Right now, zero percent of them use Silverlight."Ĭhabot said he's eager to see competition for Flash, but what he's seen so far of Silverlight and the Expression toolset supporting it doesn't impress him. "One hundred percent of the people they're targeting with this use Flash. "This is a tougher sell than Flash," said freelance developer Michael Chabot, who stopped by to check out a Silverlight demo on the TechEd show floor. Flash also runs on aging browsers and on Linux, a platform Microsoft isn't planning to support for Silverlight, which will work on Macs and PCs running Internet Explorer 6 or 7 or modern versions of Firefox or Safari. Flash's greatest strength is its universality: More than 95 percent of Internet-enabled PCs worldwide include the Flash Player, according to Adobe research. Since we're a Microsoft shop, I can see us redoing our entire Web site in this."īut other Flash programmers won't be so easily converted. Net developer for the last five years, so it would be great to be able to apply those skills. "It looks a lot easier to do things with Silverlight than in Flash. "One of the things I didn't like about Flash was the debugging and scripting. From what he's seen of Silverlight tool and programming model, he expects it to be easier to use than Flash's. A self-described "old-school Flash programmer," Nowick would prefer to never deal with Flash again. "I'm itching to get started," said Jon Nowick, a systems engineer with logistics software maker Coyote Logistics in Lake Forest, Ill. Net developers to work with Silverlight using tools they're already familiar with. Silverlight's programming model supports Visual Basic, C# and a number of dynamic languages, including Python and Ruby, while Microsoft's Visual Studio and Expression IDEs will allow. It aims to best Flash in two ways: By offering better-looking, more advanced display and interactive functionality, and by featuring better tooling support. Silverlight is a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) system that powers Vista. A recap of slides and demos first shown at Microsoft's Mix07 show last month, the Silverlight session showcased the technology that Microsoft is relying on to bring its technology platform beyond the operating system and into the Web browser. Now available in beta, Silverlight is slated for a 1.0 release this summer and is already drawing strong interest from developers.Īttendees at Microsoft's TechEd 2007 conference in Orlando, Fla., crowded into a packed Silverlight overview session Monday evening, led by Developer Division General Manager Scott Guthrie.
Yet Microsoft's Silverlight stands to give Flash a run for its market share. Adobe's ubiquitous Flash has never had serious competition, which allowed it to become the dominant technology for Web multimedia, even though its complexity causes some headaches for developers.
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