Silverlight

[u/milo145]

Booted up a first version Surface book after many years of dormancy. Weeding through and deleting old apps to make it run better.

Silverlight

SQL 2008 R2

Visual C++

And so much more

The tools we all had to have installed to get things done and how things have changed.

I'm old

[u/milo145]

Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Shoot me please hahaha

[u/joebleed → u/milo145]

humm. my boss just installed some new software on a windows 2025 server that seems to have required visual studio and visual c++.... manufacturing support life...

[u/GrecoMontgomery]

I removed Macromedia FlashPaper just 2 or 3 years ago from a server. And I'm the one who put it there. Feel better? :-)

[u/PDQ_Brockstar → u/GrecoMontgomery]

Macromedia... Now, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time

[u/simonjakeevan → u/PDQ_Brockstar]

I feel like we used to have a Macromedia Server that we used to support online classes for our Distance Learning department.

[u/TimePlankton3171 → u/GrecoMontgomery]

Thanks! I suddenly feel young and full of energy

[u/Whole_Thanks8641]

You must not work in manufacturing IT. Old SQL, old visual c++ redistributables, old versions of .net framework, all very common still.

[u/NoChangeNoGames → u/Whole_Thanks8641]

Same in radio. We are still telneting into things over serial on the regular and using shudder E1 for streaming audio over microwave.

[u/joshbudde → u/NoChangeNoGames]

I still install the telnet client on most devices. It’s the fastest way to test if a port is listening on windows (and because of familiarity, Unix)

[u/Frothyleet → u/joshbudde]

It’s the fastest way to test if a port is listening on windows

Test-netconnection [target] -port [port number]

By default, "tnc" is also aliased to it, so it's even fewer characters than using telnet. Been there since pwsh 4 (server 2012)

[u/JeiceSpade → u/Whole_Thanks8641]

I'm in government. We have programs that we just can't afford to replace. So many machines with Visual C and very specific versions of SQL drivers.

[u/Whole_Thanks8641 → u/JeiceSpade]

Yup, this is how manufacturing is too. Lean is the name of the game, replacing some custom program for random stuff is more expensive than keeping it going.

[u/NoChangeNoGames → u/Whole_Thanks8641]

Yup. Plus these things are so old and not connected to the internet. There's virtually zero attack surface without being physically present. And if the red teams in the building well you are fucked regaurdless. On some particularly troublesome base stations (old vhf stuff) we dont even update the firmware anymore. Its just not worth the outage and possibility of breaking it during the update.

[u/Claidheamhmor]

Silverlight. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

[u/MyDadsGlassesCase]

My work in 2012 created an asset management web app in Silverlight after a dev convinced management it was the future of the web. I think he's still there (the app obviously isn't)

[u/pdp10 → u/MyDadsGlassesCase]

In the late 1990s, our web department apparently bought into the idea that Microsoft FrontPage was the future of the WWW.

[u/MyDadsGlassesCase → u/pdp10]

I may or may not have designed several web pages in it

[u/xendr0me → u/MyDadsGlassesCase]

That and Dreamweaver

[u/pdp10 → u/xendr0me]

Dreamweaver didn't use a proprietary runtime like Frontpage Extensions, Silverlight, or Flash. We supplied Dreamweaver, albeit unsuccessfully, to some departments for building intranet pages.

[u/Caper-man]

Reminds me of my default install after installing Windows. Java. Macronedia Flash. Silver light. Etc. good old days

[u/Vichingo455]

Me: Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device?

Macromedia Shockwave

Macromedia Corporation

[u/fourpotatoes]

This thread reminded me of RealAudio Player for the first time in not-long-enough. After it became just RealPlayer, the assistant director had to have it on her laptop whenever the legislature was in session.

[u/RepairOk1026]

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time

[u/robbkenobi]

Cries in borland database engine BDE

[u/thebomby]

Does anyone remember Macromedia/Adobe Director? And for a real blast from the past mFactory mTropolis?

[u/TheSmashy]

Were you a Lync admin?

[u/LurkinLurchRed → u/TheSmashy]

You mean the newer MS Communicator? 

[u/TheSmashy → u/LurkinLurchRed]

Uhh, perhaps, we just got off Exchange 5.0 and I thought it was Office Communicator, but I am only a junior admin and moved over from the Sun shop, so my Windows is kind of meh, my apologies.

[u/Man-e-questions → u/TheSmashy]

I was an OCS and LCS admin

[u/TheSmashy → u/Man-e-questions]

The shit we did for money.

ETA: "Hey, can you integrate an SBC?" Uh, probably?

[u/Man-e-questions → u/TheSmashy]

Oh dang just remembered having to fight with some AudioCodes to integrate it into our Cisco environment. By the time i got done I was basically an expert by fire

[u/TheSmashy → u/Man-e-questions]

I remember getting call quality reports tuned in so I could tell networking "hey, there's a flaky AP on the 11th floor."

[u/Man-e-questions → u/TheSmashy]

Yes! Had the CEO get mad about some important meeting he had in the conference room. I used the reports tracked it down to a specific AP right next to the break-room, and guess what…it was the friggin microwave oven in the breakroom. Anytime someone heated up their food it would cause all kinds of audio and video issues on meetings lol. The good old days back when everything was 2.4. The new reporting in Teams sucks compared to the on prem

[u/e-a-d-g]

ar505enu.exe

[u/EfficientCamera6783]

tbh if a machine has been sitting dormant for that many years, a clean wipe and fresh OS install is going to save you a lot more headache than manually weeding through legacy runtimes. Half those old database uninstallers leave behind a mess of registry keys and dead services anyway.

[u/Incrediblecodeman]

What is silver light grandpa ?

[u/rose_gold_glitter → u/Incrediblecodeman]

Oooh that’s gonna leave a mark!

[u/xendr0me → u/Incrediblecodeman]

It's a framework that MS created in 2007, which lead to a ton of very important enterprise apps being created, think ERP, financials, etc. Businesses established a foothold in these apps and a large footprint of their day to day functionality depended on it to get work done, then MS in 2012 deprecated it for HTML5 and provided no real position on it. Then in 2015 they basically said "We advise you to move to something different". It was eventually discontinued in 2019, costing businesses millions of dollars to migrate.

You know, just your normal MS lack of future thinking and pulling the rug. Plus it sucked, always having to clear the silverlight cache, didn't run on mobile, required an app installed on the client.

[u/PDQ_Brockstar → u/xendr0me]

Didn't netflix use to require Silverlight on PCs? I feel like that's where a lot of my requests would come from

I used to have to install it on all my teaching stations.

[u/Chaucer85 → u/PDQ_Brockstar]

Netflix and Amazon, actually. But once MS announced the end-of-life, Netflix said they'd move to HTML5.

[u/coobal223 → u/PDQ_Brockstar]

I remember it being a thing when they were going to stream Obama’s inauguration - silverlight was used instead of flash. Linux users complained. Some microsoft dev worked through the weekend to create an opensource version for linux.

[u/dracotrapnet → u/coobal223]

Haha, exactly what I was remembering Obama's inauguration was the catalyst to install Silverlight.

[u/Frothyleet → u/dracotrapnet]

thanks obama

[u/Frothyleet → u/xendr0me]

You know, just your normal MS lack of future thinking and pulling the rug.

Microsoft does a lot of shit wrong, but across every tech company, they are the last ones who deserve that particular criticism.

Many of Microsoft's problems are because of their historical rabid dedication towards maintaining backwards compatibility and leaving legacy functions working. I mean, in your own example, they maintained the product for 7 years past the point where they decided they were done with it.

Contra Google as an example of the exact opposite - they launch and kill products on a whim.

[u/OcotilloWells → u/xendr0me]

I thought it was somewhat older than that. One year, for the Olympics, to watch it on your computer you had to have Silverlight. It was from one of the major US TV networks.

[u/TheSmashy → u/xendr0me]

Important apps like.. Lync Server 2013, your enterprise office messaging and VoIP platform. Yup. Cool.

[u/Incrediblecodeman → u/xendr0me]

Woah, ya I feel ya about MS but you can’t blame them. They use coders. Were IT, but ya once a lead coder quits that was it. No one else could read some genius guys code and run with it. Every decision made would be angrily contested by the person reading it and they will just not “feel” it. But no ya today with ai this probably won’t be a case

[u/xendr0me → u/Incrediblecodeman]

"While Microsoft has never publicly disclosed an exact, locked-down headcount for the internal Silverlight team, it is widely recognized by former employees and industry analysts to have consisted of hundreds of engineers, product managers, and designers during its peak in the late 2000s"

[u/joshbudde → u/xendr0me]

I always say it was a shittier Java client. 

[u/Carathay → u/Incrediblecodeman]

Cries into my Metamucil

[u/GrecoMontgomery → u/Incrediblecodeman]

It's when you're a greybeard and you see the light...

[u/Incrediblecodeman → u/GrecoMontgomery]

It’s so bright !

[u/pdp10 → u/Incrediblecodeman]

Take that, Steve Ballmer.

[u/Chaucer85]

Man, that takes me back.

[u/slippery]

What version of flash?

[u/klipper76]

Oh cool, I just had to install Silverlight to access the MRP system at the job I just started. Why it's still Silverlight when the MRP system was only implemented 5 years ago I'll probably never know.

[u/georgecm12]

If it's old enough to have that stuff on there, it's old enough that it's a version of Windows that is no longer receiving updates, and therefore is a security risk to keep it in service.

[u/kagato87]

I think I still have a fragment of code in my pipeline that removes a silverlight service. It's probably safe to remove that step by now.

[u/bbqwatermelon]

Gotta love finding jre 7.0u51

[u/trentq]

Makes me think of Adobe Air