Pixelbox

Welcome to Pixelbox. Thursday the 20 of November 2008

Skip to content >>

Siverlight === Flash

08/05/07
Tonight I checked out Silverlight (rock and roll!), Microsofts new... well I think the easiest way to describe it is, Flash. After watching a 45 min interview with one of the developers it is apparent that Microsoft doing the exact same thing as Adobe are doing with flash.
  1. Create a development environmen.
  2. Create a design/animation environment
  3. Create a runtime/browser plugin
It more or less sounds like they will do the exact same stuff, and the only way to tell them apart is from framwork traits, or right clicking. One interesting thing to come out of it was that, well at this stage, the silverlight file (swf) isn't compiled, but just a script tag with their XML format inside. I think its great to see more pressure on Adobe (perhaps they will make the Mac player decent!), and hopefully make Microsoft think about a cross platform runtime! What every anyone says, competition is good! Oh and check out this... Ceros in Silverlight? ... but then as we have always said, it's about our platform, anyone can do page turning ;)
Meta tags: Development, Technology

5 comments

Why not leave your own!

  1. chris dorward
    if (silverlight.promise == flash && silverlight < = eval(MicroSoft.History)) { silverlight.HasLegs = true; }else{ silverlight.SinksLikeAStone = true; }
    Left on May 9, 2007 at 11:58 am
  2. Dominic Pettifer
    Some key differences to point out, though I could be wrong on some/all of these 1. Flash is for web only AFAIK. Silverlight is a subset of WPF (WPF/e) which is a new framework for creating GUI's for both web and desktop. If you're a Silverlight Pro you can easily transition over to desktop apps and visa versa. 2. Silverlight is in an open XML format (XAML). Now this where my knowledge is shakey but flash is a closed propriatory format I believe (correct me if I'm wrong). 3. Silverlight has an argubly more powerful programming API at it's disposal, a subset of .NET, which means you can use C#, VB.NET, JScript etc.
    Left on May 9, 2007 at 4:53 pm
  3. Rob
    My thoughts on those points are: 1. With Flex you can deploy to a swf file or an apollo runtime, meaning you can run on Mac/Windows/Linux etc in a desktop environment. 2. Flex uses MXML which is open. In fact flex it's self is now an open source project. 3. Flex is using ActionScript3 which is very impressive, although perhaps not as handy as having the ability to code in different languages... well until you come to debug someone else's code ;)
    Left on May 9, 2007 at 5:01 pm
  4. Rob
    Also I forgot to say that you can program flash in flex using HTML and JavaScript
    Left on May 10, 2007 at 9:34 am
  5. Listings Lab Ltd. The blog….. » Blog Archive » Flash is dead. long live flash.
    [...] useful applications in it. The recent chatter on my own personalblogosphere (mainly the boy dark0, pixelBox and andrewskinner [dot]name) has included chat about SilverLight, Microsoft’s new web-based [...]
    Left on May 15, 2007 at 9:24 am

Add your own comment