by John Browne, on Aug 26, 2020 5:30:00 AM
It's no secret that Microsoft has dumped Silverlight like last week's leftover catfish. As of Oct. 12, 2021, there is no further support for Silverlight, which today is confined to running only in IE 11. After end of vendor support, any security vulnerabilities that "pop up" won't have any vendor fixes.
Good luck with that.
So what are you going to do? Well, Progress Software (those wonderful folks who bring you KendoUI controls) and us (i.e. Mobilize.Net) got together recently for a full day of "how to get off Silverlight." With the help of Alyssa Nicoll, Sam Basu, and others, we showed how to convert/migrate/rewrite those SIlverlight apps into Blazor, Maui, Angular and more.
Specifically, I got called in to show how our automated migration software can take the Silverlight front end web code (XAML plus C#) and convert that to Angular on top of KendoUI controls, keeping the client side processing in Typescript. I showed the conversion (before and after) and Alyssa took the Angular code along with some HTML and CSS and did a preliminary clean up to get things nice and tidy.
The whole video--less some dead time left on the cutting room floor, as they say--you can watch here. For a shorter (and funnier) intro, check out the trailer here.
What we showed off (as of this writing) is still a work in progress, but we're already using the tooling internally for a customer project. Some of the problems recreating C# features in Typescript pose interesting challenges for our development team: for example, how to recreate generic types in Typescript. I look forward to getting some more detailed content about these issues--as well as how we are addressing them--in this space in the near future. In the meantime, if you have some Silverlight you want to get rid of, check out the full video for all the different possible conversions, ours for just the Silverlight to Angular part, or just drop me a line.
