[Ironpython-users] WP7 & Silverlight Support in IronPython

[Keith Rome]

Silverlight may be dead in Redmond, but Microsoft's customers were somewhat blind-sided by that recent strategy change - Build was only 8 months ago. For many customers, they don't really have a choice but to keep using SL. They bought into what was being pitched to them for years - the ability to run managed code in a browser - and Microsoft didn't give an alternative to that when it announced the early death of SL. I haven't seen any new projects since October that target SL, but I also haven't seen any cases where ongoing SL projects were abandoned either.

For the project where we are using Iron Python with our client, SL support is pretty important for us for at least the one to two year timeframe, likely longer. If IP3 were to drop SL support, then we would not be able to move to it. In our case, we have a fairly sizable industry-vertical application that compiles to both WPF and Silverlight runtimes (plus some back-end processing services). Some customers use only the WPF front-end, others use both. Python scripts run in both the WPF and SL UI environment, as well as the back-end environment. It is therefore important for all to be synchronized to the same IP build.

SL5 only (dropping SL4) should be OK, but dropping all SL support will put us in a very serious predicament. We can't just chop scripting support for the SL front-end and expect our users to get over it. So if v3 doesn't support SL, then we probably won't be able to move to it. This is further complicated because we are also exploring concepts for supporting the Android, WinRT and (perhaps) iOS platforms - and I would be very worried about 2.7's stability on those once v3 becomes the norm.



Keith Rome
Senior Consultant and Architect
MCPD-EAD, MCSD, MCDBA, MCTS-WPF, MCTS-TFS, MCTS-WSS
Wintellect | 770.617.4016 | krome at wintellect.com
www.wintellect.com

-----Original Message-----
From: ironpython-users-bounces+rome=wintellect.com at python.org [mailto:ironpython-users-bounces+rome=wintellect.com at python.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Hardy
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 11:28 AM
To: sepatan at sibmail.com
Cc: ironpython-users at python.org
Subject: Re: [Ironpython-users] WP7 & Silverlight Support in IronPython

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 11:05 PM,  <sepatan at sibmail.com> wrote:
> Silverlight is very necessary.

Would you be fine with SL5 only, as Jimmy suggested? Also, how necessary is it that IronPython 3 support it? I don't see SL having much more takeup from now on, so I'm fine with supporting SL5 on 2.7 but dropping it from the 3.0 series (keeping in mind 3.0 is probably a year away).

That would leave 3.0 supported on desktop, WinRT (Win8 + WinPhone8), Android, and maybe iOS. Basically, platforms with a future, and WinRT.
;)

- Jeff
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