I’m a Flash developer with prior .NET experience and a traditional CS background. I’ve looked at Silverlight. You can tell by the way the libraries and development environments are set up that it’s geared towards pre-existing .NET developers. Whereas Flash is geared towards designers who picked up programming, WPF/Silverlight is designed purely for traditional programmers. That’s why Flash development is so easy to pick up–it’s pragmatic. Not so with the .NET framework. It’s a behemoth designed for general programming. You can make almost anything with .NET. RIAs are just an add-on. There’s no way a Flash designer/developer without traditional CS experience can pick it up. But as you rightly concluded, MS is not aiming for Flash developers with Silverlight. There are a lot more .NET programmers than Flash developers.

I was a Visual Studio C guy for many years before switching to Flash/Flex. Visual Studio is a great development environment. It took me a while to get into Eclipse, and I still like VS more than Eclipse.

If I could do my Flex and ASP.NET development with the same platform, I’d be happy guy.

The realism is that Adobe currently has nothing to offer developers (not just c# ones).

AJAX has been availible in some for for years, and is not as popular as many of the agencies would have us believe. I know a huge number of websites that have had usability issues with it (users apparently like/are used to the page reloading); not to mention that it starts to narrow again the number of browsers your websites can successfully load for. this ‘widespread’ AJAX rollout is just like the widespread ‘must use flash’ craze of crica 1998-9, and will die down sooner rather than later.

Flash does a number of things brilliantly, it really does. But it also does somethigns really badly; well not badly, just not as good as technology thats build for that specific purpose. Apart from Adobe itself, it doubt any big company uses the crazy Flash/Flex/FlashServer based model for anything other than it’s adverts.

C#, Php, C compile to make MUCH faster WebServices, can handle more data, and can manipulate it in a much faster way. So why would any right minded developer give up writing better code, in a more stable language, with a wider background, with transferable skills, to write in a closed and specific platform? Especially if they have to use a program aimed at designers, that works alot worse than the developement suite they themselves used 5 years ago?

The answer is that they wont. There is not carrot, and there is no stick. And thats why there is currently a HUGE gap in the market for Flash/Flex Developers across the globe. Unless you come from a Creative/Flash/Flex/Agency background, where would you have learnt the skills required? no-where.

Adobe, and to be fair Macromedia before it, has a nice learning path for people to move from Design > Flash > Flash Development. There is no option as a developer, because all the product suites are set up in a counter productive way for us. They’re not bad products (far far from it), but they are bad for developing.

For all that Microsoft may not understand designers, Adobe REALLY doesn’t understand developers.

I dont think Microsoft is building a Flash Killer because i dont think it’s possible for Flash to be killed. It’s become a cornerstone of the ‘web’ technology. But with Silverlight Microsoft is giving non-creative people a way to create the program they want, without having to be reliant on creatives. It’s my opinion that this will solve way more problems than it creates, with microsoft going after a different market than Adobe.

Oh, and for everyone who thinks that Microsoft is being all evil etc. lets not forget that Adobe tried to do exactly the same thing not that long ago. Who remembers LIVEMOTION?

As a general rule of thumb I usually stick with the development tools provided by the manufacturer of the development language I’m using. i.e. Coldfusion = Dreamweaver. That way I can always be assured I am keeping up with the latest trends and making sure I am using “what most people are using” for my desired language. This can be especially helpful when browsing online forums for help when you get stuck on a particular issue.

I’m sure MS will see a lot of .NET people using their stuff, but I would be curious to see what percentage of other types of developers make the switch.

That’s a great point–it looks as though Microsoft has paved a yellow brick road which leads web developers to windows development. According to the Silverlight website, developers can use their existing skills in Javascript and XHTML. It even highlights the ability to integrate with PHP and Apache. Once these developers get the hang of working with Silverlight, not only will they realize they can build WPF apps for windows, they’ll also see how much more powerful WPF is. The problem is, the power comes at the cost of the app being cross-platform.

I personally think we’ll see the two technologies co-existing for a long time. Michael’s right. It’s a great time to be a developer.

I think Adobe needs Flex to have more Visual Studio elements before they can feasibly chase .net developers. If the average .net developer looked at FB2 now they might say it looks like VS 4 years ago. If nothing else, thank God AJAX may soon dwindle in numbers. It’s like Flash in 1998 when everybody needed a Flash site no matter what the cost or ROI. Now it’s AJAX, not that it doesn’t have its place…it’s just highly over used for RIAs.

Now Flex/Flash and VS/Silverlight are reinventing the RIA world - it’s a great time to be a developer no matter which platform you prefer.

Thanks for the detail in your post. I’m curious to learn more on how the two can work together.