ScottGu blogged about the latest release of SL4. Top of his list of new goodies that are in the latest release was “further enhancing media support”.
This is really starting to annoy me. The multimedia sideshow was good for wooing pointy haired bosses and brainless marketing people but it’s not really important.
The world does not need YAY (yet another youtube) and apart from training material on sites like silverlight.net, all this multimedia stuff isn’t terribly useful. Sure you can use it to drip glitter on really awful internet flash-type games, but nobody pays for those, so that’s not a market.
The RIA stuff is a thousand times more important. Not as glamorous, but it’s make or break for LOB, which is the real market, where the paying customers are. Microsoft is normally very hard-headed about this stuff. Ballmer may prance about chanting “Developers, developers, developers…” but that’s because of the mutual entrenchment of the platform and the apps that run on it. He’s really chanting “Stitch up our market, stitch up our market…”
The VS2010 release candidate is a little disappointing for me. I don’t think anyone could describe it as a candidate for release.
The extensive refactoring, which broke so much of my beta 2 code, is not the reason I say this. The refactoring was to be expected, and is no more than a nuisance.
What does get to me is the fact that fundamental internal engineering is broken. There is code generation logic that in code-behind surfaces any object declared in XAML with a value for its Name attribute. This is broken.
That’s a bigger deal than it sounds. I wrote a tree-walker helper class to conveniently bring objects into scope, but there are any number of odd bugs there weren’t manifest in beta 2.
All in all, an excellent beta 3 and a dismal release candidate.