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Open source SilverlightMay 16th, 2008 |
Lest people think that Flash is the only game in town, there’s also a new release around Microsoft’s Silverlight, using Mono.
Mono offers open-source spin on Silverlight – CNET News.com
There is definitely a quiet little war on.
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The one thing about Silverlight / Moonlight that surprises me is that Microsoft openly backs Moonlight!
Oh, good, a step in the right direction. Silverlight’s architecture is much better than Flash for the purposes of programming…
Also, our comments here are being resolved so quickly!
Alas, Moonlight is only Silverlight 1.0… The most interesting description I ever heard of 1.0 was on a DotNetRocks show, where it was called “a declarative language for animated GIFs…”
Coming from the other article on Adobe, it’s no surprise that the DirectX company with the Live distribution network would be following this sort of business model as well.
At least, it seems obvious at the moment. I just hope they aren’t jerks about it. :p
I need to check out Silverlight at some point. I had to work with Flash a good bit this past semester and I just can’t understand how it’s become so widespread. How does anyone actually *make* anything with it? I could never be sure quite what the result of my inputs were going to be, and when something did work correctly I could never quite be sure why.
Kinda sad when you look to competition from Microsoft to actually improve a field.
I need to check out Silverlight at some point. I had to work with Flash a good bit this past semester and I just can’t understand how it’s become so widespread. How does anyone actually *make* anything with it? I could never be sure quite what the result of my inputs were going to be, and when something did work correctly I could never quite be sure why.
For me, Flash has been the program of choice for the last 8 years because, while I do know some programming, I’m primarily an animator/illustrator. Flash with Actionscript 1.0 was intuitive enough for me to make interactive things that were graphic-based, rather than code-based.
Now, that being said, I’ve heard Actionscript 3.0 has been steering away from that in an effort to be more programmer-friendly, but for people like me, who think graphically rather than in lines of code, Flash is perfect.
Another answer to this is probably just history. Flash was the first one on the block to really be attempting this stuff, so whatever quirks Flash has now, it still has the benefit of a high rate of adoption. There’s just too many people now who know the quirks of Flash and how to get around them, and it’s extremely well-supported by browsers.
Flash really is the only game in town, realistically. Microsoft is not going to catch up to the huge installed base and combined with the fact that AS3/Flex is actually really good from a programmers perspective, well, they’re pretty much toast.
Jason wrote:
Flash really is the only game in town, realistically.
No, not realistically — currently. The future is fickle.
It’s just as easy to install Silverlight as it is Flash. So, I can’t see why Silverlight isn’t going to catch up to Flash’s install base rather quick. Especially if they get imbeded into some large/well known sites.
My team is rather young and inexperienced. We can’t afford more experienced people. So, not having to have them learn yet another language on top of Javascript, VBScript, C#, not to mention HTML, XSLT, etc, etc, etc, is of great value to us.
Robert, ActionScript3 is the new version of javascript (ecmascript) with optional improvements… You don’t need to learn a new language, just the API. So AS3/Flex is no worse than Silverlight, but cetainly more crossplatform. Microsoft will never sustain a crossplatform solution. They don’t have the culture that Sun and Adobe has.
I never said it was worse than Silverlight. My comments were from my perspective. We maintain a closed web application, so fortunately we don’t have to work on every browser.
When we are fully on Silverlight 2 (perhaps I should have mentioned the version earlier) the vast majority of our coding will be in C#. Our junior people won’t have to touch anything but C# and SQL with one set of tools. This is valuable to us. This lets us focus more on solving our business problems instead of trying to remember some API call, debugging script, etc.
So, coming from where we are, Silverlight 2 is the right choice for us. 
Ah ok. If that’s the angle then I think Silverlight will catch on in the business-segment for the reasons you mention, but I don’t think it will catch on in the mobile segment because the big players in that field have an interest in not being ruled by MS. Adobe is probably less scary as they don’t try to tie you to the whole package and have a better reputation… I also think the entertainment segment and the mobile segment is linked, so I doubt Silverlight will ever gain more than 40% market share in that market. 30-40% shouldn’t be too hard once they’ve established themselves in the business-segment. I am not sure how much value Silverlight adds to business applications though… but who knows… MS have enough money to buy themselves into markets…
Yup, what I see as beneficial about Silverlight is that it provides a solid platform to do both your back-end web service / site stuff AND your front-end rich media application… No switching between tools required. I wonder if it will find a niche in the mid-level of .NET web developers who just don’t QUITE have the bandwidth to pick up Flash in addition.
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