Silverlight vs Flex

Question

My company develops several types of applications. A lot of our business comes from doing multimedia-type apps, typically done in Flash. However, now that side of the hous

Answer 1

Asa graphics designer, I've used Flash (on and off) over the last few years, and Silverlight (and its big brother WPF) over the last 1.5 years. Based on what I've heard from my team (all of whom are developers or former developers, if your .Net developers will be doing all the programming, go with Silverlight. I love Flash, but even with the OOP overhaul to ActionScript 3 in Flash 9 and up, it's still a somewhat quirky language, and going back and forth between AS3 and C# will probably drive your developers nuts :-).

For your designers, do the following:

• Get them a copy of Expression Blend, the GUI development tool for Silverlight/WPF.

• Blend has a somewhat steep initial learning curve, and the interface throws a ton of variables/options at you, so invest in some training, and give your designers time to get up to speed with the UI.

• Speaking of training, get a subscription to the Lynda.com video library, esp. the Lee Brimelow Expression Blend training course.

• Caveat emptor: Blend and WPF change rapidly, so sometimes you'll run into bugs in Blend that are fixed in the next beta/CTP of Blend. E.g. There was a bug in Blend 2 that prevent my storyboards (animations) from working in a recent project. I upgraded to Blend 2.5CTP, and it worked.

• Silverlight content doesn't always seem to work with the latest Beta of the Silverlight plugin, just something to keep in mind if you're testing some new feature that's only available in the latest Silverlight plugin.

• Invest in a powerful system (Quad Core, 4Gigs of RAM, etc.) Blend consumes a lot of resources, esp. when you have tons of layers. E.g. I'm working on an app with over a 100 layers(!) in the base app (and another 100+ in some of the user controls), and about 40-50 storyboards. Every few minutes, I have to restart Blend, because the UI stops responding (but doesn't freeze). Either that, or move everything you can into user controls.