This week I attended a MIX09 session (well, the one that is supposed to be presented there in March anyway) by Rick Barraza, Senior Experience Architect at Cynergy. Rick is well known for his work on Flash, Flex, AIR, Silverlight and WPF projects and is a big proponent of Silverlight as the RIA platform. He shared his impressions of development experience with Silverlight and compared it to Flash and Flex in few ways that seemed very interesting to me, so I decided to share with you my understanding of the points expressed:

·         Performance of Silverlight is sometimes few times higher than Flash, especially when it comes to animation of large number of objects on the same page – Flash usually doesn’t scale well beyond animating 10-15 primitive objects while Silverlight is capable of animating hundreds of them without significant slowdown on the same hardware

·         “10 second Wow vs 10 minute Wow”: Flash applications are usually good to wow people for first few seconds but then users ask “now what?” when come across usability and productivity problems of traditional Flash applications (Flex solves this to certain extent but loses some of the “10 second Wow” capabilities of Flash)

·         Conversion of Flash apps to Silverlight apps is done manually most of the time because of different ways they work with assets and different approach to transformations (timeline vs DispatcherTimer)

·         Silverlight on the other hand has all functionality for producing 10 second Wow being followed by good usability and productivity of modern business applications needed for 10 minute Wow and beyond

·         There are few things in Silverlight that are still hard to do (like PNG hacking, hard to do the same way due to lack of timeline, but used extremely often by designer community) but flexibility of the .NET tools and languages allows implementation of workarounds

·         Traditional workflow-like approach to creating Silverlight applications isn’t always efficient for Flash-like applications that designers got used to develop for the Web and hence there’s big pushback against it. Instead they crave for state-machine approach, which is again possible in Silverlight, but somewhat different from the way .NET developers tend to think

·         Traditional grid-based layout isn’t familiar to Flash developers either – they got used to creating free-form layout with (x,y) coordinates with a bunch of custom objects (vs predefined controls in Silverlight).

Finally, Rick suggested looking at Project “Rosetta Stone”  which shows Flash developers how to create effective Silverlight applications using their existing skills and shares few interesting workarounds.