In the past few months, I have met people that, for one reason or the other, wanted to share their views on Silverlight. This inevitably started out with things like "It's going to kill Flash" and always continued with me throwing a very lighthearted "oh, really".
They then started claiming that Silverlight had a lot of options and possibilities that "Flash didn't have". I'll name a few of the more humorous ones.
- Silverlight can read XML documents
- Silverlight can interact with databases
- There's something new and it's called Silverlight and it'll be cool
I kid you not, those were the most serious comments I got on Silverlight. The usual "Oh, but Flash has had that since <insert random year here>" on both occasions resulted in a "Well, I must admit I don't know anything about Flash".
I don't understand people that will religiously follow any technology whatsoever. If people follow technology "M" and "M" tells its followers that their Truth is the Only Truth and the followers of "M" blatantly believe this, then I have no idea what to think of technology "M".
Technology "M" is currently holding "Dev Days" in the Netherlands. I'm almost afraid to hear the stories my colleagues will be having next week ... Probably something about Silverlight being better than AIR 
May 23rd, 2008 at 09:37
Please provide documented examples of MSFT spreading this whack.
May 23rd, 2008 at 09:48
I can admit I do not know much about silverlight on a technical level.
On that note I don’t see designers like myself that have spent years learning actionscript and related technologies on the Flash platform jumping over to silverlight and Microsoft’s design suite anytime ever.
Adobe and Macromedia (All Adobe Now) have been good to me over the years. They have enabled me to have a career I love, and in my view stuck to core technologies that they continue to improve. To Microsoft it’s just another market to get into, a product to sell. As designers all we have is our passions, and we want the companies behind the products we use to share those passions.
I do invite silverlight to race. Competition is always good. Maybe they will keep Adobe on their toes.
-Jacob
June 1st, 2008 at 11:12
Hello Jacob,
Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion. For existing Flash developers, switching to a Microsoft environment to start building Silverlight applications will be like having lived in New York and going to settle in uptown Tokyo. You’ll be able to eat, breathe and get about town as you used to but the food is different, the air smells different and even taking the subway to get somewhere is going to be tough.
But it will enable existing Microsoft Developers to build Flash-like applications in a non-Flash way in an environment and language they’re used to.
We all know Microsoft isn’t big on standards and the AJAX-kit they have for .NET isn’t a real AJAX-kit since it doesn’t support asynchronous calls (yet, AJAX stands for “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”), but that isn’t stopping Microsoft and their developers from claiming they have AJAX support. So I’m really anxious to see what Silverlight is going to turn into.Still, as yourself, I’m welcoming the competition.