Recent new form PDC had nearly caused me a heart attack: MS drops Silverlight for web and bets on HTML5.
Few months ago when I was choosing a platform to write my app, Silverlight looked good:
- C# and .Net
- Easy to develop and debug.
- MS is backing it up, meaning that it will be widely used.
- Can be detached from the browser and made into a standalone application.
Even worse, detachable feature pushed me to develop a thick client to save the round trips to the server and improve performance.
Few months later, it does not look like a great idea anymore. Not only I have to re-write the app in HTML5/JavaScript, but I also have to re-architecture it to make it more decoupled. On the bright side, I plan to make it a learning experience and also to document the process in my blog to practice a discipline of posting and writing.