Silverlight

[hallsofvallhalla]

Comments? hates? Likes?

[Cayle]

I have some colleagues developing a business intelligence tool in silverlight. They built prototypes on flash (flex actually) and silverlight before deciding to go with silverlight.

[kaos78414]

Meh. Haven't really payed any mind to silverlight. The only website I know that uses it is netflix, and I watch all my netflix on the 360.

[Jackolantern]

I have used it. It is pretty neat, however, there is a lot of misconception about what Silerlight is. Kind of what Cayle touched on, Silverlight really is a competitor to Flex, not the Flash animation tool. All I ever see are "Silverlight vs. Flash" articles with people talking about Silverlight like they are going to make their next cartoon or game in it. While technically you could, you would be crazy to do so. The animation tools of Flash make game and animation development so much easier. Silverlight uses XAML and Flex uses MXML to define the UI and layout of the interface. They are both very close, with Silverlight edging Flex out a bit, mostly since it came later and was able to improve upon miscues by Adobe. Flash lays out elements visually, or with Actionscript. Since games don't typically use a mark-up layout language, this makes a crapload of Flex and Silverlight not applicable to users for anything but enterprise usage.

I think that is why Silverlight has not caught on as fast as Microsoft had hoped. If they were to release a software package like Flash Pro tomorrow, they may really give Adobe a run for their money. Expression Blend (the Silverlight-aimed part of Expression Studio) is really more like bits of Flash/Flex Builder Pro mixed with large portions of Adobe Flash Catalyst (which was actually modeled after Expression Blend).

All-in-all, I was learning Flash and Flex, but decided to put them down and refine my Javascript knowledge since I wanted to see what happens in the next year or two with HTML5 before devoting a lot of energy into either Flex or Silverlight. Flex/Silverlight may find a lot of their uses gone when you combine the power of HTML5 with the UI widgets of jQuery UI.

[hallsofvallhalla]

thanks for the comments and agreed Jack.