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Yes, Podcasts, those nice little Audiobooks I can listen to on the way to work. With the current amount of Podcasts, it's like searching a needle in a haystack, except that the haystack happens to be the Internet and is filled with too many of these "Hot new Gadgets" stuff :(
Now, even though I am mainly a .NET developer nowadays, maybe anyone knows some good Podcasts from people regarding the whole software lifecycle? Unit Testing, Continous Integration, Documentation, Deployment...
So - what are you guys and gals listening to?
Please note that the categorizations are somewhat subjective and may not be 100% accurate as many podcasts cover several areas. Categorization is made against what is considered the "main" area.
General Software Engineering / Productivity
[Stack Overflow ] 1(inactive, but still a good listen)
TekPub (Requires Paid Subscription)
Software Engineering Radio
43 Folders
Perspectives
Dr. Dobb's (now a video feed)
The Pragmatic Podcast (Inactive)
IT Matters
Agile Toolkit Podcast
The Stack Trace (Inactive)
Parleys
Techzing
The Startup Success Podcast
Berkeley CS class lectures
FLOSS Weekly
This Developer's Life
.NET / Visual Studio / Microsoft
Herding Code
Hanselminutes
.NET Rocks!
Deep Fried Bytes
Alt.Net Podcast (inactive)
Polymorphic Podcast (inconsistent)
Sparkling Client (The Silverlight Podcast)
dnrTV!
Spaghetti Code
ASP.NET Podcast
Channel 9
Radio TFS
PowerScripting Podcast
The Thirsty Developer
Elegant Code (inactive)
ConnectedShow
Crafty Coders
Coding QA
jQuery
yayQuery
The official jQuery podcast
Java / Groovy
The Java Posse
Grails Podcast
Java Technology Insider
Basement Coders
Ruby / Rails
Railscasts
Rails Envy
The Ruby on Rails Podcast
Rubiverse
Ruby5
Web Design / JavaScript / Ajax
WebDevRadio
Boagworld
The Rissington podcast
Ajaxian
YUI Theater
Unix / Linux / Mac / iPhone
Mac Developer Network
Hacker Public Radio
Linux Outlaws
Mac OS Ken
LugRadio Linux radio show (Inactive)
The Linux Action Show!
Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) Summary Podcast
Stanford's iPhone programming class
Advanced iPhone Development Course - Madison Area Technical College
WWDC 2010 Session Videos (requires Apple Developer registration)
System Administration, Security or Infrastructure
RunAs Radio
Security Now!
Crypto-Gram Security Podcast
Hak5
VMWare VMTN
Windows Weekly
PaulDotCom Security
The Register - Semi-Coherent Computing
FeatherCast
General Tech / Business
Tekzilla
This Week in Tech
The Guardian Tech Weekly
PCMag Radio Podcast (Inactive)
Entrepreneurship Corner
Manager Tools
Other / Misc. / Podcast Networks
IT Conversations
Retrobits Podcast
No Agenda Netcast
Cranky Geeks
The Command Line
Freelance Radio
IBM developerWorks
The Register - Open Season
Drunk and Retired
Technometria
Sod This
Radio4Nerds
Hacker Medley
I like
General Software
Stackoverflow (perhaps too obvious)
Deep Fried Bytes
Hanselminutes
Software Engineering Radio (via Brenden)
Herding Code
Dot Net
Alt.NET Podcast
Polymorphic Podcast
Productivity
43 Folders
My list:
Hanselminutes
.NET Rocks!
Herding Code
Deep Fried Bytes
Spaghetti Code
The Sparkling Client
Plumbers # Work
Polymorphic Podcast
ALT.NET Podcast
ASP.NET Podcast
Radio TFS
PowerScripting Podcast
Software Engineering Radio
stackoverflow Podcast
The Thirsty Developer
ThoughtWorks - IT Matters Podcast
Agile Toolkit Podcast
Ajaxian Podcast
Pragmatic Podcasts
Channel 9 Audio Feed
EDIT: Missed one:
Elegant Code Cast
This one's not specifically about development, but Security Now from Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte is an excellent discussion of security issues. I think it's a must-listen for just about any computer user who's concerned about security, and especially for web developers who are responsible both for the security of their site and at least partially responsible for their users' security.
I love FLOSS Weekly. Another Twit Podcast where Leo and Randal Schwartz interview open source geeks. My favorite was their interview with Dan Ingalls (Smalltalk/Squeak fame). I also enjoyed their interview of Richard Hipp (SQLite).
Am I going to be downmodded for suggesting that the Stack Overflow podcast is hilariously bad as a podcast? Anywho, you can find it, and a number of not-bad podcasts at
itconversations.com.
As this question asked for a "good" rather than "exhaustive" list, then this is obviously just my opinion. My opinion bounces between .NET and Java and just geek. And obvious omissions would reflect my opinion on "good". (Ahem, DNR.)
The rest of these are easily found by doing a podcast search in iTunes, or just googling (I'll do some repeating here to condense the list):
Buzz Out Loud (General Consumer Tech, Daily)
This Week in Tech (aka TWiT. Weekly Consumer Tech.)
The Java Posse (Weekly.)
Google Developer Podcast (which went long fallow, but seems to be coming
back, possible renamed as the Google Code Review. Schedule uncertain, technologies vary.)
Hanselminutes (Usually, but not always, .NET-related)
MacBreak Weekly (The Mac version of TWiT)
Polymorphic Podcast (All .NET, usually ASP.NET)
Pixel8ed (All .NET, focused on UI. Same guy who does Polymorphic Podcast)
tech5 (Consumer Tech. Mostly a fun waste of 5 minutes because Dvorak is so... Spolsky.)
In the Stack Overflow podcast SE-radio was mentioned. It's pretty in depth.
Also if you are an aspiring JavaScript developer, the Douglas Crockford "The JavaScript Programming Language" and "Advanced JavaScript" talks on YUI Developer Theatre are excellent. There are a few other gems on the podcast too.
I listen to the javaposse regularly, they cover mostly Java, but not solely.
JavaPosse If you want to hear all that you (n)ever wanted to know about closures (7/2010 - This is actually a good podcast, but now it's all you (n)ever wanted to know about apple & android)
.NET Rocks For when you want to hear the billionth interview about databinding controls in the trenches during the transition from VB6 to VB.NET
Stack Overflow You really do want to hear a guy who doesn't know C debate a guy who pretends to have invented it, or something, or maybe just listen for spoilers to wallee
Security Now! You want to listen to someone who thinks he's the most ingenious security architect in the world, because he writes EVERYTHING IN ASSEMBLER (no, I'm not kidding), while overlooking the obvious solutions to problems that have existed for years. Please don't listen to this thinking it's good
Yahoo! Dev Network - I haven't seen a lot of good stuff here, but Crockford's talks on advanced JavaScript are wonderful
Suggestion: If you post each of your recommended podcasts as a separate answer then people can vote for your "answer".
BTW, Joel discussed this on the Stack Overflow Podcast (can't find the reference in the transcript Wiki) and suggested something like:
- Post your suggested "favorite" (tech podcast, in this case) as a question: "Do you like < > podcast and tag it with "technology podcast".
The beauty of this is that we get a simple poll. Yes, it would be nice to actually have a poll but that's not yet a Stack Overflow feature.
The Google Developer Podcast is good.
The way I understand the question, you are asking for developer centric podcast. My personal number one is Late Night Cocoa from the Mac Developer Network followed by Mac Developer Roundtable. Although I agree that every developer should probably listen to Steve Gibson's Security Now! (with Leo Laporte's TWiT network).
For general tech stuff, check out other TWiT podcasts: This week in Tech, MacBreak Weekly, MacBreack Tech (with PixelCorps), Windows Weekly and FLOSS Weekly
On a side note: relevant to some developers who think about becoming a Micro-ISV in the Apple Universe: MacSB - Mac Software Business
Brad's list is pretty good. I also listen to:
Sparkling Client (Silverlight specific)
Jon Udell's Perspectives series
Herding Code (shameless plug for a podcast I put on
with Kevin Dente, Scott "lazycoder" Koon, and K. Scott
Allen. We recently interviewed Jeff Atwood about
Stack Overflow, discussing both how the site is
designed and the technology behind it.
I found this on a similar discussion, I think it was at Reddit:
UC Berkeley Webcast
I found it most useful, since it podcasts entire classes from Berkley courses such as Operating Systems and System Programming, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Data Structures and Programming Methodology, among others.
Almost all of my favorite podcasts have already been mentioned but not the No 1. Do yourself a favor and listen to the best podcast ever, Linux radio show - LugRadio.
If you are into web design and website creation then I recommend Boagworld and also The Rissington podcast even if you are not.
Also make sure you don't miss the dnrTV webcast show that Carl Franklin (the man behind .NET rocks) publishes. Even if it's a not a podcast and requires a more attention while watching it it's really informative and if you're into .NET and Microsoft related techniques you'll learn a lot.
I can second Jon Galloway's mention of Herding Code, and since I have absolutely nothing to do with the podcast, with nothing to gain, my opinion may be more valuable than his :-).
There are only a few there as it's relatively new, but they are jam packed with good stuff that is very relevant to today's programming paradigms and strategies.
I also love the smooth format they've got going since 4 guys all giving input on a topic can make for a very jerky conversation with all (most?) of them dialed in, but whether it's the post editing or just a good format, either way it comes across as a very comfortable listening experience to the end user. Keep it up guys!
Hope that helps,
Rob G
It does not seem like this one was mentioned yet.
http://thecommandline.net/ --
"Exploring the rough edges where technology, society and public policy meet."
He does a weekly News show and a weekly topics show.
From the website,
Endorsement:
"Thoughtful, informative, and deep, a real plunge into the geeky end of the news-pool. There's great analysis and rumination, as well as detailed explanations of important security issues with common OSes and so on." -- Cory Doctorow
Not hardcore technology but I really enjoy Drunk and Retired. It's like you're talking to your programmer buddy mixed in with life stuff.
Besides Stack Overflow of course, here are mine.
Many have already mentioned Hanselminutes.
Some have already mentioned .NET Rocks!
Not quite as many have mentioned RunAs Radio.
I can't believe the size of some of these lists. With podcasts, I like to keep the list short and the quality high. As such, I tend to skip the aggregates like ITConversations et. al.
Extending on what Mike Powell has to say, I am actually a big fan of almost all of the podcasts at http://www.twit.tv. Most of the content is watered down a bit, but some of the speakers are top notch thinkers - especially on "This Week in Tech", the flagship program.
Oh - and Car Talk on NPR but those guys hardly EVER get into the SDLC!
FLOSS Weekly
Pragmatic Podcasts
Rails Envy
Webdev Radio
If you started out on an 8 bit machine, don't forget your roots:
The Retrobits Podcast
A good weekly update to the Ruby on Rails world: Rails Envy.
The thestacktrace is good general programming podcast, which covers every thing from git to Scala.
If you're interested in Linux, Linux Action Show is a wonderful podcast !
It's about Linux news, distributions and softwares releases and also Linux based hardware testing (like drobo, Amazon Kindle and so on).
It's very good quality and the hosts, Brian and Chris, sounds amazing.
It's my number one podcast !
Also, I've just discovered that IBM offers some developer podcasts which seems very interesting, some are from Erich Gamma by the way. Of course, it's a little bit more Java and Eclipse oriented (It's IBM).
http://herdingcode.com/
Plus one for the following:
The Java Posse
Software Engineering Radio
The Grails Podcast
Linux Outlaws are pretty good. They discuss GNU/Linux distros, software and IT news.
My favorite is Manager Tools. Technically it is a business podcast, but very valuable for programmers or other individual contributors working in corporate environments. Been listening for 3 years, new to StackOverflow
-- Mike
Elegant Code Cast
Related
Broad, sweeping question here...
Assume you have built an enterprise level framework with some rich client in the .Net (Microsoft) sphere, with a WCF back end. Now, imagine that that enterprise framework's UI technology is being deprecated in favour of UWP.
The choices for a front end replacement basically are: UWP, Web (HTML), or some other rich client technology.
How would you go about the decision making process?
I personally lean toward a rich client where the user base is a captive user base. I mean, where the users' IT department is happy to install the necessary runtime environment on the machines, etc. This is usually not a problem with Microsoft technologies, and this won't be a problem in about 10 years when organizations roll out Windows 10.
But, people are telling me these days that web has come a long way. People are telling me that JavaScript frameworks are becoming very sophisticated, and that low level JavaScript for basic data binding and the like is mostly unnecessary.
I have really been turned off by web solutions like ASP in the past, but I do understand that technology has moved forward, and I do understand that Microsoft have been working on ASP.Net v Next which might actually be good?
The question is not so much what would you opt for? But, what factors would you take in to account to decide which platform to go for?
Opnion based answer here...
In a decision to adopt a particular tech for any project lies in many factors. I can cite two majors for your particular scenario.
1 - Client adoption. It's easy for the customers to use/install it? They need to pay some sort of license? Can it run in all platforms/devices the customer already own?
2 - Market adoption. It's easy for you co-workers to adopt it? It's hard to find/hire experienced/hardened developers? We need to pay some kind of license? Can I trust it ill be a long lived technology?
The answer to your question can be HTML.
Not only it is already got a lot of momentum in market, it ill take years to change it even if today someone (big like MS or Google) put some new (better) stuff on the table.
Also if someone on MS marketing dep say next week Universal Windows Platform or WinRT must die it ill die (like Silverlight). So Im not adopting some new technology just because some big player told me to do it.
Yes web has come a long way indeed. You can do a lot of amazing things just with JS+HTML+CSS those days. Also the right usage/architecture of it ill allow you to put your app running in PCs, Tablets and Mobiles (at a minimum cost to port between devices) and capable in running in anything can access internet.
I suggest you to catch up and learn a lot about webservices, Json, JS libraries like JQuery, Sammy and some nice stuff like Knockout, SPA, Angular, Node, etc.
Edit, answer to comments
To not start a chatty comment I'll respond here. Yes your questions and comments brings interesting questions. To let it readable for posterity both of us can edit answer and question to organize it.
Silverlight. How not love it? In special after strugling with flash. It's a shame MS pulled the plug (die in hell MS CEOs). When MS let it to die I was planning a big web app SL was my first choice. Why I changed my mind? Well 2 years to develop that app and at the end how much browser ill get along supporting it? The SL community is great, the tool is great but browsers can just say, Hey tomorrow there's no guarantee it keep working.
.Net and MS platforms. I'm a .Net developer. I adopted it since beta, first to work with winforms (in a previous life I was a proud Delphi developer). After a while started to work with web. I also worked in classical ASP (bad times) and loved .Net ASP from start.
You can run .Net apps in almost any PC in the planet today. Not exactly true for all mobiles/gadgets. For browsers pure HTML+JS+CSS ill to better because it's lightweight (done right). Also we can move a lot of thing to client side and just let it hit the server only when necessary. .Net apps can do that, sure, but ill never be light as a tailored HTML+JS+CSS.
In fact I believe you can do anything with .Net and you can do amazing things if you got a few good developers in your team. But depending on the project it ill do better (and cheaper) in HTML or PHP or Ruby or Java, etc.
In fact at a previous shop, with both PHP and .Net teams we found (after 1 year study, metrics, lots of projects) small projects are better done in PHP, larger ones in .Net (if I remember a medium project can be 4k to 6k men/hours).
The point here is. You really must read a lot about HTML, CSS, JS, SPA, Angular, etc. Bringing to live a big and shinning web app is challenging today not because what we can do (we can do anything) but how we can do. DDD, MVC, MVVM. Testing framework, etc. Man Node is the future (the concept at least).
Web developing really changed in the last years and with it the clients and users expectations. Today no one ill wait for more than 2 secs for a page to load. Everybody wants usability to be at the top of the table from project scratch. You app must be responsive, etc. (not using Dilbertian management buzz words here for the sake of it. Just stating usability is that important today).
And don't forget everyone wants it to be beatifull (from a graphical designer point of view) even if it's a dull B2B supposed to be used only by cave mens.
Even if you stick to a classical .Net app learn about the (many) options, that can bring a new wider perspective.
I have decided to answer this question here because we've had a lot more time to investigate and look at different options. The original question turned out to be a bit of a furphy. Pure UWP and Web are not the only options. There is also a Xamarin Forms as an option which includes UWP, Android, and iOS. As a personal preference, I am leaning toward using Xamarin Forms as a client instead of any other development platform because it supports three OSs out of the box: Windows 10, iOS, and Android.
I believe the answer to the question is: you should only develop a web app if you need to. Does your user base consist of people who will mostly prefer a browser over apps? Are your potential users likely to want to avoid downloading an app? Is your app very simple, and you want people to be able to dive in very quickly? Are you able to get away without access to things like the camera, location and push notifications? If you can answer yes to these things, then I think you should go for HTML 5/JavaScript. If however, your user base is comfortable downloading apps, and you think that your app will require a UI more sophisticated than most browser apps, I'd recommend looking at Xamarin Forms as the preferred option. We've had very good success with Xamarin Forms so far, and the UWP version of our Xamarin Forms app has turned out just as good as our first stab at a UWP app.
Note: I should give Web Assembly (http://webassembly.org/) an honorable mention here. This technology is being considered in all the big tech organisations like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. One day, it may make deployment of native apps in a browser great again.
This may appear as a subjective question but i am asking from an technical architect point of view.
What would be your choice if you were building E-Commerce based Application to help giant companies carry out their marketing and sales campaigns. I looked into open source frameworks such as Magento that works with ZendFramework using the PHP,MySQL And Apache stack. Other basic frameworks like OSCommerce seem reasonable. Whats the leading E-Commerce framework for .Net Technologies? I also looked into Zoho and it seems like using their applications most of the requirements can be knocked off but I also feel I may face flexibility issues down the line with what they provide.
Please try to mention what architectural benefits do you see in the frameworks you know about. Thanks, as always, and its always great to hear the expert opinions on stackoverflow.
For "Giant companies" your question is formed badly and has no information to actually answer it.
For micro and middle sized companies (10 -500 persons in company) go for Magento EE or Magneto CE version and Magento optimized hosting solution
My company (a large organization) is developing a "road-map" for evolving their rather old, tangled confederation of systems to an SOA model. A few people are pushing hard for using Websphere Integration Developer and Websphere Process Server as the defacto platform for developing future applications...because they feel IBM is a stable vendor, the tools are made for the enterprise, they drank the "business agility" BPEL kool-aid, etc.
Does anyone have positive or negative thoughts on this platform? Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
My experience with the IBM Java tool set is pure pain. Days to install lots of different versions of different components all incompatible with each other, discover a bug in component A get told to update to see if it fixes, updating component A breaks component B and C, get told to update these etc.
I find Eclipse with out the IBM extensions far more stable and quicker and provides more features (as its stable versions are a couple releases ahead of WID/RAD).
I would advise against going the IBM way for development tools. As for process server I have less experience but the people in my team using it seemed to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed WID. not a lot.
So far I havent been impressed by any tools with the "SOA" and/or "BPM" labels on them. My "roadmap" would be very very iterative to see some results with the archetecture as fast as possible while trying to grab some of the easy fruits. That way you gain your feel for what works for you and your people.
I would never let any vendor push me anywhere in the "scuplturing" of the architecture.
I agree with other users complaining about WID. The only reason we are using WID is that a decision was made a while back to use IBM products across the board by our sales department.
That's right, our sales department made the decision to use IBM products.
Development has been painful and frustrating. We have lots of stability problems with Process Server, sometimes it doesn't want to start or shutdown properly. Yeah you can easily draw processes in the IDE, but most any toolset provides that functionality these days. It is nothing special or unique to WID or IBM. IBM is a few iterations behind mainstream.
There are plenty of open source implementations out there that offer great support. Checkout JBoss or RedHat, they are pretty good. If that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Apache tools.
Walter
Developers don't choose WID, WMB, or WPS. Managers do, because IBM is a "stable vendor".
Look at JBoss, or K.I.S.S.
WID/WPS is actually pretty simple. The original intention was for analysts and business people to "compose" services (DO NOT LET THEM DO THIS!) so the UI is simple and easy.
Most of the work will be in defineing and implementing the back end services which depending on the platform will mostly involve wrapping existing code in SOA service.
The most important thing to bear in mind is that SOAP is technoligy and SOA is an architecture and a state of mind.
There is a zen to a succesful SOA implementation. Its all about "business services", if you have a service that you cannot describe to a business user in less than six words you have done it wrong! Ideally the service name alone should be enough to describe the functionality of the service.
If you end up with a service called "MyApp.GetContactData" described as "get name, addresses tel fax etc." then you are there. If You have a service called MyAppGetFaxNoFromOldSys" described as "Retrieve current-fax-nmbr from telephony table in legacy system" you are doomed!
Incidently most of the Websphere tooling for WS* is pretty nice. But I would recommend the very wonderful SAOPUI tool from http://www.eviware.com which is very good for compsing/reading WSDL based messages and also function as a useful test client or server.
Do the GUI tools help eliminate monotonous/redundant coding...or just obscure things and make things harder to maintain? Basically, do the benefits justify the complexity?
As a Developer, I find the tools at varying levels of being bug free. 6.0.1 was a pain, 6.2 is so much better. But once you develop with the tool, there is minimal effort to maintain it. I develop in hours what java developers take days to do. It is also easy to maintain as changes can be made very quickly. I cannot answer your question from the perspective of an architect or a Manager but i would agree with comments of some others here.
Silverlight v2.0 is getting closer and closer to RTM but I have yet to hear any stats as to how many browsers are running Silverlight. If I ask Adobe (by googling "Flash install base") they're only too happy to tell me that 97.7% of browsers are running Flash player 9 or better.
Not that I believe everything I read, but where are these statistics from Microsoft or some other vendor about Silverlight? I'm going to be making a technology choice soon and a little bit of empirical evidence would be an asset at this point...
All you Silverlight developers out there, show me your stats!
Quick Answer: www.riastats.com
This site compares the different RIA plugins using graphical charts and graphs.
It gets its data from small snippets of javascripts running on sites accross the web (approx 400,000 last time I looked)
At the time of this post, Silverlight 2 was sitting at close to 11%.
I would not take this as the end-all, be-all in RIA stats, but it's the best site I've found so far.
If you are developing something for a general audience, I would highly recommend against Silverlight as you immediately cut out Linux users.
I went to watch videos for the Olympics (and I run exclusively Linux), and I couldn't watch the video on their site because they were in Silverlight. On top of that, they actively removed all videos from YouTube, so I had no alternative but to try and scrounge up a Windows boot. This only served to give me a very negative opinion of NBC, and consider them quite amateurish to pick such a restricting technology for something that should be available for everyone.
While Flash has it's problems, it works fine in Linux, so I would say (at this point), it is a much superior technology choice.
If you KNOW your audience is entirely on Windows (maybe Mac).... then you can consider Silverlight with knowing you won't be cutting out part of your audience.
if you're that concerned about locking out potential users, you should be building a low-bandwidth HTML only version of your site anyways...regardless of whether you use Flash or Silverlight.
I struggled with this for a while. Ultimately, I chose to develop my site using Silverlight for the major components. I did a good bit of research, and I reached the following bottom-line conclusion:
If Silverlight fails, it will not
be for lack of installed base. There
are simply too many levers for MS to
pull (windows update, embedding it in
IE8, or even paying highly trafficed
sites to use it.
I will add this from Alexa - microsoft.com has pretty impressive daily reach and it uses SL on the main page. I would also not be surprised at all if Outlook Web Access is moved to Silverlight - thereby turning every single office outlook user who wants to access email from home/other into a roaming SL installer.
Alexa Link comparing microsoft.com/ebay.com/amazon.com
I will add this from ScottGu's blog entry:
In addition to powering the Olympics
experience in the US, Silverlight was
also used in France (by FranceTV), the
Netherlands (by NOS), Russia (by
Sportbox.ru) and Italy (by RAI). In
addition to video quality, a big
reason behind these broadcasters
decision to use Silverlight was the
TCO and streaming cost difference
Silverlight provided. In the August
2008 edition of Web Designer Magazine
(a Dutch publication) a NOS
representative reported that they were
able to serve 100,000 concurrent users
using Silverlight and 40 Windows Media
Servers, whereas it would have
required 270 servers if they had used
Flash Media Servers.
Over the last month we've seen several
major new deployments of Silverlight
for media scenarios. For example: CBS
College Sports is now using
Silverlight to stream NCAA events from
its 170 partner colleges and
university. Blockbuster is replacing
Flash with Silverlight for its
MovieLink application. And Netflix two
weeks ago rolled out its new Instant
Watch service using Silverlight.
At the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Scott Guthrie said that Silverlight was installed on "45% of the world's Internet-connected devices"
http://www.betanews.com/article/PDC-2009-Live-from-the-Day-2-keynote/1258561992 (quote taken from "9:28am PT") entry
This was the weekly poll over on CP a few weeks back. Out of the 1463 developers responding, aprox. 62% had Silverlight installed on at least one system.
So... if you're making a site targeted at Windows developers... and don't mind locking out a third of your potential market...
I haven't been able to get stats. I'd assume they might release some at PDC in late October. If you're building a site which needs to target a non-developer audience who won't want to install another plugin, you might want to wait for Silverlight.
I have done a good amount of testing with Moonlight on Linux, and it works well for sites which use either use Silverlight 1.0 functionality (pretty much 100% supported) or which happen to use the Silverlight 2.0 bits which Moonlight currently supports. The caveat is that some websites explicitly check the user agent and won't offer content if you're not on a "supported" platform. That's poor website coding, not a fault of the Silverlight plugin.
During the keynote # ReMIX UK when ScottGu gave the figure of 1.5 million installs/day I was sat next to Andrew Shorten, one of the Adobe platform evangelists (and also a good chum). He was telling me Adobe have independant evidence of an AVERAGE of 12 million installs a day, with over 40 million downloads.
It would appear 1.5 million is a tiny amount of what it could be.
Well 6 million watched the Olympics on NBC, which used a silverlight player. So at least 6 million. I've never seen exact stats, but you can be pretty certain that it is pretty small still.
Also, there is an implementation of silverlight for linux called moonlight.
I think an interesting stat comes from this site itself. Have a look at how many silverlight questions there are! And how many responses - it's not the most active topic!
I think you'll see a dramatic increase in the Silverlight install base after Silverlight 2.0 officially comes out. Right now it's still in beta. Silverlight 1.0 is out and runs quite well from what I've seen in Moonlight on Linux, but it's much harder to create full-scale applications for than version 2.0. According to Microsoft, Moonlight will be "100% compatible" at release time. See Scott Guthrie's blog (note: 2.0 was called 1.1 at the time).
Nick R, as for the fact that there isn't much Silverlight activity on these forums, I think the biggest reason for that is the very active community on the silverlight.net forums.
Scott Guthrie said (at Remix UK Sept 18 2008) that Silverlight is currently downloaded 1.5 million times per day. Over 115 million downloads since the version 1 release.
The Version 1 installed base will automatically update to version 2 when it is out of beta.
Wow! Scott said the same thing at Mix in February 08 about run rate - 1.5m. So it seems that a daily run rate of 1.5m per day for 6 months would add 270m installs to the installed base. So their numbers are not exactly clear in their meaning.
If one assumes the 115m installed base is correct, then it implies a run rate around 700k per day in the six months since SL2. Of course, many users are upgrading versions B1 to B2 as an example.
Either way, it is gaining some steady installs. It would be nice to see the run rate improve. By 2nd quarter of next year, it should be dramatically higher due to v2 shipment, application/web site adoption, pre-installation on various computers (like HP) and any unannounced distribution mechanisms.
While in general I support the idea of developing a site using silverlight and feel that that, depending on your audience, you should not have too much trouble getting users to download the plug in I would caution you against assuming that Microsoft will release the plugin built into IE or as a part of windows update.
I have had two separate Microsoft Technology Evangelists tell me that the company is reluctant to do that due to Anti-Trust reasons.
This was over a year ago and their strategy has probably evolved since then, but it enough to make me not count on that as an option for greater market penetration.
Don't forget that the Silverlight 2 install base will never include PPC Mac users. It doesn't look like the Moonlight people are targetting them at all, despite the heroic effort to add PIC streaming for Silverlight 1.0 users for the Obama inauguration.
The larger question is how many users will your site lose if implemented in Silverlight. And, it very much depends on your audience.
If you're running a site about the joys of Linux kernel hacking or the virtues of Internet security, you'll probably lose a significant chunk of your audience. If you're running a more mainstream site, my experience is that, sadly, people will download anything they're told to most of the time. That's why spyware and malware work. And, as the NBC/Olympics deal shows, Microsoft will aggressively push its partners to use Silverlight until it's fairly ubiquitous.
I won't be using Silverlight until it's more mature because I do cater to a fair number of Linux users, but I might for a less technically-oriented site.
Using the GamerServices component for XNA to access Xbox/GfW Live for networking purposes requires developers and players each to have a US$100/year subscription to Microsoft's Creators Club. That's not much of an issue for Xbox360 XNA projects as you need the subscription anyway to be able to put your game on the 360.
But for PC games using XNA, requiring developers and players to put that much up each year is pretty crazy just for the access to a player's gamer card. Are there any solutions for XNA games that provide similar benefits to GamerServices? Or are developers pretty much restricted to building their own networking functionality if they don't want to subject their players (and themselves) to that $100/head hit?
Perhaps you could try Lidgren
Please note that games for windows live is now free:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/22/games-for-windows-live-now-free/
Since using the Live APIs is your only option on xbox and zune, it makes it a pretty compelling option since your only issue was the cost on windows :-) Especially considering the fact that once game studio 3.0 launches, you'll be able to sell your games on xbox live's new community games section
Edit, upon further investigation, it turns out that the games for windows live stuff is kind of half-baked. The gamerservices library doesn't seem to be included in the redistributable bits. So unless you want to break the EULA, your player would have to install gamestudio. That being said, I do still believe that it's free nonetheless, if not inconvenient.
Well, you can use sockets, obviously, and using sockets you can create a seperate, dedicated server app, which you can't do with Live (as far as I know). You could also try SteamWorks; I haven't heard of anyone trying that, however.