How Silverlight Will Change the Way We Build Applications

Comments

# Joe Chung said on January 10, 2008 12:49 AM:

How is Flex not an application development platform along the same lines, only on a more heavily adopted, mature environment (Flash)?

I agree that .NET makes Silverlight attractive to developers, especially those coming from the Windows world, but I don't see the appeal to designers who have years of practical experience with Adobe designer tools.

# Jesse Ezell said on January 10, 2008 01:30 AM:

IMO, the Silverlight 2.0 model is far superior to Flex for application development.  On the other hand, Flash for rich media still has a bit of an edge, with things like alpha channels on video and real time image processing filters.

Microsoft doesn't really have to appeal to designers with years of experience with Adobe tools. There are a lot of developers outside of that sandbox that have years of experience with Microsoft tools that count for absolutely nothing in the Adobe world. Silverlight is for those guys... and there is a hell of a lot more of those guys than there are in the Adobe camp, seeing that the vast majority of applications on the market and in corp. IT depatments are built using Microsoft's tools, not Adobe's tools.

# Cyril Gupta said on January 10, 2008 02:01 AM:

Silverlight must evolve from the present to be a competition to flash. I tried to work on Silverlight when it was freshly introduced, some of the work is really pathbreaking, but I find it irritating that Silverlight 1.0 does not work with .Net, and Silverlight 1.1, is not commercially released.

I want a tool that gives me the .Net capabilities and can be put into production now. But I do know that eventually I will be using Silverlight (or WPF) for my apps. I think that time's going to be in the second half of the year. Only after Microsoft releases Silverlight 2.0 with everything working.

# Jason Clark said on January 10, 2008 07:50 AM:

Flex an application development platform?  Come now...   Adobe and Macromedia have some successful product lines, no question there.   The designer tools, even Dreamweaver are market leaders.   However, neither Adobe/Macromedia has ever really succeeded in creating a development platform that mass amounts of developers want to use.  

Look at ColdFusion, fantastic platform for throwing together quick and dirty intranet apps, but it isn't in the same space as native J2EE or .NET (yes I know that underneath ColdFusion is Java, I’m talking about the language).  

Now, look at Flash, which has spent most of its life animating ads, that drive most of us nuts.   Flex comes along, but in its first couple of versions the IDE was absolutely terrible.   Debugging barely worked, and connecting to anything other than a CF / Java web service was like running the Boston marathon with both legs tied together.  

Microsoft on the other hand, has always catered to the developer.  They spend every waking minute marketing and producing developer tools and peddling their wares.    Microsoft gets developers, and that is the key to any developer focused technology.    

# Quentin said on January 10, 2008 10:42 AM:

Flex is as much an app dev platform as Silverlight.  Right tool for the job, and although it is not as widespread as .NET tools are, it is picking up momentum all the time.  Competition is good for the market, you shouldn't want one to win over the other, then you get stagnant products, and no one wins, and no one innovates.  Again, right tool for the job, neither will ever cover everything.

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