Niko Neugebauer is happy about an update to Master Data Services in SQL Server 2019:
Before we continue, let me ask you one question, have you heard about Silverlight?
Or in other words, and with a kind of evil voice “DID YOU EVER INSTALLED SILVERLIGHT ON A PRODUCTION SERVER”?.
If you have worked with MDS oh yes, you did! At least in order to check if everything is configured/upgraded correctly and nothing is broke, I will do a wild guess and claim that you did! So am I … :sBecause in order to make things work in MDS correctly, one needs this old, for a very long time deprecated framework, that is supported only in deprecated browser that is called Internet Explorer v.11, and that pain-in-the-neck framework is called Silverlight and if you dare to work with any SQL Server versions before SQL Server 2019, the picture on the left will appear in front of you at the moment you will try to explore the master data in the MDS Explorer – ensuring that unless you install a totally abandoned (and obviously unnecessary product, that represents another risk on your server) is a necessary thing. That is alone is the reason for some people would use some development VM in order to work with MDS, but that is not a good excuse to include that product in SQL Server 2016 or in SQL Server 2017.
The interface still has problems, as Niko points out, but hopefully this is the first step and not the last one.