Silverlight or Flash CS3

[Eibach]

So i was thinking about making a portfolio for my projects.

I have programmed in flash for a couple years now and i was wondering if maybe i should make a switch over to silver light to make my new portfolio..

I have not read up much about Silverlight so im open for anything.

thanks

 

[maw]

Microsoft is trying its darnest to push Silverlight, hell, you can't even go to their homepage without getting an annoying prompt to install it. Right now Flash has a HUGE lead in terms of installed base, but MS can simply roll Silverlight into the next version of IE or as a "critical update" and achieve instant market penetration. They could even start pushing it in development tools like VS.NET, or tightly integrate it in their Office/SharePoint products.

Ultimately, however, widespread adoption will depend on whether or not enough developers become interested enough to embrace Silverlight, the jury is still out on that one. I personally don't know any Flash developers who are excited about switching to Silverlight anytime soon.

 

[mikeblas]

Does Silverlight work on Mac or *nix? What about Flash?

 

[Eva_Unit_0]

Does Silverlight work on Mac or *nix? What about Flash?

It's supported on osx but the non-apple unices are left to fend for themselves. The open source project is called Moonlight, apparently it's making significant progress but is nowhere near ready yet.

As much as I hate adobe and flash, and as much as I would love for a decent replacement, I don't think that silverlight is it. At least adobe provides working plugins for linux. Shittily done plugins, but at least they make the effort.

 

[mikeblas]

Shittily done [...] but at least they make the effort.

LOL! How I long for the day when someone would give MSFT the benefit of the doubt like that.

 

[Eva_Unit_0]

LOL! How I long for the day when someone would give MSFT the benefit of the doubt like that.

well, if I have to pick between flash, which adobe provides a mediocre binary plugin for, or silverlight which microsoft doesn't even offer so much as a toolkit for linux devs to use, then I'm obviously going to pick flash. Lesser of two evils I think.

 

[Eibach]

thanks for the input, i think i will just stay with flash

 

[rgratto2]

So i was thinking about making a portfolio for my projects.

I have programmed in flash for a couple years now and i was wondering if maybe i should make a switch over to silver light to make my new portfolio..

I have not read up much about Silverlight so im open for anything.

thanks

Do you have any programming experience? The glory of Silverlight is that it is based off of the structure of WPF - you have an xml file that describes the user interface layout (the XAML file), and then a code-behind file that handles the actions for the form. The code-behind file can be written in any .NET language, such as C# or VB. Therefore, if you have any programming experience, it should be easy to pick up Silverlight.

It's supported on osx but the non-apple unices are left to fend for themselves. The open source project is called Moonlight, apparently it's making significant progress but is nowhere near ready yet.

As much as I hate adobe and flash, and as much as I would love for a decent replacement, I don't think that silverlight is it. At least adobe provides working plugins for linux. Shittily done plugins, but at least they make the effort.

I think theres some misinformation here. Moonlight fully supports Silverlight 1 at this time, and support for 2 (which is still in beta) is in the works. And, while not developing it directly, Microsoft is supporting it.

 

[Eva_Unit_0]

I think theres some misinformation here. Moonlight fully supports Silverlight 1 at this time, and support for 2 (which is still in beta) is in the works. And, while not developing it directly, Microsoft is supporting it.

There is no functional mozilla plugin, and isn't that the general idea silverlight, to be a flash-like system? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it seems like without a browser plugin it would be difficult to say moonlight works great.

 

[rgratto2]

There is no functional mozilla plugin, and isn't that the general idea silverlight, to be a flash-like system? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it seems like without a browser plugin it would be difficult to say moonlight works great.

I think you are mistaken. I think that silverlight (and moonlight) is a runtime, not a plugin. You install it to your system and it works in all browsers - I didn't have to install it for both IE and Firefox.

Moonlights site has some screenshots of it working in FF as well... I haven't personally used it with linux or anything, so I could surely be mistaken

 

[colinstu]

Pick mainstream and *almost* the standard... flash.

Can't stand installing plugins for weird sh*t. Keep it simple people!

 

[Arainach]

Linux support is coming for Silverlight, or so I've heard. Plus it's a LOT nicer to write apps for. I'd go with it.

 

[maw]

Linux support is coming for Silverlight, or so I've heard. Plus it's a LOT nicer to write apps for. I'd go with it.

Flex is also a damn nice platform to develop Flash applications on.

 

[rwt2006]

Flash and Flex are probably the way to go, Silverlight just feels like a flavor of the week kinda thing but it is really starting to pick up. Flash has some serious street cred though because of how long it's been around.

 

[Bigbacon]

Silverlight does integreate into vs2008 with expression Blends 2. You can create projects that can go across either product. You can manage the XAML files right in vs2008.

I am a programmer and I never used Flash, but I picked up Silverlight in about a week. If you know any other languages like VB or C# (I think you can use PHP as well) you can use it and build it all in the same development program. You can even use javascript if you want to. Heck I went from knowing nothing about it to writing a game show for work for our computer security week thing.

I think right now only intel based macs can use SL and it works across all the browsers I've used to test it including safari in windows.

 

[Eibach]

yeah i think i will switch over to silverlight only because i have been programming in C# for a while now and i think it would be easier to pump somthing out quick... anyway thanks for all the advice =)

 

[maw]

yeah i think i will switch over to silverlight only because i have been programming in C# for a while now and i think it would be easier to pump somthing out quick... anyway thanks for all the advice =)

well, it never hurts to keep on top of the latest technology, especially if it's easy to pick up.

 

[mikeblas]

well, it never hurts to keep on top of the latest technology,

It hurts if the technology is stillborn, or has low duration or penetration in the marketplace.

 

[calebb]

It hurts if the technology is stillborn, or has low duration or penetration in the marketplace.

On the other hand, lets look at Microsoft's track record:

DirectX - sucked compared to OpenGL on initial launch. When was the last game released that even supported OpenGL?

.NET - It sucked so bad when version 1.0 was released. There were so many promises and so many left unfulfilled. Simple tasks in other languages were 10x more difficult in .NET. IMO, .NET 2 changed everything. .NET adoption is very pervasive now.

XBOX - Not a language... but still - nobody thought it would last.

Microsoft has a lot of money in the bank. They are slow and methodical. They don't generally release stillborn products and they can continue to improve and push a product like Silverlight for a long time if necessary. (Bob was a small exception, but that was a long time ago. ME wasn't that bad if you actually used it / supported it)

 

[wildfire99]

... Silverlight just feels like a flavor of the week kinda thing but it is really starting to pick up.

Everything from Redmond is a flavor of the week, which is why I wouldn't do Silverlight. Sure it works now, but 2 years from now when they decide it's time for another revenue cycle, breaking your code is no big thing to them. Of course, if MS is the evil Sith Lord Emperor, Adobe is certainly a convincing Darth Vader.

DirectX - sucked compared to OpenGL on initial launch. When was the last game released that even supported OpenGL?

OpenGL killed itself with (IMO) piss-poor support for any new technology. Between its lackluster extension setup and the sibling bickering of AMD and nVidia breaking every code path every other quarter, who the heck would have wanted to deal with it all? Aside from that, OpenGL is still straightforward and way more enjoyable to use (again, IMO). It was of course very nice of Microsoft to sabotage OGL 1.5/2.0 on Windows, and that had nothing to do with DirectX I'm sure.

.NET is great but I still do not forgive MS for taking those technologies forward without flipping the bird to everyone who did NOT want to code in their proprietary system. There were a lot of great advantages to be had there, but again .NET was just a new revenue scheme and did nothing to enhance the user experience for legacy apps or cross-platform capable apps.

MS would be an amazing company.. I mean truly even more legendary than they are now, if they simply pushed user experience above revenue and monopolization. I mean for ***-sakes, how much more money do they need?

 

[calebb]

MS would be an amazing company.. I mean truly even more legendary than they are now, if they simply pushed user experience above revenue and monopolization. I mean for ***-sakes, how much more money do they need?

Any company that takes revenue out of the equation will not stay in business for long. (well.. non profits... but then there are plenty of problems with corruption/waste)

So not enough examples?

IE 2.0... it sucked, but MS kept improving it. Now compare IE4 with Netscape Navigator Gold 4.01. (both free products) Netscape sucked which is why people moved to IE.

Today at least there is a viable choice to IE: Firefox... but that's off topic.

My point is that MS isn't going to let Silverlight just die IMO.

 

[Arainach]

wildfire - Seriously? Find me one other company which has paid MORE attention to backwards compatibility than Microsoft. Yes, once in a while they can't afford to support previous design decisions forever and they have to do a reboot like Visual BASIC 6.0 -> .NET. But for the most part, there's still plenty of Windows application code out there that will, with minimal changes, compile 15-20 years after it was written. That's certainly not true of Mac or Linux.

 

[wildfire99]

Seriously? Find me one other company which has paid MORE attention to backwards compatibility than Microsoft.

Yes I know, I have a bit of a double standard about that, and I didn't want to threadjack by going into detail. To me, it's not so much the idea that technology moves on (as I followed from DOS/VESA to WinG to DirectX to GDI+ and Direct3D), but that we're increasingly being manipulated into newer MS technology when something else comes down the pipe just to have a refresh. Vista is probably the biggest and easiest example of this. "Don't like it? Suck it. We're not selling you XP anymore."

All my legacy Win32 code compiles flawlessly, something I cannot say equally about some legacy MFC code and a couple early C++/CLI efforts. I know for a fact that MS has serious backwards-compatibility concerns and they take literally herculean steps to ensure stuff works, it isn't my problem. My problem is when they break what the user expects just to make a few bucks. They harped hard on devs to standardize the UI, and when we all did, they went and said "screw you" with their Media Player interface and Office 2008's ribbon interface, just to name a couple. Of course, if I want to leverage any of their new stuff with legacy code, well I'm out of luck, even though there's no reason I couldn't. I hate having fifteen different wheels on the OS and its libraries, and not one of them actually spins completely around. Then, next year, we have Wheel .Net that spins around all the way but only if used with MS Wagon(tm).

I do trust them to not outright break my established, compiled code. I don't trust them to support my platform of choice for more than 12 months however, because by then it's .Net or Silverlight or WPF or DX10 or whatever the hell today's flavor is, and if you don't play along, you get to experience pain as they silently purge documentation and bundled libraries with the OS. If you have existing code then yes, it will work. But going forward, MS technologies are a moving target that exist only to make them more money, not enhance anyone's life, that's my opinion and my experience. .NET has hung around a lot longer than I thought it would, but that's probably because it's MS proprietary (their sneaky 'standard' claim or not). I'm just tired of trying to code around someone's biz model and not their actual API or technology. MS especially gets under my skin for this.

I'm not going to say that open source or Mac is better. Open source is schizophrenic, has subtle bugs, and is often documented poorly if at all (with only a few notable exceptions). Mac... well they have their own thing that is nearly as painful as following the MS upgrade train. I can pick on MS and have my double standard because they can literally afford to do better when it comes to not punishing their customers just to raise quarterly income another billion dollars. When something doesn't work just because some middle manager wanted to raise the cash dividend by a tenth of a percent, that is not cool. The only thing worse than being an MS-based developer must be being an MS employee.

Wow, that was verbose. So I'd vote for Flash simply because what you wrote yesterday will still work tomorrow and what you write tomorrow will not be jettisoned (I hope) in 2009 because Adobe wants to force you into buying their new dev package for AIR, or something like that. Adobe is evil but I've yet to complain that they broke my old files with something new, which pretty much is the case with every release of Visual Studio. With Adobe, the challenge is merely getting their POS apps to open and not crash.

 

[Arainach]

So basically you want MS to stagnate, release a single API, and then never change it forever. That means no ability to improve, no ability to fix their mistakes, and that is one giant failure of a business model. Thank god you're not in upper management in MS.

And for the record, you're the exception. MS gets considerably more complaints about people who find Win32 development awkward and want improved, cleaned libraries than people who want things to stagnate forever.

 

[calebb]

I don't trust them to support my platform of choice for more than 12 months however, because by then it's .Net or Silverlight or WPF or DX10

Sorry to cherry pick like this, but are you serious? Each of those is a different technology.

And 12 months? Try 5+ years at a minimum.

Name one MS technology that they abandoned after 12 months. (real technology - not a backwards compatibility wrapper that was discontinued when the underlying technology was discontinued)

Still not convinced? http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

 

[mikeblas]

On the other hand, lets look at Microsoft's track record:

Sure, let's:

Microsoft Pascal - Done.
Microsoft FORTRAN - Sold to Hitachi (or Toshiba?, or someone ...)
Microsoft Sidewinder Products - Mostly gone. Most Microsoft hardware products never see a 2.0 release.
Microsoft VisualSource Safe. They don't ship any version control system, anymore.
Microsoft InterDev. Kind of this web tool thing that did some authoring stuff, or something.
Microsoft SQL Server Natural Language Query. Quietly dropped; I don't think anyone was using it.
Microsoft Bob - Before it's time or just a joke, either way: it's gone
Microsoft BizTalk - Huge group, no product.
Microsoft FrontPage - That's why we're talking about Silverlight and Expression Web.
Microsoft Windows ActiveX - Still struggling along, but it's hardly a standard.
Microsoft Windows DNA - Dead.
Microsoft J++ - Where did it go?
Microsoft Liquid Motion - Dead.
Microsoft VizAct - Gone.
Microsoft Photo Something - Picture It!, Digital Image, Imager, whatever. Which one, now?
Microsoft FoxPro. Huuuuge user base.
Windows for Pen Computing. Everyone else got it wrong, except Microsoft, who dropped support for it.
Microsoft Binder. Pretty neat idea, but it's dead now. ActiveDocument support, I think, was its contribution to OLE.
Microsoft Bookshelf. Gone.
Microsoft Test. Dead.
HTML Help. Which replaced RTF help, was superseded by CHM files, and then the Microsoft Document Viewer with the online add-in thingie.
XPS Was that the name? Right? Of the "open" document format? I guess this is still supported, but who's really using it?

DirectX - sucked compared to OpenGL on initial launch. When was the last game released that even supported OpenGL?

Frets On Fire, I think was the most recent popular one.

.NET - It sucked so bad when version 1.0 was released. There were so many promises and so many left unfulfilled. Simple tasks in other languages were 10x more difficult in .NET. IMO, .NET 2 changed everything. .NET adoption is very pervasive now.

Yeah; the VB 6 programmers are still pretty pissed about how Microsoft terminated their investment in the language (and its libraries, extensions, and tools), for an incompatible product with the same name. I think native programmers are next. .NET isn't a language, BTW.

They are slow and methodical. They don't generally release stillborn products and they can continue to improve and push a product like Silverlight for a long time if necessary.

They're slow, but they're not methodical.

Anyway, all this not withstanding, it does sometimes hurt to invest in learning a technology.

 

[calebb]

.NET isn't a language, BTW.

Who said it was On the other hand MSIL/CIL is, so the distinction becomes more academic at some point.

Microsoft Pascal - Done. V1: 1980 v4: 1988. Still abides by lifecycle agreements at the time.

Microsoft FORTRAN - Sold to Hitachi (or Toshiba?, or someone ...) Not familiar with this. Aren't Fortran compilers open source since ~1970 and still released every few years?


Microsoft Sidewinder Products - Mostly gone. Most Microsoft hardware products never see a 2.0 release. I remember I bought my first sidewinder in 1995. It was a great gamepad for the early emulator market. I think they retired this series in ~2003 with product support for existing products (warranty/software) continuing according to their regular lifecycle. AGain, this is an 8+ year run! The xbox 360 control (wireless) is much better anyway Also... never see a 2.0 release? There were like 7 versions!


Microsoft VisualSource Safe. They don't ship any version control system, anymore. HUH? VERY much still alive, although they are pushing Team Suite more lately. VSS started in what.. 1993 or so for it's first public release? That's a good 15 year run.


Microsoft InterDev. Kind of this web tool thing that did some authoring stuff, or something. Eh? This was just the name for Visual Studio back in the day. They didn't discontinue it, they renamed it to something more appropriate...

Microsoft SQL Server Natural Language Query. Quietly dropped; I don't think anyone was using it. Nobody used it. But for what it's worth, it started in SQL 6.5 (1998ish), continued in SQL 2000 and if you upgrade a SQL 2000 -> SQL 2005 installation you can even use it in SQL 2005. That's a good 7 year run - and like you said - nobody used it.

Microsoft Bob - Before it's time or just a joke, either way: it's gone Didn't I already mention this one

Microsoft BizTalk - Huge group, no product. Alive and kicking for ~8 years so far. .NET 3.0/3.5 version recently release.

Microsoft FrontPage - That's why we're talking about Silverlight and Expression Web. Available from 1996ish till 2006. A good 10 year run - and there's a replacement with decent legacy support.

Sorry.. running out of time.. and colors of the rainbow... but I think I made my point. I didn't say they NEVER discontinue a product - I said they don't produce stillborn products. They are methodical and they have the cash to keep the project going until it is either adopted or not. If it's not adopted (i.e., Microsoft English Query), they slowly deprecate it.

If you are going to continue to debate this point, perhaps you could find a case study of a company (medium-large) who was screwed due to Microsoft suddenly deprecating a technology?

 

[colinstu]

I don't see Microsoft Bob on that list

 

[mikeblas]

If you are going to continue to debate this point,

As I mentioned above, the point I made has nothing to do with Microsoft. I'm just entertaining your suggestion of looking at Microsoft's track record, which has lots of abandoned products that you've chosen not to remember, and lots of products that are fizzling, which you dismiss.

I'm not sure how providing a case study about a medium- or large company (whatever that definition will turn out to mean) having problems with deprecated software from Microsoft would realize any progress on understanding the assertion that an individual staying on top of technologies is a wasted effort when a technology does not pan out.

Individuals make investments of their time in their vocation. They might make a monetary investment, too. You buy some books, you spend some time learning a new technology. If you want to become an expert with the technology, then you need a pretty substantial investment. If you want a return on that investment, then the technology needs to be popular enough to get you work, and viable enough to provide room for your skills.

Otherwise, you've been hurt: you should have invested in something else besides that new technology, and have some opportunity cost in addition to the hard cost of your investment.

I think the prudent move is to use or learn Flash, since it's well-established. Once successful with that, use the profits from the resulting work to subsidize an investment in Silverlight. Going straight to an unproven, limited technology might end up working out, but I think it's more of a gamble.

 

[calebb]

Otherwise, you've been hurt:

As long as we're off topic (as usual)...

I just did a google search of your name and guess what? You have a couple books! (lol)

And we have many copies of your MFC 4 book in stock -

Here's one in our Seattle Warehouse. The CD is still sealed in the back of the book still!


clicky

 

[mikeblas]

I just did a google search of your name and guess what? You have a couple books! (lol)

Yep. I worked on Visual Studio back when it wasn't named Visual InterDev, and when the Visual SourceSafe team was disbanded (the first time).

At which bookstore do you work?

 

[calebb]

Yep. I worked on Visual Studio back when it wasn't named Visual InterDev, and when the Visual SourceSafe team was disbanded (the first time).

At which bookstore do you work?

I actually don't mention the name on public forums, but my company is the largest (possibly 2nd largest... the judges are still out!) used book seller in the world

 

[Eibach]

I actually don't mention the name on public forums, but my company is the largest (possibly 2nd largest... the judges are still out!) used book seller in the world

barns and noble??? lol

hmm well thank you for the intresting posts everyone... i should have known this would have turned into a ms vs anything else thread.... it would have been understandable if we talked about the pros and cons of "Silverlight" instead of the pros and cons of MS...

well thank you all, i still have made my decision to go with Silverlight

thanks again... you all should really talk about something more important than MS... =)
if you dont like it so much or are backing them up... take it somewhere else because we have all heard it a million times.. there is not much any of us can do about it so stop complaining...

 

[mikeblas]

well thank you all, i still have made my decision to go with Silverlight

What's your rationale?

 

[calebb]

about the pros and cons of "Silverlight" instead of the pros and cons of MS...

After doing some research I see that Mike and I are both ex-MSFT employees. Irony? I haven't decided yet.

It looks like Mike worked for Microsoft for ~7 times as long (impressive) so it's quite likely that his opinions have a bit more credibility than mine ? Man, I feel like a stalker now...

Have fun with Silverlight and please share a demo with the [H] if you remember!

 

[Eibach]

Have fun with Silverlight and please share a demo with the [H] if you remember!

thanks im sure i will

What's your rationale?

As i said before, i am going with it only because of the fact that i belive i will be able to produce the end product fast than i would be able to with flash. with the skills that i have i have spent a good deal of time in flash but i feel that i could not push the results out that i would have liked to as fast as within C#. Nothing to do with the background of MS and them having backward compatiblity and the likely hood of Silverlight not making it.