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On Our Cross Plat Commitment

When I joined Microsoft and started talking about Silverlight, many in the Mac community expressed skepticism about Microsoft’s long-term commitment to the Mac platform. In its most rabid form, the concern was that we were supporting the Mac only preemptively and would drop our support for the Mac as soon as enough Mac developers embraced it (!)

So, 2.5 years later, with the worst not having happened, I have renewed my personal pledge to make sure, to the best of my ability, that Silverlight not only continues to work on the Mac but looks and feels like a Mac app. 

Since I love the Mac, and I love Win7, and I really wanted a Working Laptop2 single machine to walk around with, I recently invested (personally) in a MacBook Pro and put enough RAM in it to happily run both Operating Systems simultaneously.  Here it is at my office with a 24” Cinema display, running both operating systems and pleasing me no end.

I absolutely understand company loyalty (and loving the Mac is not disloyal to Microsoft) but I tend to believe that we do best in recognizing the strengths of our allies and our competition. To quote from a Daft Punk: *

Work it, make it, do it, makes us
Harder, better, faster, stronger

Very much looking forward to PDC – look for me in the The Big Room or check for me on Twitter: @JesseLiberty

 

 

* In the original posting I attributed these words to Kanye West. This was a happy mistake, as your corrections led me to the music of Daft Punk

Published Thursday, November 12, 2009 3:42 PM by jesseliberty
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# Social comments and analytics for this post

This post was mentioned on Twitter by JesseLiberty: New blog post: http://tinyurl.com/ygquhz8 - On Our Cross Plat Commitment

Thursday, November 12, 2009 4:15 PM by uberVU - social comments

# On Our Cross Plat Commitment - Jesse Liberty - Silverlight Geek Silverlight Web

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# re: On Our Cross Plat Commitment

Yo jesse, I'm really happy for you , I'm going to let you finish but Daft Punk had one of the best songs of all time...one of the best of all time..and Kanye just sampled them

Thursday, November 12, 2009 6:33 PM by ColinBlair

# Their Best Role: Brad Pitt and 'Fight Club' – Cinematical | Brad Pitt Celebrity Monitor

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# Their Best Role: Brad Pitt and 'Fight Club' – Cinematical | Brad Pitt Celebrity Monitor

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# re: On Our Cross Plat Commitment

Yes, Jesse. The best thing to do with a Mac is putting Windows 7 to actually work with it. As usually from our Apple friends, the hardware is pretty good but the software leaves you wanting.

Friday, November 13, 2009 7:29 AM by Bigsby

# re: On Our Cross Plat Commitment

Jesse, don't give Kanye West honnors that he doesn't deserve. He didn't write that quote and frankly, comparing to Daft Punk, he is less that nothing. We are talking about the guys who invented the "french touch" or more communly, the ones who made the electronic music becoming accessible by everybody. They created the "genre". What did the RnB singer ?

Friday, November 13, 2009 12:23 PM by Magister99

# re: On Our Cross Plat Commitment

Hi Jesse,

Cross plat is vital for me as a .NET developer because my customers key management people are Mac users and traditional Web development continues to be hard due to differences among browser versions.  

Being able to develop for Mac with .NET is really great and I hope this just get better.

Friday, November 13, 2009 1:53 PM by escasal

# re: On Our Cross Plat Commitment

Jesse, The best thing you can do to help the Mac version of Silverlight is to push the team to get full feature parity. A couple big ones being GPU acceleration in windowed mode, and full mouse-wheel support (file bugs/feature requests with WebKit and Firefox teams if necessary). The other big gain would be PPC support. I know that's highly unlikely, but would remove the one remaining valid argument I hear over and over again to go with Flash instead of Silverlight. As it is I have to setup a Windows server with terminal services to support our art department which is still using G4s (and even some G3s). That's a pain.

Thanks for your personal support of the Mac platform!

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 2:49 PM by CoderX

# Silverlight Salmagundi ??? Global Nerdy

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Tuesday, November 24, 2009 12:25 PM by Silverlight Salmagundi ??? Global Nerdy

# re: On Our Cross Plat Commitment

Completely agree with CoderX.

Thinking about Cross Plat Commitment: why "Com interop" on SL?

This can be the begining of the end...

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 8:05 AM by escasal