10 reasons to love Silverlight and 10 reasons to hate it
Summary: Update: I found out that this is the second most hated post on ZDNet in the past 90 days. That's an impressive and dubious honor and it was a wakeup call not to do posts like this.
Update: I found out that this is the second most hated post on ZDNet in the past 90 days. That's an impressive and dubious honor and it was a wakeup call not to do posts like this. I think Tim's post is awesome, but next time I won't link without substance and I'll use a better title.
I won't add much commentary to Tim's excellent post up on the Register because I work for Adobe and I don't want to get into a bunch of nonsensical arguments about Flash versus Silverlight. But I will say that Tim Anderson is one of the very few tech journalists who really, really gets the RIA space. He knows all of the technologies from the major companies and how they're meant to be used.
The last one in Tim's hate list is the one that kills me: You have to develop on Windows. This is particularly a problem for the Expression design tools, since designers have a disproportionately high number of Macs. I know Microsoft sells Windows and that's how they make money, but I've been doing some C# development lately and it really sucks to have to go into VMWare to load up my development environment. If anyone has any good tips on doing C# development on a Mac, let me know. Mono seems halfway there but I haven't found a great tooling option yet.
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Talkback
VMWare sux?
-M
RE: VMWare sux?
=Ryan
really bad story
wow did zdnet ever go down hill.
RE: really bad story
=Ryan
Reason number 11 to love Silverlight
:)
RE: 10 reasons to love Silverlight and 10 reasons to hate it
I think he was right on with a few things, but mostly misguided in general.
"The design tools are Expression Blend and Expression Design - but who uses them? The design world uses Adobe PhotoShop"
Ok, I can understand the statement with Expression Design...But not Blend. ANYONE that makes a *great* UI in WPF, uses Blend...even developers. Blend is a UI designer (Like Interface Builder) and not really graphic design app.
"While having solution compatibility between Expression Blend and Visual Studio sounds good, it???s actually a hassle having to use two separate tools, especially when there are niggling incompatibilities, as in the current beta."
There have been many debates with "Blend should be in Visual Studio" vs "Blend should be its own app!" The reason its a different app is make the boundary of Designer/Developer event more clear. I do think Visual Studio could use a "Blend Lite"...The current state of "Cider" is very bad.
"No support for the popular H.264 video codec. Instead hi-def video for Silverlight must be in VC-1, which is less common"
The popularity of VC-1 vs H.264 is debatable. Instead of throwing out facts I made up on the spot, I'll say that Microsoft has a lot of customers that have invested heavily in WMV1, WMV2 and WMV3 (VC-1) and they wanted a more compatible way to deliver their media investment. On this, Microsoft came through.
"It???s another effort to promote proprietary technology rather than open standards."
Very true, but would we have YouTube with only open standards? Did we forget about SVG? I sure did. Honestly, I see very few technology innovations come from open standards. But I do see open standards adopting proprietary innovations (e.g. Ajax).
"Yes Linux will be supported via Moonlight, but when? It seems likely that the Linux implementation will always lag behind the Windows and Mac releases."
Yes Linux is the bastard child that is often forgotten. It's a sad state. I'm surprised MS is even playing nice.
"Silverlight supports SOAP web services, or REST provided you don???t use PUT or DELETE, but doesn???t have an optimized binary protocol like Adobe???s ActionScript Message Format (AMF), which likely means slower performance in some scenarios."
Forget about SL's support for sockets? I agree that it would be nice if it came with a protocol out of the box, but an "AMF" is possible with the SL runtimes today.
"Silverlight is a browser-only solution, whereas Flash can be deployed for the desktop using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Having said that, yes I have seen this."
Can't argue here. SL is only officially supported in the browser. But seeing some demos some associates have made, really shows how possible it is to move SL to the desktop.
-Jeremiah
Fix your damn Flash
RE: 10 reasons to love Silverlight and 10 reasons to hate it
Only one in this thread <nt>
Redirect title?
RE: Redirect title?
=Ryan
RE: 10 reasons to love Silverlight and 10 reasons to hate it
Cool
Are you sure?
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/SysReq.aspx?key=studio
in the system requirements for Expression studio it says it runs on OS X 10.4 or later.
A rule of thumb to live by...
I'll second that!
When you use MS-only technologies, you lose, even when you think you've won.
At the top of the risk actualization tree is the branch everyone developing with Microsoft tools falls off of: millions of companies built for NT, rebuilt for 2000, revised for 2003/XP, now face rebuilds for the 2008 Server/Vista combination -and can look forward to throwing away any successes they achieve in this process just as soon as Microsoft gets whatever they want to sell next out the door.
In contrast, non-Microsoft development tools I have worked with since the late 1980s have generally proven automatically upgradeable to new technologies. All you need to do is stick to standards and steer clear of all things that are Microsoft-only.
-Mike
You stick with those '80s tools sonny...
These anti-Microsoft rants just kill me! :)
RE: 10 reasons to love Silverlight and 10 reasons to hate it
Thats the only reason I need to hate it.
Dissapointed
RE: 10 reasons Silverlight Vs Adobe
up their patch and creating a wunderkid that favours
windows is a good strategy - but far too late - the world is
going open source like a rocket. Meanwhile, swift kick up
the butt for Adobe. It is leaving itself wide open by bloating
Adobe to the point where it often causes slow downs or
crashes in Mac or Windows. It is a new bloatware and
memory hog. Fix it guys or let the Macromedia legacy team
take over the firm.
22 votes, 22 minuses