Should I need a reason to hate Apple, it would be censorship.
This is not the first time Apple censors an application on the iPhone, but this time it's scarier.
They censor software, and they censor books. Are users of iPhones and Apple products fully aware of such things? As consumers, you have the power to react.
This is also ridiculous. As wondered in the original blog post, how is that different from using the built-in browser of the iPhone to access the same public content?
The first version of the New York Times Reader was showcased in 2006 as one of the first and major WPF applications. Then, the Times Reader was ported to Silverlight, so it can work on non-Windows platforms such as Mac OS and Linux. The fact that WPF runs only on Windows was indeed a major concern for such a product.
The move to Silverlight was not a big success. The Silverlight version of the Times Reader suffered from technical issues and political rejection from Apple users.
There were hundreds of comments on the homepage of the Silverlight version. Roughtly half of them where related to technical problems, half to rejection. Many Apple users don't want to use Microsoft products.
Technical issues can be solved (over time), but solving rejection is another story (and I don't think it can be solved).
Version 2.0 of the Times Reader has been released recently, and what is interesting is that WPF and Silverlight have been dropped in favor of Adobe AIR.
No more political issues, a single code base, and less technical issues it seems.
This is a very interesting move. In fact, when I had to choose a technology for a new product a couple of months ago, I chose AIR too. As a .NET expert, I have of course considered WPF and Silverlight, but I had the same concerns as the New York Times.
A requirement was that the product should run on major platforms (Windows AND Mac at least), and even if Silverlight works on Macs, it was not a good choice for the same technical and political issues that the Times Reader faced. One big showstopper was the inability to create standalone desktop applications with Silverlight. It should be noted that Silverlight 3's out-of-browser mode won't be an answer to this because of its intrinsic limitations. AIR is much more powerful, with deeper desktop integration (such as file system access).
It will be interesting to follow what will happen over time, but in my book, Flash/Flex and AIR have a lot of advantages right now compared to WPF and Silverlight.
I believe also that the battle is not only on the Web and the desktop, but also on mobile devices. Something tells me that we'll see Flash on Android, iPhone and Pre before Silverlight. And that will make a big difference.
More about the new version of the Times Reader here, here and here.
Update: Here is the post that announced the original version for the Mac, based on Silverlight. I read a few months ago the comments made on this post. Have a look, it's very instructive. Oh of course, silly people posted comments there too...
Eric Lippert, whose blog you shouldn't miss, adds his own arguments to the debate about whether using a ForEach extension method instead of foreach is a good idea or a bad one.
I don't see a definitive answer to the question. All the arguments given here and elsewhere are good, but in the end, it's up to you to decide what you prefer to do.
Read the posts and the comments to make up your own mind.
Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net
After English, German and Spanish, LINQ in Action is now available em Português.
The title is LINQ em Ação. The publisher is Editora Ciência Moderna.
Cross-posted from http://linqinaction.net
Does your Visual Studio 2008 SP1 crash when you open some XAML files? It started to happen to me, for some unknown reason.
What I saw was Visual Studio completely disappearing after opening a XAML file, with the devenv.exe process being unloaded. The only traces of this kind of crash were error events in the Windows Event Viewer: ".NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A035E00) (80131506)".
Luckily, a fix for this issue has been published by Microsoft. It looks like everything is back in order now.
Finally, back to productivity thanks to this hotfix and the tip I published some time ago!