Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site
Silverlight developers just can't catch a break.
Microsoft has closed its primary Web resource for its Silverlight browser plug-in and development framework -- the Silverlight.Net site -- breaking loads of links out there to resources and discussions on Silverlight, as noted by blogger Tim Anderson on ITWriting. Clicking on those links dumps users into a bare-bones Silverlight informational page on Microsoft's MSDN site.
The move added insult to injury for those developers who are feeling increasingly disenfranchised by Microsoft's decision to back away from Silverlight.
I asked a Microsoft what, if anything, the company planned to do to fix the myriad broken Silverlight links. A spokesperson emailed me the following statment:
“In order to streamline access to online resources for the Silverlight community, we’ve consolidated our Silverlight content with the library of information on MSDN. On October 2nd, we communicated to our customers that we would be merging Silverlight.net with MSDN, and completed this migration on October 31st.
"We realize that some of our customers may have experienced challenges accessing links to content that had resided on the original Silverlight site. We apologize for any inconvenience and we’re working to resolve these issues for our customers.
"The consolidation of this content does not impact Microsoft’s Silverlight offering. We released Silverlight 5 in December 2011 and we’ve committed to supporting Silverlight into the year 2021.”
Microsoft officials did note that Silverlight would continue to be supported for ten years, back when version 5 was released to the Web in 2011. Since that time, Microsoft quietly rolled out version 5.1. Officials have repeatedly declined to say if there will be any more Silverlight releases beyond that. The rumor is no.
Update (December 21); Microsoft has fixed the broken links, as of the evening of December 20, officials said.
From a spokesperson: "Each of the 100,000 Silverlight.net forum threads are now redirecting to their new thread locations on MSDN."