End of the line for Silverlight? I for one would not mind

Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing strategy on the Silverlight web technology.

When first announced Silverlight was portrayed as a rival to Flash and key to getting Microsoft software running on many different devices.

Now Microsoft is slowing Silverlight development and turning its attention to web standards such as HTML5.

Silverlight will remain as a way to get apps running on Windows phone 7.

The strategy shift emerged as a result of an interview that Bob Muglia, Microsoft's head of servers and tools division, gave at the company's Professional Developers Conferenc

BBC News - Coders decry Silverlight change

I was so excited when I first started looking at Silverlight 3. "Introducing Silverlight 3" from Microsoft Press is probably one of the few technology books I have read cover to cover. Then I started to play around with it. In short, it stinks. Silverlight 3 can't even touch Flash 3, the interface is terrible and tool is so complex. I think only a .NET developer could get anything much out if and it utterly lacks Flash's intuitive interface and use.

Frankly I am of the opinion that Microsoft was wasting its time with Silverlight, that it would take Microsoft almost a decade to get it anywhere near the level of Flash. And Flash best period is probably over. From what I have seen and heard about HTML 5 its hard to see the real value of having to get a plugin at all. In 2002 Flash was pretty amazing, but it probably is time to embrace an open browser standard for defining rich multimedia.

My vote, Microsoft should probably just drop Silverlight entirely and make a deal with Adobe to create a Flash with .NET offering.

Flash vs. Silverlight

Well I guess I have to be honest. I have been using Flash since the first release and have watched the product mature. I have been using Silverlight for about a year now, with my use picking up in the past few months.

How do they compare, sadly for Microsoft they don't. Silverlight, even using Expressions, requires a great deal of coding skills to get anything to work, and very quickly even a fairly simple animation or interface becomes a confused mass of XAML. The clean interface with Flash allows developers to manage vast amounts more complexity.

Just to stage a single repeating animation in Silverlight is a mind dulling piece of complexity. You keep asking yourself why they did it this way? Going from Flash, where you get an easy story board tool the drives the site and the ability to make scenes, you will find Expression confusing.

Probably a key indicator is how I learned. I learned Flash mostly by just playing around with it. Sure I got some books but really 90% of what I learned about Flash was because the interface was so obvious. And it was fun to play with and you could get results easy. And this was back in 1999 when it was not obvious what the tool was trying to do.

Silverlight Expressions on the other hand requires I keep the manual at my side constantly. This is with a full knowledge of what the final output will be.

Perhaps the worst part for me so far has been getting the animations to actually work. In Flash animations just start if you want them too, its like getting pregant if your Roman Catholic. So far in Expressions I have had to make changes to the XAML code setting a storyboard start object. This is not only confusing it then breaks the Expressions interface and makes it impossible for me to add to the existing storyboard without making the changes by hand to the XAML code. There may be an easier way to do this but I have not read that far in the manual.

Compound this with the fact that everyone has the flash plugin installed, Flash can run against Java and PHP back-ends, and Flash can be used by designers as well as programmers and Silverlight can only be used by developers; well lets say if you have existing Flash projects going keep them Flash.

I would imagine that at present SilverLight should be limited to the following:

1. Full Microsoft implementations
2. Simple user interfaces
3. Intranets and other controlled platforms.

All other situations should stick with Flash.