Silverlight and DevExpress Universal v15.1

You may have noticed something peculiar once you’d installed v15.1: no Silverlight controls came as a part of the product and hence were no longer present on your machine. Wait, what?

Back in December 2014, at the time of the v14.2 release, I announced that we were no longer going to update and enhance the Silverlight controls (Silverlight’s future at DevExpress). I’ll quote the relevant summary:

…we made the decision to put our Silverlight controls into maintenance mode as well – in fact, we have already forked the code. We will not be providing any new functionality for our Silverlight controls but will provide maintenance updates to fix any issues as and when necessary. We have already stopped selling DevExpress Silverlight as a separate product (either as a new subscription or as a maintenance subscription) and it is now only available as part of DXperience or Universal.

However, we then made a pretty big faux pas: we removed the controls completely from our products in v15.1, despite our promise to keep it available with DXperience and Universal subscriptions, and despite the fact that we made no announcement of such an action being contemplated, let alone made. The decision was made internally, but the fact that it was a breaking change and an action that required an announcement escaped everyone.

Without further ado, I apologize to our Silverlight customers on behalf of DevExpress for this uncharacteristic oversight. We deeply regret this failure in communication.

So what’s going to happen at DevExpress with regard to Silverlight now?

1. If you have one or more Silverlight apps using our controls that you are maintaining, you will have to remain on v14.2. Possibly this might mean a separate development machine or VM. We do not plan to add the Silverlight suite back to v15.1.
2. We shall continue to provide support and minor updates to our Silverlight controls until next June, when we release v16.1. In fact, let me be a little more precise: we will continue to update DevExpress Silverlight v14.2 with minor releases as and when needed, up to and including 30 June 2016. In essence, if you are an active customer, you will receive support and any updates we publish until that date.
3. After that, that’s it. No more Silverlight. Now, should Microsoft subsequently make some breaking change to Silverlight (which, admittedly, is very unlikely – they’ve just done very minor updates for the last three plus years and the API can be considered as frozen), we shall revisit this policy, perhaps by making a hotfix available to repair whatever issue was brought up by Microsoft’s change. I will not, however, guarantee this.

My recommendation, then? You should strongly consider moving or porting your Silverlight projects to another platform well before the next twelve months are up.

By the way, I shall be making some efforts to ensure that such a situation does not occur again; that you, our customers, are informed well in advance of major changes like this that will affect your development and projects. Your loyalty and satisfaction are of great importance to us.

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