>>According to tweets I read from this week's PDC, it appears to be alive and well. VS is now using it extensively. Expression Blend was also written with it. Other expression products use a combination of WPF and native C++
>>
>> >Hello,
>>>
>>>Do you have any information about the future of WPF?
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>
>>>TFISHER
>
>So does anyone know what Microsoft's strategy is for software developers?
>
>I'm supposed to take their exam 70-515 "Web Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4" to keep up my Partner qualifications. The exam prep concentrates on telling you that everything you used in ASP.NET was wrong - now you're supposed to go completely client side with MVC and JSON and other drivel in order to make development far more difficult.
>
>Basically what that says to me is that Microsoft is abandoning ASP.NET while trying to act like it isn't.
>
>Now they are demoting silverlight (the wonder technology buzz of the last couple of years). I was just starting to build some apps in Silverlight (complete PITA but that was supposed to be the future).
>
>I'm real close to telling Microsoft to shove it, dropping our Certified Partner status, and heading for something more stable like Java or Perl or something.

Funny, I actually woke up in the middle of the night, and the first thought that came to my awaken mind was:"There must be a better way!" This endless vacillating is starting to get to me... If only there was a great and stable IDE for Python or Ruby, I'd probably start heading that direction right about now. I'm telling you, this MS's ADD behavior is really, REALLY starting to get on my nerves.

I recently had a lengthy discussion with anapparently bright, young MSoftie who had joined MS about a year ago specifically because MS appeared to be embracing open source. I asked him about IronRuby (and its demise at MS) and the light went out of the guy's eyes. He said he was extremely disappointed, and he will probably be looking for work elsewhere as a result. There it is again, Microsoft's ED strategy (no, I am talking about "Embrace-Discard" here, not the other ED -- although, come to think of it, in this case they both might well be clinically indicated and thus closely correlated <g>.)