Ah yes, Silverlight. I’m one of the few MS developers who will admit to loving Silverlight; in fact, I wrote was the best-selling Silverlight book of the time. The changes in each new version were dramatic, and it was clear that Silverlight was on track to give developers a lightweight, embedded version of WPF & .NET in a browser. It was good enough that you could migrate many desktop applications directly into the browser, with no pain. What could be better?

Unfortunately, the world changed. Once HTML5 & JS became “good enough”, there was no way that a technology that required a plug-in could ever compete. Add to that the fact that Silverlight was completely at odds with the emerging mobile-first development philosophy, and it was clear that the technology was as doomed as Flash. (In fact, Silverlight could be described as a modern, thoroughly redesigned Flash.)

So long story short, I don’t blame MS for the death of Silverlight. However, I do wish it could have ended differently.