Comments on: Silverlight 4 beta released leaving Flex behind

By: Determining Silverlight Version Installed | Gergely on .NET

Determining Silverlight Version Installed | Gergely on .NET — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:40:47 +0000

[...] Related article: Silverlight 4 beta released leaving Flex behind [...]

By: Phong Hoang

Phong Hoang — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:50:36 +0000

The best case for Flex, say 3 – 5 years from now, is to be able to retain or stay as relevant as that of Java to .NET. The dev environment for Silverlight is just too scary. With VS, .NET framework, and the integration between them all will smoke Flex.

Silverlight is built with a single purpose: to be the best in RIA. Is it going to own that space? I think so.

By: Colin Eberhardt

Colin Eberhardt — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:55:52 +0000

Hi Anon,

RTL is supported in SL4:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx#bidi-rtl

Regards, Colin E.

By: anon

anon — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:36:02 +0000

Flex supports right to left languages but SL does not …

By: Colin Eberhardt

Colin Eberhardt — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:59:10 +0000

Hi Balint,

Thanks for the feedback. Personally I think Silverlight is aimed at a different market to Flash, hence I tend to compare it more to Flex. Silverlight has a powerful framework born out of WPF which is great for building applications. If you want to just add some interactivity to a web page, I would recommend Flash everytime, but for Rich Internet Application development, my money is on Silverlight.

Developed at a rate of 1.5 VIPAs Silvelight will reach v.25 by 2023, whilst Flash (at 0.9 VIPAs) will be just behind at version 22.6

Regards, Colin E.

By: Balint Orosz

Balint Orosz — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:39:41 +0000

I think Microsoft is still doing it the bad way. The main concept is : Add more features than any other of your competitors and than you will have the best product… But this I found bad.
Just like my windows mobile. Has TONS of features compared to the iPhone. Still it is not good. It is slow, hard to use, incosistent, sometimes freezes and so on. Compared to it the iPhone “just works”. Sure I can’t have an mms with it but what works works.
Its a quite a bit same with the Flash. Flash is stable. I mean super-stable (by the developers view of point). Flash has a large developer community sending Adobe feedback for more than 10 years now. And they are developing the player SLOWLY. Listening to the developers what features they want, making it faster and so on..
Microsoft doesn’t has this. Very few people are developing in silverlight (compared to Flash). The fact is that very few people USE silverlight (View silverlight content). I see a silverlight app one time every 2 weeks.

So Silverlight is definetly cool for Microsoft-only firms. But it has a long way to go until it is a worthy match for the Flash platform. At this speed I think it will be at approx. version 25

By: Colin Eberhardt

Colin Eberhardt — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:43:18 +0000

Thanks Homer, but graphs never lie!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue-in-cheek

Regards, Colin E.

By: Homer

Homer — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:39:32 +0000

Silverlight is making rapid progress, but you are not measuring anything meaningful at all by counting major version numbers. There is no standard for how many function points make a version increment, either between products or within them. Your graphs are gibberish.