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Should we be supporting Silverlight?

Should we be supporting Silverlight?

Since Microsoft announced the end-of-life for Silverlight in 2012, support for this platform has waned. We are still supporting Silverlight for a number of reasons, but we want to hear from you what you think about this platform, and whether we should continue supporting it after the next major version (v4) of SciChart.

Please take 5 minutes to answer our short survey on whether we should continue to support Silverlight: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/K6ZV3MF

What are the benefits of supporting Silverlight?

  • We have a Silverlight demo at www.scichart.com/demo which is identical in features to the WPF version
  • The Silverlight demo is a valuable pre-sales tool and can be shown to managers, purchasers and stakeholders without downloading the SciChart trial.
  • It is also a valuable support tool, we often refer to the Silverlight demo in forum posts and support emails.
  • We do have some (but very few) Silverlight customers.
  • Keeping our code Silverlight compatible might make it easier to port to Universal Windows Platform (UWP10).

What are the drawbacks of supporting Silverlight?

  • The Silverlight platform is buggy, and when we develop features, particularly new features, we often have to do twice as much work to ensure it works on Silverlight.
  • Supporting Silverlight means our progress is slower on WPF.
  • In the future, many planned features require DirectX hardware acceleration, which will not be available on Silverlight
  • Several browsers no longer support Silverlight, such as Chrome, Edge (Windows 10 browser). Only Firefox and IE<11 remain.
  • Silverlight is slower than WPF, we actually give SciChart performance a bad name by demonstrating it in Silverlight.

So what do you think?

Should we continue to support Silverlight after the next major version of SciChart? We propose to keep v3.x but in v4.x to phase our support for the Silverlight version of SciChart and the Silverlight demo, replacing it with a trial download for the WPF demo, depending on what you answer in our questions.

Please take 5 minutes to answer this short survey! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/K6ZV3MF

By Andrew Burnett-Thompson | Aug 08, 2015
CEO / Founder of SciChart. Masters (MEng) and PhD in Electronics & Signal Processing.Follow me on LinkedIn for more SciChart content, or twitter at @drandrewbt.

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