Moonlight 2 arrives and falls flat on its face

Bug Reports

Given that this is a beta, it would be really helpful if you could provide a list of sites you tried that didn't work, so these bugs can be fixed for the final.

Thanks!

I avoid any and all sites

I avoid any and all sites which have Adobe Flash content. Just remember that's a proprietary Adobe format and they can demand royalties at any time. I say stick with Silverlight. With any luck Microsoft may push the Silverlight specification as an international standard (they'll still make good money providing good tools).
Let's hope for the future we can avoid the security risk Adobe Flash.

Silverblight/Moonblight

I avoid any and all sites which have Silverblight content. Just remember that's a proprietary MS format and they can demand royalties at any time. As much as I loathe Flash, I say stick with Flash. With any luck Adobe may push the Flash specification as an international standard (they'll still make good money providing good tools). In fact I think Adobe needs to push Flash as an international standard to eliminate the risk of losing out to Silverblight.

Now for better interoperability blah blah blah, I'd like to see Ogg/Theora take over the world. The licensing for Theora has a few strings attached but I don't see any great problems. If anything, people may improve the Theora algorithm. Then again as far as I know Theora is only a codec for sequences of frames; Flash can be interactive.

Mono again?

When will this mad dash of reporting on Mono end? Let it die; we do not need NET and we do not need Mono.

I really do not understand the logic of any IT shop that continues to go down the road of perpetual lock in. NET locks you to MS; I do not care what the Mono and NETites want you to believe, the truth is you are and will be, locked in.

There was a time when platform specific development was a requirement. Sure, there was a supposed ANSI C standard where you could write C code that was at least partially portable (write 85% here, recode 15%, and compile practically anywhere). However, when ever you added GUI into the mix, XPlatform was simply not possible.

Then along came Java and XPlatform was actually getting close to reality. Yes, early implementations of Java were slow, clumsy, and did not have a consistent look and feel across platforms. But that was THEN, this is NOW.

Over the years Java has come close, very close to 100% portability. NET, is not and will never be close to 100% portable.

Want natively compiled applications and not interpreted or runtime ones? Add the QT toolkit to the XPlatform equation and even that is now possible. It works 85% of the time for write once, compile anywhere. The Lazarus/Free Pascal project even offers a pretty decent RAD Delphi type environment for development, and for Web Development, Flash will get you Mac, Windows, or Linux/Open Solaris, as well as some embedded devices, and Java will get you almost 100% of everything out there.

MS controls NET and they decide what goes in and what goes out. There is no Net Community Process (as there is with Open Source GPL Java), and MS will NEVER endorse one. NET is MS Java, without the benefits of true XPlatform, period!

Why then would any company choose to lock themselves in? It truly makes no sense at all. Even if I were a Windows shop today, I certainly would not want to commit to a lock in scenario for the future. Choice is good, the ability to adapt your IT applications to various platforms is wise.

If the market changes in 5 years, do you really want to start over and give that flexibility to your competition? If you lock yourselves in, you are STUCK, PERIOD!! Attempting to recode all of your applications as the world moves to something else (Linux, Mac, etc) is simply not wise and not worth the risk. Do you really want to tie yourself to ever increasing hardware and software upgrades while your competition lowers their infrastructure cost by extending their hardware and OS cost, because they wisely chose XPlatform?

I understand why many IT shops were writing platform specific applications as little as 5 years ago. Today, it is just purely asinine! There is no reason to do this any longer, none. If your IT shop is doing this today it is either because: (1) Your management has no clue, (2) Your IT Architects, Team Leads, and staff are either inept, unwilling to adapt and/or change, or have some religious attachment to X.

I do not care whether you are a Windows fan, Mac fan, Linux, or some other Unix aficionado. I do not care if your worship at the alter of Redmond or the alter of GPL. Locking yourselves into a single solution when it is simply not necessary. is quite simply, DUMB!

Sure, kernel level developers, RTOS, or OS specialty apps, as well as game development, does not have the luxuries yet that the general business application developers have. This post is not meant for you and does not necessarily apply. However, if you are a business IT department whose primary job is business based applications, then you are either extremely short-sided, ignorant, or listen too much to the marketers, if you choose to develop your application in a Vendor or platform specific manner. It is simply an unwise decision and sooner or later, your competition is going to make you PAY!!!

In fact if I were CIO and that was the direction my IT managers were going in the near and long term, you can bet that I would be handing you your pink slip, unless you had a truly compelling reason. Warning, there are not many cases that warrant non XPlatform development, so you had better have your ducks in a row!!

You can choose your technologies (Java, QT, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc), but XPlatform is important.

You should only use tools that allow you to obtain an XPlatform objective and fit the type of application you are tasked to build. No favorites or religion allowed!! Choose the one that fits best and is proven to work best in that environment. This could require more than one, or one may be sufficient.

However, NET is simply not a good choice and you might as well continue to use Visual Basic 6 and Visual C++. Either way you are locked in and tied to both a single Vendor and potentially a single platform.

Yes, I do understand this may not be possible overnight. Your staff may not have the sufficient skills to move immediately. But you should formulate the plan to make the transition and start the training move very, very, soon.