As well as having a nice logo, Silverlight is “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications”. Basically, it’s an easy to use plug-in that allows developers to easily create full-blown applications / media inside a browser.
The reason for this post?
Jesse Ezell, a long-time Flash enthusiast (who has even written an SDK for Flash in the past), has a very interesting and well structured post claiming that Flash is dead on his blog - and I believe him. I don’t want to go through the details because Jesse does it very well and I’m not a Flash expert like he is, but here’s a summary illustrating which one is stronger in certain areas:
| Feature | Flash | Silverlight | Winner |
| Animation | Frame-based. Simple transformation of matrices |
Supports WPF. Define start and end and it will figure out how to get there | Silverlight |
| Shapes | Binary Shape records | Text-based XAML | Silverlight |
| Text | Player doesn’t understand TFF files | Allows you to embed true font information inside projects | Silverlight |
| Vide/Audio | Proprietary mutilation of H.263 | Uses industry standard VC-1 codec as well as WMV/WMA and even DRM | Silverlight |
| Scripting | ActionScript is powerful but there are no IDEs for creating ActionScript-based desktop applications | Can resue C# classes on the server-side, which means the logic only has to be written once, whereas ActionScript requires it on the server and client machine | Silverlight |
| Tools | Flash development environments | The most used environment on the plane, Visual Studio | Silverlight |
Silverlight doesn’t run on Linux, but it does run on Mac OS. I don’t think that will put anyone off though. It might take years to happen, but if Adobe don’t get their act together, Microsoft are going to steal the show - and I’m glad.
Perhaps this is all a bit one-sided? But that doesn’t really matter. What matters most is the speed and cost of development along with the number of developers. Silverlight wins again.