Is Microsoft BUILD’ing Anxiety Among Developers?

So many controversies in life are not about the actual offense, but how it’s handled. Just ask Anthony Weiner. And so it is for Microsoft and its somewhat clumsy handling of the upcoming changes to Windows 8 that has left developers twisting in the wind.

A quick backtrack: Microsoft’s Windows 8 demo at the D9 conference has caused some severe heartburn among .NET and Silverlight developers when they saw that the new interface, which bears a strong resemblance to Windows Phone 7, is built on HTML 5 and JavaScript.

As part of the demo, Microsoft issued a press release hyping the use of HTML5 and JavaScript and made no mention of Silverlight or .NET, even though Silverlight is the basis for Windows Phone 7, and that’s where Windows 8 got its UI inspiration.

Developers have expressed concern on Microsoft developer pages like this and this on the Silverlight forums. The fear is that Microsoft is going to put Silverlight and .NET on legacy status and reduce it to the same orphaned state as Visual Basic 6.

“Potentially TERRIBLE news. It almost puts me in a state of shock. My biggest fears coming into Windows 8 was that, as a mostly WPF+.NET developer, was that they would shift everything to Silverlight and leave the FULL platform (can you write a VisualStudio in Silverlight? of course not, not designed for that) in the dust. To my utter shock, they did something much, much, much worse,” wrote Nicholas Petersen of Eclipsoft.

The main problem developers have is articulated in this posting, also by Petersen, which can be summed up in three words: talk to us. “We would like to know: Do Silverlight and WPF have an integral, irreplaceable, and front-facing role to play in Windows 8 and in the future?” he wrote. His posting was followed by a lot of other developers agreeing with him.

The problem is Microsoft dropped this bombshell at D9 and has now gone silent and will not speak until the newly-announced BUILD conference, to take place in mid-September in sunny Anaheim, California (ten miles from my home, so yours truly will be covering the event for these pages).

Pete Brown, a Microsoft community program manager, posted that his hands are tied.

“None of us at Microsoft can say anything until //build/ in September. No one likes that, including me. That’s all we can do, however,” he wrote.

The announcement of BUILD also threw people off, as Microsoft already has the Professional Developer Conference, TechEd and the Windows Hardware Engineering (WinHEC) conferences, among others. BUILD turns out to be a rebranding of PDC and will include WinHEC during the same show. At the same time, BUILD will broaden the reach to more than just professional developers, according to Microsoft.

This is not a bad idea at all. In 2008, I recall Microsoft hosting two shows in two weeks in Los Angeles; PDC week one, WinHEC the following week. There was no reason for two separate shows, making people come to L.A. twice in two weeks, especially given their relative small size and the cost of using the massive L.A. Convention Center. Moving to Anaheim means a smaller location which will save some money.

So on many levels, it’s a wise move. But maintaining radio silence until September is just unacceptable and not a smart move. You can’t leave developers twisting in the wind, allowing their imaginations to run away from them. At the very least developers need to know clearly that .NET and Silverlight are not going to be abandoned, back burnered, or otherwise de-emphasized.

This year has gone by fast, but September still feels like a long way off. Microsoft has to speak up before then.