Thoughts on Silverlight
Posted by Eric Polerecky in silverlightOct 7th, 2009 | no responsesIn a recent post Jamie Kosoy, who I believe is a flash developer, posted his thoughts on his first Silverlight project. I’m also green to Silverlight and just finished my first project. I’ll save the post about my thoughts for another day; but I wanted to add my two cents regarding Jamie’s observations.
Timeline animation is different.
Flash uses a key frame based animation framework, Silverlights animation is based on time. Seems simple, and as someone coming from jQuery heavy development it was, but I can see how it would take a second too understand.
Silverlight is the better videoplayer solution
Adaptive streaming is amazing. The power to stream a single feed (HD) and have it chunked up into bit size bits for clients of all connection speeds to render with as much bandwidth/gpu power they have can’t be overstated.
XAPs aren’t fun to load…
Building even the simplest of applications without Prism, and soon MEF, is like coding with one hand. Yeah; you can do it but its hard, painful and frustrating. I hear parts of Prism are being pulled into SL4, I’ve voting for regions, modules, and events.
Classes can get really messy
C# is powerful; with great power comes great responsibility. 
Building on OS X is critical.
I believe you can use MonoDevelop and Moonlight to develop silverlight applications on a mac. (Alpha)
Learning C# and Blend is empowering
C# Yes, Blend Yes, Declarative Programming in XAML – Big Fat No – Web ASP.NET Webforms. It causes more problems then it solves.
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