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Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

chaitanyavrk — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:10:15 GMT

Nice comparision. Anyone going to update this for the latest releases?

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

srigger — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:56:55 GMT

It is a nice table you have done here, but do you have an update to the table for Silverlight 3
because I need at good comparison between Silverlight 3 and Flash for my bachelor project
in Software Engineering ?

Kind regards
Kenneth Rasmussen

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

Tim Acheson — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:23:58 GMT

For completeness I've added a comment about SilverBoom to my blog post on Flash to Silverlight/WPF converters:-

http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/jul/convert_flash_apps_to_silverlight

I'm particularly interested in media, for example converting Flash's FLVPlayback component to Silverlight's MediaElement control and how this is handled in the conversion process. Flash's media components are so clunky, buggy, and hard to work with -- the quicker we can migrate everything to Silverlight the better. I'm bored with Flash idiosyncrasies like embedding two different Flash players on the same page and finding that for example muting one player also affects the other completely different player on the same page. When you embed a player made with Silverlight on a web page, no matter how many players you have on the same page each one is truly independent because Silverlight does it properly while Flash seems to work through a series of flimsy bolt-ons and workarounds.

Here's an example - play around with mute and pause on two players at the same time, and you'll notice how they get confused:-

http://flowplayer.org/demos/installation/multiple-players.html

I've seen developers trying desperately to manage such idiosyncrasies in Flash by working around them or calling it a feature and building on it. But if your UED team insists that this behaviour must be eliminated before a release, you're in for a real pain in the neck trying to work around the countless flaws in Flash. In a typical production-ready Flash app I sometimes end up with as many comments about bugs and workarounds (and quote a lot of code too) as I have comments about the actual application code.

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

ConVid — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:56:13 GMT

Flash to Silverlight conversion here also: SilverBoom

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

Krasshirsch — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:30:43 GMT

True, that the Flex Builder improved flash development, but compared to visual studio and blend it is still nothing but a toy.

But .. do not fear Visual Studio is here http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Adobe-Flex-Development-in-Visual

And the really good part, it's free, the VS Express edition performs nicely ;)

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

mike.chambers — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:23:11 GMT

If you dont like the Flash Authoring workflow (which is primarily designer / animator focused), then you can use Flex Builder, and have the same if not similar type of workflow that you have in Visual Studio.

mike chambers

mesh@adobe.com

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

Ade_William — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:27:43 GMT

Hi Guys,

thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter.

I was using Flash up to the release of MX 2004. I think as a developer, the biggest pain in the ass in using Flash was debugging. I have not been keeping up to date with Flash now, but back then you could embed actionscript in any of the object. that means if you have an object inside an object inside another object, chances are it'll dirve you crazy finding the script that you need to debug. I think the Development tool like VS is a lot more intuitive for me. In my opinion Flash was primarily designed for designers, not hardcore programmers, while Silverlight seems to be geared for programmers, and designers can utilize Blend.

True enough Flash has been around for a while and certainly has resolved a lot more issues than the young Silverlight, but with Silverlight Toolkit, I think Silverlight kept getting more interesting. This way the community can directly contribute as to which tool might be considered usefull and add it to the SIlverlight development process. As far as I know, Adobe has not adopted such method so the best way would probably spam them with email requesting such feature in the next version.

CMIIW

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

AlexE — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 01:14:43 GMT

Thank you Tim for the correction.

Yes, www.silverx.net is the Flash to Silverlight conversion tool I had in mind.

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

Tim Acheson — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:59:34 GMT

I believe the correct URL for this third-party Flash-to-Silverlight conversion wizard is:-

http://www.silverx.net/

I wrote a brief review of SilverX and a summary of why a Flash-to-Silverlight conversion wizard is so useful.

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

AlexE — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:23:51 GMT

You can now convert Flash code into Silverlight at www.silverx.com

Alex

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

Tim Acheson — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:13:36 GMT

Until recently the Xbox web site also only used Flash. It takes time for legacy products to be updated to use a new technology. Be patient. To take another case study, most media content on Xbox.com is now migrated to Silverlight. Although this may only be apparent to more experienced developers and system architects, there is more to the migration than web pages. There are considerations for the server architecture and many other factors too, like the ad service provider for sponsored sites many of which have themselves not yet completed the migration process.

On a much more interesting note, Silverlight 3 is now released, check out the new features!

http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/jul/silverlight_3_released

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

Psychlist1972 — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:01:12 GMT

alvirtuoso:

One BIG difference is:

msn.com uses flash instead of their own silverlight.

*yawn*

Troll elsewhere, please.

Pete

Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

alvirtuoso — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:36:44 GMT

One BIG difference is:

msn.com uses flash instead of their own silverlight.

Re: Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

bartczernicki — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:55:25 GMT

Did you look when the article was written...2007. It sucks that this page still comes up high in the rankings, because like you mention it is misinformation.

Re: Re: Silverlight vs. Flash – An Analysis Report

djeddiej — Fri, 29 May 2009 04:04:15 GMT

All the tables, as said, are pretty, but are also pretty much out of date or full of misinformation.

I am about to do a comparison presentation for a major department within the Canadian Federal Government between Silverlight and Adobe Flex/Flash, and my opinion will influence potentially what will be deployed on a large number of the Canadian government's websites.

Having used Macromedia/Adobe Flash for years and then Silverlight with its recent induction a few years ago, I can say that Microsoft has a lot to catch up upon, and is doing so with reasonable speed. However, Flash/Flex's entrenchment in the web development / design community as well as its widespread availability, support, and distribution is going to make it quite a challenge for Microsoft.

I doubt that many people actually recall that Microsoft acquired a similar "Flash Killer" tool well over a decade ago - it was called Liquid Motion Pro. Look it up. It was comparable to Flash 3 at the time. Once it was acquired, it quickly disappeared. Not a good move. One wonders what would have occured in the RIA landscape if Microsoft continued supporting Liquid Motion Pro.

Anyway, with regards to the table, Mike Chambers above mentioned most of the points that I wanted to correct regarding what the table said about Flash. I am supposing that if he wrote it in a prettier table then perhaps it would be more eye-catching to the readers of this thread.

In short - what needs to be changed in the table that irks me the most is

Flash Player 9/10 supports not only flv, but f4v (flv in industry standard H264 compliant container) quicktime mov, .mp4 etc.
debugging - insert a breakpoint, click debug, use step-into, step-over buttons, look at a properties window to see variables, watching, all that stuff is in there. just like visual studio. why not also compare expression blend into the mix? its more like flash in terms of IDE workflow.
As said many times, Actionscript is to c# as MXML is to XAML. there are two language environments.
The wide availability of Flash Video Streaming Services like Akamai, The popularity of video uploading sites like YouTube (which support flash video), the availability of Flash Media Server itself (the product that can serve video to users) makes the point of Silverlight Streaming Service more than a moot point. The developer license of Flash Media Server can even allow a small amount of streaming publically (10 users) at no cost.

It just irks me that misinformation can lead to misinformed decisions.

thanks for reading!

Edward