles related to Getting Started. Much more coming here, along wtih dedicated mini-sites on transitioning to various aspects of Silverlight programming from other backgrounds
What's New
Total agreement that we need to beef this up and have it ready at release and going forward. Pete and Tim have addressed this and I can only add that this is a major area of commitmentLearn WP7
While there is an entire site dedicated to Windows Phone 7 developers we have also been producing videos and mini-tutorials on the topic, and I've started a series directed at experienced Silverlight programmers who want to add Windows Phone 7 development. WP7 will also be a central component in the next iteration of the Silverlight HyperVideo Project.
Start To Finish and Best Practices
This is near and dear to my heart, and I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to create videos and tutorials arising out of the open source Silverlight HyperVideo Project. In this project we've embraced Test Driven Development, Agile and Kanban, MEF, MVVM and much more. I've also been documenting RIA Services, LINQ and etc. but nearly as much as I will be in coming months.
All of this can sound very defensive, and it isn't meant that way at all. What I'd like to do is strongly encourage a discussion about whether we're going in the right direction with this coverage (more more!) or whether we need to take a different approach, at least for some users. Please feel free to reply here and/or in the comments section at each of the links above.Thanks again Jesse Liberty
TDD "Silverlight 4 Beta" "WCF RIA Services" "Silverlight Developer runtime" MVVM Sillverlight 4 MEF Silverlight 4 silvelight 4 Tutorials Best Practices Kanban Learning Agile Videos
Silverlight Geek
funwithcoding
Member
6 Points
9 Posts
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 05:22 PM | LINK
@batpox Our organisation depends on silverlight's pace very much. In order to stand out in this competitive world, our organisation embraces new technologies. Silverlight is top in the list. Lot of new technologies and products are depending on silverlight now. Ex: Web Applications, SharePoint and most importantly Windows Phone. In fact,we are looking out for silverlight 5.
In order to keep the momentum going on, I strongly believe that it is required to keep up the pace wrt silverlight. Silverlight core runtime is well tested and is already deployed in production environments by many. Silverlight team has done really an awesome job to release new silverlight versions in short span of time. I agree that some of the tutorials are outdated, but silverlight 4 books are already available and more are coming soon.
Blogposts of Shawn Wildermuth, Laurent Bugnion,Jessy Liberty, Tim Heuer, Mike Taulty,John Papa, Dan Wahlin, Victor Gaudioso, Nikhil Kothari, Justin Angel & several other silverlight geeks do have lots of updated silverlight 4 content. Check silverlight sessions from near by user groups. Check PDC09 & MIX10 video recordings. You can also get help from stackoverflow. There are lot of silverlight geeks out there on twitter and they are always ready to help us out. My recent experience was, I asked Victor Gaudioso on how to apply more than one bitmap effect on a silverlight element on twitter. He created a video tutorial for me in about 30 minutes and posted on his blog to help me out. Who on the earth is going to be more friendlier or more helpful than this?
@Silverlight team.
Silverlight rocks!!! Awesome job.Great platform,Fantastic tools,Excellent geeks and Fabulous team. Make Silverlight the ultimate platform to develop and experience.
suedama1756
Member
482 Points
103 Posts
Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 07:27 PM | LINK
Web | Blog | Twitter: @JYoung1756
Siodmy
Member
16 Points
34 Posts
Re: Re: An Open Letter to Scott, Tim, and the Silverlight Team: Please Slow down and Tighten up
Jun 03, 2010 07:28 PM | LINK
"That includes culling out old content (...)"
I would suggest to avoid removing and moving to "deprecated" section or flagging as out of date. Just leave it available as it is sometimes better to see how things were and how they have changed. I'm no specialist but from my perspective taking a grip on a smaller part and then moving on with the changes while knowing the cause of each one is a nice helper.