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

Someone said: "Find 3 real world silverlight applications". Ok, I knew some off the top of my head but I googled it anyway. The list:

• 2008 Beijing Olympics (stats here, 250TB of data delivered!)
• Netflix on-demand player
• AOL email client (may not be released yet)

Oh, not video players? Well that leaves the UFC application (it's a hybrid video/chat/other stuff) and the AOL email client. Silverlight excels at video and that's where it's gaining it's foothold but that doesn't mean it can't do other things. I see no reason to dismiss it just because it does video well.

Infoworld [link] said that "Silverlight has substantial technical merit and relatively good performance. It's a very capable RIA technology that's especially useful in the hands of programmers with .Net experience and designers with XAML experience." It's a good article for you to read regarding your question.

My answer: if you have a team of devs that are comfortable with .NET then Silverlight should be first on your list. If not, then it's a real tossup. I've seen articles say that Visual Studio is a superior development platform compared to what you use with Flex. But Flash is damn near ubiquitous.

Also keep in mind that Silverlight 2 uses almost no Javascript (I think none, but I'm not positive). So any avoidance of Silverlight because of JS is unfounded.

If performance matters, Silverlight wins there. I've seen my browser's CPU usage go to 100% many times and killing whatever window is running Flash always got rid of it. It's especially obvious in Chrome where you can see the process that's consuming your CPU. If your interested in Silverlight for gaming potential, look for QuakeLight, the Silverlight port of Quake. It's shaping up really well.

I really think it comes down to where your developer talent lies and what kind of application you'll be delivering. Simple game? Flash. Line of business app? Silverlight. In-between? Go with what your devs recommend.