Why? Flash has had 10 years to evolve, and while Adibe is trying to move it to become a proper programming platform, it is still very sadly lacking. Too much in Flash and AS3 still feels like hacks and workarounds. There is no way it should be in this state after 10 years!

Yes, some elements of Silverlight 2 are still a bit behind, but the quality of the overall Silverlight design clearly shows that it is the direction of the future. Without question. Maybe Adobe can play catch up, but I doubt they will… and don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think Flash will go away. After all, there are a lot of people who have build careers learning Flash scripting. It is my belief though that from a technology standpoint, Flash will just continue to slip further behind.

Then again, part of the reason that Flash development is not better is because Adobe has held a near monopoly for so long. Perhaps now that there is truly viable competition, we’ll see great improvements on both sides. Competition is always good!

There won’t be a browser war, really. I see ASP.Net developers adopting Silverlight over Flash because they already know how to program Silverlight if they do .Net. Microsoft doesn’t do things better, they make things easier for developers (and hopefully end users, but debatable).

Flash will be included with IE, I’m sure. But, if you’re a development house that is starting new additions and work in .Net, I don’t see why you’d choose Flash over Silverlight after the 2.0 release.

This brings me back to the days when .Net first came out (1.0-yuk) and everyone laughed because it was esentially “a broken version of java for MS developers”. That lasted maybe 2 years before .Net became a dominent force. I see this over-taking Flash in the next year or so unless Flash changes to do their coding in Java instead of action script (and a paradigm shift in how Flash is developed to be more OO-friendly).

In the end, the client doesn’t care what their app is developed in. They just want it quick and pretty.

I’d like to throw up that it’s not so much as the market penetration as far as raw percentage, but the reach – the platforms it runs on that will be the big thing.

the last thing we need is the browser wars-like versioning all over again.

and while a certain Microsoft employee I know may bleat on about Apple being a rounding error in Microsoft’s eyes, the holy grail is (for me) cross-platform usability…

… and that goes for AIR too.

No they are great today. AS3 is the only possible way for 3d in flash to be usable. Silverlight doesn’t stand a chance until it has the same and the type of market penetration that Flash has, which might be never.

I am just tracking these two technologies as a developer/architect and seeing what they can do. I welcome competition and it would be wise of Silverlight to adopt similar frameworks that allow for developers to easily develop on either platform. Much like Java did for C# with kits like NUnit, NDoc, NAnt, etc.

Why? Do you have difficulties using those technologies today?

And what probability do you assess the chance that any such future plugin will be kept updated on 85% of the world’s machines?

jd/adobe