Just tripped over a large rock in the street and found it carved not only with Action Script, but with Silverlight Beta 2 managed code. Was this a curious prank by MIXed up geeks from a Torchwood conference, or some attempt at convincing those college graduates with Flash diplomas that Silverlight is really quite easy. Really quite cool?

I am sorry to say this but until Silverlight graduates from a collection of disparate Beta products into a single mature entity, Flash will continue to be regarded as the standard for ‘rich web content’. And people will continue to say, “I’ve never heard of Silverlight?”

All power to the stone!

Andy,

Clearly you are not "sorry to say this but...". Silverlight 2 is a single Beta product and certainly it needs to be released before it sees the kind of adoption that Flash has...wait, or do I mean Flex...oh, sorry I mean Adobe's platform...wait, confused again I mean AIR.

At the end of the day users shouldn't know or care what the technologies are used, they just deserve good experiences. If its Flash, great. If its Flex, fine. If its Silverlight, sure. Or even plain old HTML. Being dogmatic about any technology missed the boat.

Thanks for the comment, but as the Flash garrison continues to sound arrogant, they'll be treated thusly. Don't you understand that Silverlight helps everyone. Do you honestly think Adobe would be putting much effort into new tools if they left to their own devices? Have you used Flex Builder? Or are you building line-of-business apps in PhotoShop?

Building in Ap in Photoshop - frightening!

I must qualify my own POV by saying that SILVERLIGHT is the way ahead. I was very excited to find there was a non-flash route to nicer content... Which is why I downloaded all of those How-To Videos by your good self.

In a political sense, Silverlight is rather like Barack Obama; it's promises are still only a promises - mainly due to the lack of content. Meanwhile Flash is the McCain of content - it's always been here, even though it's often just a heartbeat away from killing the browser.

Yes Silverlight gives hope for a truely integrated client-server world that looks as good as the code-behind - and visa versa - BUT, Silverlight might be a hard sell to those companies and individuals who have already invested time-effort-money-passion in Flash and, who are eager for many more years of the 'McSame'. Which is where the Rosetta initiative comes in?

So is Chrome the Sarah Palin of browsers? Only if it won't run Silverlight!

Keep the faith :-)

It's definitely a great site (he has some neat effects examples)! I have been playing with Silverlight off and on since Alpha 1.1 (more on now), but I definitely still find surprises in the Silverlight vs Flash/Flex/AIR (nicely the way you put it) world.

When I was writing my last article about Silverlight multithreading for UI controls...I was surprised to find that Flash/Flex doesn't have true multithreading support (correct me here if I am wrong)??!! The best I could find is they are "sort of getting" some kind of wrapper for it in version 10. I know Silverlight has some major features missing like printing, good 3D/audio support integration with the Adobe graphics suite. But Silverlight has some major pluses in productivity (C#/VS 2008), data aware apps (WCF, ADO.NET Services), client side LINQ (XML, JSON, objects) and a bright future to leverage other .NET framework libraries (i.e. PLINQ).

I think the technologies will help each other out, but they appear to be taking slightly different paths. Adobe is pushing the graphics envelope (its advantage) and Microsoft is going to push the .NET framework stack and possibly wide array of Microsoft business products (its advantage).

I've been looking into Silverlight since 1.1 and everyone seems to compare Flash and Silverlight as if they are trying to accomplish the same thing. Yes there are similarities but take a closer look.

Flash has always focused it's efforts on design, look, feel of what the user can do. This is great for games and artsy sites but what about business applications.

Silverlight is based off of a full programming framework and seems to be focusing more on the logical programmatic side for rich business applications rather than fancy look and feel.

Both have there place and I believe that both will have there relavance on the internet. Having both will also mean competition which will in turn make both companies compete against each other to bring a better product than the other.

As for Silverlight not being adopted by a wide margin of people yet, let's remember to key things. First Silverlight is still in Beta and second Microsoft has Windows Updates.

For business applications, Silverlight is no doubt having a better future because of its development tool, Visual Studio, and server side backings from other Microsoft products such as WCF, SQL Server, MOSS, etc. That makes Silverlight development highly productive.

I have an example to prove it:

There are still very few full Flash/Flex sites in the market regarding Flashes' huge market adoption percentage, and the most popular Flash adoption is banners, or some other types Flash islands in a conventional HTML page. In comparison, almost all Silverlight sites, especially for those written in Silverlight 2.0, are intending to be full Silverlight sites.