…sounds like an argument for MSDos circa 1995.

Hey! Didn’t they have a high penetration too?

Im sure they know what happened with Microsoft FronPage,, or may be they do not even know that program .
So… The history repeats. “FrontPage vs. dreamwaver” and now “SilverLight vs. Flash” …..
Please .. Do you think someone will drop Flash to star using SilverLight ? Lol and now that Adobe owns it??
If Microsoft could not fight ageins Micromedia the fight will be worse if they try ageins Adobe..
We are talking about all the brains from Micromedia and Adobe together !! They are the masters of Animation,graphics and Design !! They own the ground ..What do you thing Microsoft uses to design ther icons,logos and their interface? Hoo! let me answer my own question.. Windows Paintbrush..
They not even have a clue what what peoples like .. They have to still someones design and try to fellow MAC and Firefox designs in order to be in the 2008 fashion Lol.
Old f****g icons fro the 1900`s they never change.. they were forced to change the interface because MAC was so far at front with design interface and peaples like shit like that. That is what peoples buy,, Beautiful Designs, nice logos, animation and all this crap !!.
That is way youtube is so popular ,,BUT look now what is happening with Vista.. Peaples are not happy with it. From every 100 that buy computers with Vista they end up formating the HD and Installing XP .. So all the work stealing designs from other companies is wort it ?

PLEASE !! Microsoft keap working with OS security and programation afther you get good in those thing you can try tho work in the animation and graphics world.. There are another companies that are gooooood on it.. They do not need halp!! You need help from them..

Microsoft is a terrific opponent to have, just look at what happened with Xbox in the last few years. When it came out, Playstation was just about everything where gaming consoles are concerned. Several years later and it is struggling (not that it’s doing bad, it just has a big rival to compete with).

One good thing about being built on top of .NET is that you get some (read: a lot of) really advanced coding tools, such as Visual Studio to begin with. C# is one of the most progressive languages of this time, and a lot of work is being put into both C# and .NET, adding more features and coding convenience with each new release. This works really well for getting the developer support as there are a lot of people using these tools.

It’s still too early to tell, but I think Silverlight has a bright future waiting, and Adobe is facing a great struggle ahead. Prepare for the new War Of The Titans….

“Silverlight is a lot more powerful and has features built in where flash relies on other peoples code.”

Huh? I write all my own code holmes.

So because it’s integrated with VS, its more technologically advanced? What an arrogant M$ evangelic statment. Have you ever looked at Actionscript – ever heard of it? You know there is a strongly-typed OOP language that goes with Flash? How about ECMA – ever heard of that?

You sound al little mislead there yourself DJ.

Integration with your platform of choice doesn’t make it more technically advanced silly.

A 10 year head start now on the other hand, does make one technology more advanced than the other wouldnt you say?

BTW, What design tools do you use to make your layouts DJ?

Or do you rely on design from “other people” yourself?

What exactly with your SilverFish application look like when you have no creative skill man? Is VB gonna save you there? No, of course not.

So you reiterate, you calling Silverlight (Public beta) more technologically advanced that Flash/Actionscript that has been around longer than your whole career – is simply an ignorant statement from someone who obviously has been caught making unqualified statements in the public domain.

Have a seat DJ.., you are making a fool of yourself.
My condolences.

In closing – here is a short list of what your technically superior Silverlight CANT do, that the inferior Flash CAN DO:

sound processing

binary data exchange

sockets

per pixel bitmap editing

bitmap filters (convolution, color matrix etc)

bitmap effects (drop shadow, blur, glow)

frame based animation (i.e. hand made)

webcam

microphone

text input

e4x

built in file upload/download

user controls

layout engine

local data storage

linux player

express install (through player)

BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY for 10 years so far! 1.1meg footprint

KEEP DREAMING!

Nice post. I had heard of silverlight but only today I got to see examples of the same.The applications are quite cool but I totally agree with you on the point that the application lack smoothness when compared to flash/flex application.
I used the ‘journal’ application of silverlight too…If someone happens to use it … just notice the eraser.It is not properly all synched with the mouse movements you make.
It just roughly erases the part of the picture you intend to and its neighbour hood too…

Can you point to an example that you think is more apt and proves your claim? …. Or maybe elaborate on why you think SilverLight is more advanced

By the way,let us not forget Microsoft’s greatest tool against all its competitors – BRILLANT MARKETING. Even if the technology is weak, they have a brilliant marketing strategy in place. And, in today’s information driven world that’s damn important.

I think only time will tell whether 10 years from now we’ll be working on Flash or Silverlight!

Nate …. but I will still have to agree to Anupam on the lack of innovativeness …just take the name for example .. SilverLight??? … isn’t a flash a silver light …. oh no no wait .. SilverLight is not Flash …

… maybe this is some marketing tactic that i don’t understand .. I wonder

Maybe I wrote it wrong above, but I was saying that flex book loses performance when the complexity increases. Maybe the MS book’s image is higher quality than the flex book anatomy example.

Anupam- the MS silverlight book came out many months before Ely’s flex book. Before both of them people have made books like these in pure flash. It was just very hard to do. Both silverlight and flex reduces the complexity of making these apps.

First off, I’m not trashing SilverLight … as I said above “Microsoft is doing a good job with it, but it has a long way to go before it reaches where Flash is today” … so all I’m doing is shelving it until further releases, because in the current state they are not upto my mark.

The point you make about FlexBook’s (Flash’s) performance is intriguing … are you saying that when we increase complexity in your environment PageTurn looks and feels better that FlexBook? I would love to know more about this.

However, FlexBook – PageTurn is just one example that I used to make my point that Flex is a better product today. There are other examples that I have looked at and those too feel like lower beings when compared to Flex based equivalents.

I totally agree that SiverLight does empower a wider range of developers with the ability to create RIAs and that is good for everyone as that brings us closer to the day when Richness in Internet applications will be a norm and not something us RIA zealots have to market.

All I’m trying to say here is people like you and me who have a choice would use Flex/Flash for now as it is better technology.

But both apps look the same to me. I agree that Ely was more skilled than the MS developer and it feels a lot better. I am however using flexbook at my company in a production environment. When the book takes up a larger space and has more complex children it has the same lower fps and clips that the silverlight one does (actually a lot lower).

It’s funny, there are all these blogs trashing silverlight because it doesn’t measure up feature to feature with flash (which it doesn’t). But the power is for the million + .NET developers, they can now have a tightly integrated way to do RIA now.

No one at my company knew what flex was until i started using it. Many people, even the execs, have herd of WPF/e.

Plus as far as distribution goes, Microsoft just needs to put it in a windows update and they will have a large market penetration.

btw, i started coding in flex because i tried to do wpf/e and got frustrated (im a .NET developer). I found the expressions tools to be unintuitive. I looked around and found flex. I love love love it. Now all I use .NET for is the data access layer. Expressions was alpha when I used it though.

Anyways, that was a rant.

-Nate