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Looking back on Microsoft's BUILD conference and everything that came out of it, I'm not sure what direction I'm supposed to take as a developer? If I understood it right MS is putting HTML5 before WPF, Silverlight and Flash, and there's also talk about WinRT and Metro UI.

I'm going to buy a couple of courses in the winter but I'm not sure what to choose?

I KNOW
WinForms
MVC3
LINQ
CSS2
jQuery
json

LEARNING
HTML5
CSS3

What else?

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closed as not constructive by ChrisF♦ Sep 19 '11 at 9:48

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3 Answers

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IMHO there is still a great future for the .NET platform. Microsoft has been investing in it and improving it in the last ten years, there is a great mass of developers who master it already and it would be suicidal to abandon it now. Not to mention that Windows 7 and Vista (and I dare to say XP too) will still be around for quite a while.

As for what to learn, I would recommend Silverlight (if only because it is the native platform for Windows Phone 7) and also WPF (since it is very similar to Silverlight and I see that you have experience on Winforms already).

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This is what they wrote on their blog: For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible. HTML5 will also be more cross-browser friendly and Win8 will be the main OS on all Microsoft products, right? – Niklas Sep 19 '11 at 9:05
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I would suggest holding off on learning Silverlight just now, as it's future looks far from certain. Right now it sounds as if Silverlight will be abandoned in favour of HTML5. I would suggest learning WPF, and waiting a while to see exactly what microsofts intentions are regarding WinRT / Silverlight. – Gavin Coates Sep 19 '11 at 9:48
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Microsoft has clarified that Win 8 will support all the applications build for Windows 7. From that i can say, that neither the .NET or WPF is going anywhere. As far as the Flash is concerned, Microsoft is fishing that out, by integrating HTML5 in the new browsers for the Windows 8 but will still support the Silverlight Content.

So, you can enhance your learning by moving onto WPF from Windows Form and taking a leash out of Silverlight book.

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As I understood the keynote slides, HTML5 with Javascript stands side by side with XAML with C#/VB. It is not a degration of .NET rather than a new profile that targets Metro style applications. HTML5 and Javascript is one more option you get doing this on the client.

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