Graeme's doing a sterling effort on the FLEX + .NET Front.

I've been reading Graeme's blog for quite some time, and I have to say he's been doing a sterling effort in keeping the glue together in terms of Flex working with .NET overall.

Microsoft would love nothing more in the end to have everyone using 100% Vista with WPF  or WPF/e going forward, but that's a perfect world syndrome.

Reality of the situation is that many developers are interested in FLEX (why shouldn't they be) and while I have my own set of issues with FLEX ( still like writing code in the language though as its comfortable still with me ) none the less it has still got interest.

I've had to field a lot of questions around "how do I get Flex talking .NET backends without SOAP" and I keep pointing to Graeme's site with a hint at WebORB.

Graeme's giving a very level headed rundown of what the issues are out there for .NET development and FLEX and it's great to see him being critical on both brands (more of it I say!)

This part stuck out with me and I agree with it:

The importance of not giving up on .NET developers

Adobe would be foolish to continue to ignore the .NET developer community. The .NET developer community is HUGE and growing, not least because it's a fantastic development environment and because it's free. It may surprise Adobe but there is insterest in Flex in the .NET community. When I posted my .NET tutorials on my blog it rose to being the 6th most visited Flex blog on Adobe's MXNA aggregator. I find the lack of .NET samples on flex.org completely astonishing. While it's true that many professional .NET developers will be using WPF on the desktop, .NET developers are not all idiots/mindless bigots, there will be many .NET developers who decide to adopt Apollo/Flex for the presentation tier (for lots of good reasons). Let's not concede defeat to WPF before we've started.

WPF will solve pain points in many ways, but I would like to say that if you're ok with X-Platform not being an issue, you at least get to re-use C#/VB and going from MXML to XAML has been somewhat easy for me as of late.

So should you drop FLEX and go with WPF? It's a personal choice and something that needs to be weighed appropriately but in doing this, I do recommend you read Graeme's blog from back to front as he does illustrate the pain points you will need to go through if you want to get both technologies synced.

(I"m also working with WebORB folks to ensure they get as much support from Microsoft as I can muster. I'm a strong advocate of WebORB and can't recommend it enough to you .NET troops).

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