Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 delivers decent alternative to Adobe

A difficult act to swallow

By Scott Gilbertson, 8th May 2009

Review Silverlight's future looks bright, which is just as well.

The initial release of Microsoft media player for the browser lacked many of the features Flash had offered for years. Version 1.0 was really little more than a dressed up beta and, while the current release is an improvement, it still lacks many advanced capabilities that have seen Flash set the standard.

Silverlight 3.0, released as a beta recently, promises to put Microsoft's player on a nearly level playing field with Adobe's Flash framework. Silverlight 3.0 brings a staggering amount of improvements to the table with new APIs, audio codecs and features for video such as Smooth Streaming, H264 and AAC, and hardware-based graphics acceleration.

But how easy is it to develop in Silverlight? And how much has Microsoft closed the feature gap with Adobe's Flash platform? I've been taking the Silverlight 3.0 beta for a spin.

The test track was a photo gallery I built using Microsoft's IronPython that contained 40 photos pulled off of Flickr and served up using a local Ning server. I picked this project because the basic mechanics of a slideshow such as loading images from XML and cross fading them are something I've done a plenty of times using Flash over the years, so this made comparisons relatively easy.

From the development IDE to the massive load of new APIs, Silverlight 3.0 is designed to make developers' lives easier, and that's an important part of Microsoft's strategy because many web developers remain wary of Silverlight's primary development environment - the Microsoft family of .NET languages.

Give us the tools

For newcomers the .NET experience can be quite a bit more complicated than typical web development tools like JavaScript or ActionScript, which powers Adobe's Flash platform. Although it's probably a bit easier, you need not be a .NET expert to build a Silverlight app.

Using the .NET framework means Silverlight 3.0 offers more robust programming tools than Flash developers have access to. Visual Studio 2008, the primary IDE for Silverlight, blows Adobe's Flash IDE out of the water. Of course most Flash developers have long since moved to outside tools like Eclipse and there are also Eclipse plug-ins for working with Silverlight.

The biggest flaw in the Flash IDE is that it basically encourages bad code, you can bury code in a literally infinite number of places - external files, movie clips, timeline frames, frames within movie clips. It gets ugly very fast. Visual Studio 2008 integrates nicely with Subversion and other version-control systems so your code is organized in a logical way from the beginning, making it easier to update, maintain and share with other developers.

There is no frame-based animation, so it works more the way programmers are accustomed to working - with a collection of files compiled into a finished app.

The other thing you get with Silverlight is access to "real" programming languages. Sure Adobe's ActionScript is capable of creating some powerful apps, but Flash and even the Flex framework lack the sophistication and maturity you'll find in the .NET framework. Silverlight also offers a much wider range of development tools - Silverlight apps can be built with anything from C to Ruby.

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Posted Wednesday 20th May 2009 00:01 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Microsoft Smooth Streaming

Sounds an awful lot like Dynamic Streaming that was introduced in Flash Media Server 3.5.

Posted Monday 18th May 2009 15:25 GMT

Inachu

So does this give me an option to print?

Will I be able to print a Microsoft document as a silverlight app?

If so and if it is FREE then this will already be better than paying $600 to print as PDF.

Or is i t $300? Its just a document exachange!... Adobe wants to strip your wallet bare.

Posted Monday 18th May 2009 08:30 GMT

John Smith

@Barney Carroll

"when submitting a project proposal at Microsoft you have to include a case study of how the competition have already done it. Without that, your project is deemed pointless."

This is a fascinating insight into Redmond thinking. Consider what it is saying.

They will *never* be first to market.

It's not worth doing *unless* someone else has done it already.

Not exactly Bell Labs. The notion of Microsoft *ever* coming up with a truly original, possibly unique (and actually wanted) product idea is absurd. MS seems to hire original researchers on a fairly regular basis. I wonder when they find out their most original thinking is actually *certain* to go nowhere, or do they get told up front that it'll go in an archive in case someone else decides to do it and they want to respond quickly. Given that background I suspect licensing some IP your team has developed inside MS and spinning off as a separate company might be quite challenging. MS is a jealous god. About as likely as King Herod setting up a planned parenthood clinic in fact.