Microsoft Graveyard: Microsoft’s missed opportunities with products that showed great promise but lacked proper execution

[Windows Central]

Microsoft Graveyard was recently launched to help users keep track of all deprecated Microsoft products and those set to hit their end-of-support date soon.

Microsoft Graveyard: Microsoft’s missed opportunities with products that showed great promise but lacked proper execution : Read more

 

[GothardJ2]

Wait, someone made a second one of these? Killed By Microsoft has been around for years, at least since this site was known as Windows Phone Central. I don't know who runs that one, but it is very similar to Killed by Google, so might be the same group.

 

[Jez Corden]

Wait, someone made a second one of these? Killed By Microsoft has been around for years, at least since this site was known as Windows Phone Central. I don't know who runs that one, but it is very similar to Killed by Google, so might be the same group.

mm first time i saw that, pretty cool.

 

[John McIlhinney]

I'm wondering why Xamarin is on that list. As far as I'm aware, .NET MAUI is an evolution and extension of Xamarin. I'm a .NET developer but I've never actually used either, but that's my understanding.

 

[TheFerrango]

I'm wondering why Xamarin is on that list. As far as I'm aware, .NET MAUI is an evolution and extension of Xamarin. I'm a .NET developer but I've never actually used either, but that's my understanding.

We developed a few mobile apps with Xamarin where I'm working, and migrating them to MAUI involves more or less a complete rewrite, save for a few libraries we managed to recycle

 

[John McIlhinney]

I'm wondering why Xamarin is on that list. As far as I'm aware, .NET MAUI is an evolution and extension of Xamarin. I'm a .NET developer but I've never actually used either, but that's my understanding.

OK, I did a bit more reading and, while it would be appropriate to call MAUI an evolution of Xamarin, it seems like they are still different enough to be considered to be completely separate entities so, from that perspective, Xamarin has been strictly killed off.

 

[John McIlhinney]

We developed a few mobile apps with Xamarin where I'm working, and migrating them to MAUI involves more or less a complete rewrite, save for a few libraries we managed to recycle

I haven't done a thorough investigation but what I'm reading seems to suggest that, if that's the case, there's something rather specific to your current project that is the reason for that. It sounds like there's a reasonable amount of rejigging required but rewriting large swathes of code doesn't sound like it should generally be required.

 

[bazanime]

Many dead horses were beaten for this nostalgic effort. RIP

 

[TheFerrango]

I haven't done a thorough investigation but what I'm reading seems to suggest that, if that's the case, there's something rather specific to your current project that is the reason for that. It sounds like there's a reasonable amount of rejigging required but rewriting large swathes of code doesn't sound like it should generally be required.

Yeah, it's akin to the migration from WP 7's Silverlight to WP 8.1's, mostly similar but different enough that you have to edit everything a little. We also used some MVVM framework we didn't want to bother with anymore, so we just ditched the thing convinced the client of the many benefits of the new tech and rewrote everything using the hybrid approach.

 

[Laxman Dhotre]

Who is the genius that is adding literal OS version in there? The product "Windows" is still alive. Ironically windows 10x isn't on list

 

[fdruid]

Some are definitely pretty silly, like saying they killed Xbox Live Gold when it's still a payment subscription neede to play online. And if that thing was killed for good, users wouldn't need to pay to play online and it would be a good thing.

 

[fdruid]

I'm wondering why Xamarin is on that list. As far as I'm aware, .NET MAUI is an evolution and extension of Xamarin. I'm a .NET developer but I've never actually used either, but that's my understanding.

Because while a lot of this are fair, this list is unnecessarily inflated.

 

[John McIlhinney]

Because while a lot of this are fair, this list is unnecessarily inflated.

I guess it depends how you interpret it. Every company stops developing aplications and technologies over time - it would be weird if they didn't - and if you just want to list all those then that seems a little uninteresting but, hey, whatever. It seems to me that, if you use words like "killed" or "graveyard" in the name, you're trying to convey a negative connotation. From that perspective, it certainly does eeem like this list is inflated. In the case of Xamairn, I would say that Microsoft have replaced it with something that plays the same role and also addresses some of the limitations of the existing tool. I believe that some of MAUI is even built directly on top of Xamarin Forms, but maybe I'm misunderstanding. To my mind, the word "killed" is an inaccurate characterisation of that.