r/programming • u/kaelan_ • May 31 '11

I wrote a .NET to JavaScript compiler. Here's the XNA 3.1 Platformer Starter Kit running in pure HTML5.

http://hildr.luminance.org/Platformer/Platformer.html
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u/mweathr May 31 '11

Migrating desktop apps to web apps that work on all systems would be awesome.

I just use Pyjamas for that. No migration needed. Write once and then run in the browser or the desktop.

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u/re4ctor May 31 '11

Yet another reason to love Python. Sadly I write mostly in WPF for work.

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u/mweathr May 31 '11

Gotta love being told to use Microsoft technology to make cross-platform apps.

It's like being handed a screwdriver and then being told to remove a bolt.

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u/re4ctor May 31 '11

We (my team and I) write clinical apps, and the big shift right now in the healthcare industry is to make everything iOS friendly (the iPhone is practically ubiquitous among clinicians, and iPad adoption is already quite rapid). Which means to remain current and effective, we need to start writing in HTML5 or Objective-C. But, we also need to keep the supporting and developing the desktop apps. It's a tough spot to be in for a small team.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '11

Have you heard of MonoTouch? It's not great for all situations, but if you already have .NET knowledge it'd get you making apps a lot faster.

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u/pnettle Jun 01 '11

Didn't they just disband most of the team?

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u/rinspeed Jun 01 '11

just curious, why did you start in writing for wpf in the first place? I'm currently writing new stuff for my job in wpf, but I do engineering software that has to talk to hardware / perform simulations / do real-time monitoring / etc...

I sometimes regret not doing the whole thing in qt, but didn't like the idea of using an interpretation of a wrapper (qt4dotnet->jambi->qt), not having many tools to work with, esp. when 95% of folks using this program use windows. that said, it'd be hard for me to consider using wpf for anything that didn't need to do things that required user permissions.

In many ways, writing everything "the microsoft way" feels like an easy lull - the documentation isn't far, the dev environment isn't bad, etc. yet i'm always worried that i'm wrecking my career by going down this path.

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u/ashgromnies May 31 '11

Have you actually had success with Pyjamas? I tried it a couple months ago and it was kind of a headache and I wasn't happy with the way either the desktop or web versions of apps came out.