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My company want to develop an online multitouch scrumboard for our scrumteams. We are still in doubt between flex and silverlight as platform for the application. (don't want to fire a hole new flex vs. silverlight discussion again) Installation rate & platform independence are not critical to us, because it's just for teammembers and only windows 7 enables multitouch events in flash or silverlight.
We would like some pros/cons specifically for this project (multitouch, rich user interface, integration with backends).
Our first pros/cons overview:
Pros Silverlight
More experience with silverlight / .net in our company
Multi-theading
One Integrated Visual Studio for All Development
Expression Blend
Easy unit testing
more intuitive and powerful xaml
Cons Silverlight
less platforms
less controls
Pros Flash
Balance the experience or products in our company (.net/silverlight & flex)
independent platform
lots of default controls / easy customizing controls
better template & css support
Cons Flash
can't combine default gestures at the same time
no other languages
no multi-threading
expensive tools
Thanks for any advise!
Assuming either could do the job, the decision on what technology to choose will more likely depend on either your company's in-house skills or if you intend to contract it out.
If you are an existing Flex shop you will probably develop it in Flex to leverage the existing skills, unless you find one of the missing features is a show-stopper (multi-touch?).
IMHO: if you have any Silverlight skills in-house, or intend to outsource it (and you want serious back-end integration), the Microsoft stack will make life very easy. Although there is a learning curve for Silverlight, RIA services alone is worth the effort for client/server apps.
It really sounds like you have done your research, and I certainly dont want to start a flame war here either, but ALL of the pros for flash are also pros for Silverlight. There really are plenty of controls available out there for Silverlight.
One thing to think about too, is the Multitouch support in Windows 7, I dont know about Flex but Silverlight 4.0 has the full API support for it, which makes life very easy when developing multitouch apps. There is the Surface pack for Windows 7 which has extra API's around multitouch development, and its very nice.
Im obviously a Silverligh guy, but no multi-threading in Flash sounds like a big deal breaker to me, how do you access data and do background processing in Flash without locking up the UI thread?
The whole TDD approach is also a big one for me, the tooling around testing and the like is a big benefit (which you did mention)...
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Having experience in java (awt and swing) and also in html and javascript I have moved and in my new country found a job in a consulting company as a developer.
I also had experience doing some stuff in c#, but never touched the GUI part.
I have seen that the most of our clients are using .net, so I have decided to update my knowledge in .net and also learn about the GUIs while I have no assigned client.
But my problem is that for the GUI part I can see there is:
Windows forms
Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF)
WinRT
Universal Windows Platform (UWP)
asp.net
I understand all of those are not the same, some are compatible with each other (winform and WPF) and others are not. Syntaxis is different and also the elements available to create the GUI. I have searched and even coded some basic examples and found out even the way to program (events vs databinding) changes a lot. I also read several discussions about the pros and cons for each one.
Now, taking into account my context (big company, not a startup) which one of the above technologies should I focus into? and by this I mean: Which one has a bigger marketshare in 2016 or will have more action in the near future (I know it's impossibe to predict technology in 10 years but lets say 2-3 years). Is there any statistics or any official position from Microsoft about wich one will be the standard?
Thank you for taking the time to answer.
Edit: For those who didn't understand and are down voting my question saying is opinion based: I am not asking for which one you prefer. I am asking is there's some statistics or an official position from Microsoft about this.
Some of you say you cannot compare different technologies because it is like to compare programming languages. This has been done, because I am not asking to compare the technology itself but the marketshare. If you want to compare javascript with .net and abap MARKETSHARE you can use the tiobe index.
If you dont know the answer simply do not say anything, but not pretend people cannot ask things you don't know about.
Edit2: Finally I found what I was looking for.
For desktop application
42% use Windows Forms, 46% WPF and 8% UWP
More data available at http://www.telerik.com/campaigns/devcraft/net-developer-report-for-2016
WinForms is very old technology, so better choose something new.
If talk about vacancies now, I think that ASP.Net is leader. What would be in future - have no idea. Azure? ASP.Net Core?
WinRT (Windows Store 8.1 Apps) and UWP are have much in common but not extermely popular yet. Advantage is that you can write your apps already for desktop, phone, XBox, raspberry pi and more devices.
WinRT Windows 8 Apps are depricated.
WPF is nice. Better start learn .Net Core Apps (they are crossplatform)
Xamarin crossplatform apps are also popular now. You can write C# apps for Windows, iOs and Android.
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Does Adobe recommend we use Flex or HTML5 for our enterprise application development?
In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development. We also know that, currently, Flex has clear benefits for large-scale client projects typically associated with desktop application profiles.
Given our experiences innovating on Flex, we are extremely well positioned to positively contribute to the advancement of HTML5 development, starting with mobile applications. In fact, many of the engineers and product managers who worked on Flex SDK will be moving to work on our HTML efforts. We will continue making significant contributions to open web technologies like WebKit & jQuery, advance the development of PhoneGap and create new tools that solve the challenges developers face when building applications with HTML5.
is it a positive or negitive for the flex i am a flex developer and i just want to know that weather i have future in flex please geeks answer to my question.....
thank you
Flex is now becoming part of apache http://incubator.apache.org/projects/flex.html and no one can really tell where the party is going at. But there is a huge interest as far as i can tell in not only keeping Flex alive, but also making it more mature.
From the blog post by Adobe http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html
Note the second part of the answer.
> Does Adobe recommend we use Flex or HTML5 for our enterprise application development?
In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for
enterprise application development. We also know that, currently, Flex
has clear benefits for large-scale client projects typically
associated with desktop application profiles.
Given our experiences innovating on Flex, we are extremely well
positioned to positively contribute to the advancement of HTML5
development, starting with mobile applications. In fact, many of the
engineers and product managers who worked on Flex SDK will be moving
to work on our HTML efforts. We will continue making significant
contributions to open web technologies like WebKit & jQuery, advance
the development of PhoneGap and create new tools that solve the
challenges developers face when building applications with HTML5.
> You said that you believe HTML is the “long-term solution for
enterprise applications” – can you clarify this statement?
HTML5 related technologies (comprising HTML, JavaScript and CSS) are
becoming increasingly capable, such that we have every reason to
believe that advances in expressiveness (e.g. Canvas), performance
(e.g. VM and GPU acceleration in many browsers) and
application-related capabilities (e.g. offline storage, web workers)
will continue at a rapid pace. In time (and depending upon your
application, it could be 3-5 years from now), we believe HTML5 could
support the majority of use cases where Flex is used today.
However, Flex has now, and for many years will continue to have,
advantages over HTML5 for enterprise application development – in
particular:
Flex offers complete feature-level consistency across multiple
platforms The Flex component set and programming model makes it
extremely productive when building complex application user interfaces
ActionScript is a mature language, suitable for large application
development Supporting tools (both Adobe’s and third-party) offer a
productive environment with respect to code editing, debugging and
profiling Our announcements relating to changes in the way Flex SDK is
developed do not change the fundamental value-add of Flex or make
HTML5 suddenly more capable than it was last week.
We intend to make investments in HTML-related technologies, so that we
can help advance HTML5 to make it suitable for enterprise
applications.
Is Silverlight just basically Microsoft's version of Adobe Flash? If so, I've read over the years that Flash is very SEO unfriendly (SE bots see it as a blank page, I've been told), and some browsers don't like Flash too much. Are the same things true for Silverlight?
I just have a company website I made in Visual Studio 2010 / vb / asp.net 4.0.
Do you have to be an experienced programmer to work with Silverlight, or is there a nice GUI to help out newbies? I'm just trying to find out, now that I've downloaded 5.0, if the value of learning it is worth it. Thanks!
Silverlight is a lot of things, in summary you could say that it's a light-weight .NET run-time, a subset of WPF and a capable video player.
Silverlight brings XAML to the web, yes, but more importantly it appears that it's becoming more and more a framework for deploying rich business applications over the web, but not through the browser.
Some would probably argue that Silverlight (along with Flash) is dead, and that the HTML5 is the way forward. That might be true, under certain circumstances but Silverlight has a lot of cool data binding tricks as well as a very capable retained mode render which is very suitable for business GUIs.
I would argue that the choice wheter to invest in Silverlight as a technology or not is a question you should ask yourself, basically what's your reach? e.g. I would not develop Facebook using Silverlight because Facebook has to be everywhere. If you wanna go social, then the web is ubiquitous. But if you have a customer base that acknowledge Microsoft, and already run Windows everywhere, the kind of headway you can make with Silverlight is quite astonishing.
I urge you to look at some Silverlight demos to gain a better feel for what Silverlight has to offer. Then to build great Silverlight applications you need to invest time in learning, things like XAML and MVVM (using a lot of data binding).
Silver light is Microsoft's option or alternative to adobe flash its provides user with the feature of developing Application that are rich in UI we do have tools that enable us to develop appealing UI that is Expression Blend. SO there is lot to learn in it but talking about the future of this technology i doubt as after HTML 5.0 which enables us to get most of the features of silver-light i don't think any one will be interested to get an add on plugin to silver-light to achieve same result so its up to u if u want to learn it as some new technology its good but as a future its not that great.
SEO friendliness depends on the amount of effort your developers are ready to put into it, Silverlight and Flash both. Silverlight has a framework (Navigation) allowing deep linking that can help for instance.
The tool chain is top class, you get the arguably best IDE (Visual Studio 2010), and a cool designer friendly tool (Blend) that enables, among other things, non-code oriented development, or put the other way, a designer friendly workflow. The XAML+data binding approach is also much more productive than most of the competing alternative (personal opinion, but shared by many developers).
The value of using and of learning Silverlight both is very dependent on your company's objective and skill set. If you already have proficient .NET developers, intend to target Windows Phone or Windows 8 or even do some WPF (Windows desktop counterpart of Silverlight), the learning is either small or a good one. If you're a pure web shop, valuing multiplatform, needing iOS/Android/etc... support, you're probably better off with HTML+CSS+JS.
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What's the advantage of one over the other? I am so tempted to implement everything in silverlight now, so is ASP.NET, in particular, with Ajax, going to be dead?
For an enterprise solution especially, with 100+ views and 1000+ pages, is it still feasible?
Why isn't silverlight adopted that much by most enterprises? It is mostly used for videos and galleries, etc.
Cheers
Two completely different tools.
They aren't even competitors, much less one killing the other off. Silverlight just came out, requires browser plugins and a client-side runtime, and only has a fraction of the .Net framework available to it. Enterprise hasn't adopted it yet because most clients are wary about having to roll out browser plugins (anyone remember IE5 and ActiveX?) and still consider Flash a more mature and viable way to do client-side browser apps.
ASP.Net works with any web browser, is well-established, has access to the full .Net framework and the web environment, and can easily handle the load that you are sort-of describing, as long as you know how to set it up properly.
Silverlight is a client-side based solution. It's a miniature .NET runtime and Windows Presentation Foundation package, rolled into one and made (somewhat) cross-platform.
Silverlight won't work on your iPhone, it won't work on really old PCs, etc... You can use it in the enterprise, but if you're doing an enterprise based app based on it, you should probably just develop your stuff in WPF and get all of the features of .NET.
Silverlight isn't adopted much because either A) enterprises are using Windows Forms or WPF because they can or B) because it's relatively new to the game, and it remains to be seen how much traction it will get in the marketplace vs. Flash and Java.
Some advantages/disadvantages:
Silverlight
Lower installed base (although increasing at a good pace), due to necessary VM.
You can program in one language, any of the .Net languages supported for Silverlight
Equivalent apps may perform better on the Silverlight VM due to compiled code nature.
ASP.Net
Higher installed base, due to apps being executed on browser, no extra VM needed.
Ususally use multiple languages for programming - C#/VB.Net, CSS, JavaScript, HTML (there are tools that allow you to circumvent this such as the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
Equivalent functionality web apps may perform more poorly due to interpreted nature of code executed by the browser.
Why isn't Silverlight adopted by enterprise? Because most computers would need a client installation to view the site. Flash is widespread (most computers have at least some version). HTML and Javascript are even more commonly supported. But Silverlight would definitely be an annoyance which would lose some users.
That said, we use some Silverlight on our internal apps. We have a portal/intranet which runs in a controlled environment and we use some Silverlight there. But Flash and Ajax on the public site.
I can do some amazing things faster in Silverlight than with ASP.net, which would be perfect for a targeted population like enterprise customers. I can't run Silverlight off of my Iphone but I have accessed some of my ASP.net apps from it so that's one example where ASP.net wins.
I'd say it will grow but even at version 3, it's a jumble of codeplex projects and 3rd party controls.
I'm looking for a solution now for drag and drop treeview which I can do easily in AJAX but having trouble finding a solution with silverlight and I've tried on my own.
I would learn both and mix them.
I've targeted certain areas of my personal sites for Silverlight, but am wary of overloading a user with too much. For a blog, for example, I wouldn't redo the whole site in Silverlight--that's overkill--and similar to how you wouldn't have (or shouldn't have) an entire site done in Flash. No matter what, some people will have it blocked or not installed at all, and why exclude potential users/clients/readers?
There's the fact that clients need the runtime installed, which means I'm hesitant to convert any critical functionality over to Silverlight for fear someone just won't have or want to install the runtime.
As far as professionally, we are moving forward with web apps that at least partially make use of Silverlight, but the targeted audience is fairly well-controlled in that we can tell them, "You'll need to have Silverlight installed", and we can reasonably be certain they'll comply. For internal tools where it makes sense we are 100% Silverlight all the way as we have total control over that audience. Again, though, the usage has to make sense.
I am tempted to say go with silverlight, its installbase is still low but its because there still isn't very many silverlight apps out there. It is still very easy to install(not as easy as flash though) so I dont see that as a big issue. Html was never ment to be used for applications so a silverlight app is far better suited for application programming. This is of course only my own opinion but I am sure the direction is more, bigger and higher quality applications running on web and not least apps running on mobiles (Silverlight is also coming to mobiles)
I think we need a better programming model for web applications to keep productivity up when creating more complex web applications and silverlight is certainly a step up from html and javascript.
This is not a pure technical question, but I believe answers will help the RIA community.
We are a software development company working on development of a stock trading product. We chose to use Adobe Flex (in mid of 2008) due to its browser penetration and its maturity relative to Silverlight. We already developed the system, and we are quite happy with it.
Now we are planning to launch the second version of our product, and it will feature a much more advanced user interface -- basically a framework of dockable windows and panes as in Visual Studio 2005 and onward, etc. We searched on the internet and found that the market of 3rd party components for Adobe Flex is still very small, but for Microsoft's Silverlight there are many advanced 3rd party components available e.g. data grids, docking frameworks, etc.
When can we expect the same type of components in Adobe Flex? What do experts think if we develop to the new version of Silverlight (Expertise in Adobe Flex vs. Silverlight is not an issue at the moment, assuming we have to develop everything from scratch).
The launch of next version is expected to be in mid 2010. Any feedback regarding this is highly appreciated.
I can tell you from direct experience that Flex is a more productive platform. I work for a large RIA consultancy that builds a large number of apps with both Flex and Silverlight and we see that equivalent functionality in SL takes about 10-20% longer to develop than in Flex. Data binding support in Flex is significantly easier to use than in SL. I can also tell you that a suitably-experienced Flex developer could easily build a MDI toolkit in Flex with a couple of weeks of development time. So I would advise you to consider hiring experienced Flex developers rather than shelling out money for SL components.
SL does have a big advantage in that C# can be used on both the client and server and business logic can be reused in both tiers. This is significant and should not be discounted. ActionScript doesn't have a server-side counterpart and lacks this ability, although Flex does play nicely with a number of different backend technologies, especially Java using BlazeDS. Silverlight services integration has a variety of options on the .NET side (see Bart's comment below) while Flex can use very performant AMF in both RPC and data push (messaging). BlazeDS is free and open source.
I also think basing your decision for a development platform solely off the availability of 3rd party components is not a great idea. Putting that aside, MS platforms have always had a huge number of component development shops and a wide variety of components to choose from. It's likely even with a smaller market share that SL will have a bigger selection of 3rd party components than Flex moving forward.
Finally, I don't think MS is going to be giving up on Silverlight anytime soon. They are aggressively developing new features for SL4 and the Blend tool offers some innovations for designer/developer interactions that even Adobe is struggling to match with their new Catalyst tool.
If you have to make the decision today, I'd say go with Flex, especially for a public-facing application where you don't want to lose users because they can't or won't install the SL plugin. In 12-18 months I'm confident that SL will give Flex a much bigger run for its money but I don't think it's there, yet.
Although I cannot give you the desired answer, I hope I can give you a couple of good questions and ideas that maybe help you in the process:
City Coder: Flex 3 versus Silverlight 3 in Enterprise development
Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe AIR/Flex Debate
I personally think, that Adobe Flash is going to lose a noticeable user base in the near future duo to new features in the upcoming html 5.0 standard. Furthermore I prefer the tools (Visual Studio), addons and languages (C#) over the Adobe equivalents and I would consider these superior. However I have to emphasis that this is only from my perspective.. :)
A few people in this thread assume that you can't develop Flex or Flash-based projects with Visual Studio. From 30th August, 2010 that is no longer true. You may want to look at Amethyst which is a VS visual (drag+drop) Flash Platform IDE with a multi-process debugger, IntelliSense and refactoring: http://www.sapphiresteel.com
best wishes
Huw
actually i am also thorn between the 2. in fact, i still considered Flash, but sort of struck that off because thats more for animations rather than RIAs. with Flex, theres AIR to enable deployment in both desktop and web, tho i havent tried it and dunno how easy isit to use. and i also am not sure if Silverlight can be used as a desktop app anyone?
comparing Flex and Silverlight, i dont think we shld just base our judgment on what is more widely used now. Silverlight maybe something good!
just starting exploring the 2 and find Silverlight's XAML markup more intuitive than Flex mxml. further more Silverlight will integrate with C# which is getting better with LINQ and all. so data binding, an important part of any RIA is better. for Flex, one can probably link up with something like PHP with AMF but seems abit harder from what i saw. that said i am not really familiar with both.
UPDATE: and Flex is open source now while Silverlight closed right? so Flex can be said to be cheaper to use.
One thing to consider is Microsoft's dedication to Silverlight. Silverlight is not taking off. How long are they going to stick with it? If the next version of Silverlight doesn't get significant market penetration, is Microsoft going to continue supporting it?
Even if they do stick with it, and even if it does take off, are they going to do like they did with Internet Explorer: develop it into the most awesome browser available at the time with IE6, and then coast for 5+ years and become a major thorn in developers' hides?
Silverlight doesn't have a lot to do with Windows. People using Silverlight does not make Microsoft much money. There's not an especially compelling business case for MS to push Silverlight.
Silverlight doesn't offer anything to the users that Flash doesn't. It's the users that are going to drive Silverlight adoption, and until there's a compelling case for me to install it on my computer (which it's not, incidentally), it's staying off.
Flex is a natural companion to Flash, which is one of Adobe's flagship products. Adobe's not going to drop Flex. Even if they did, it's entirely open-source, and Flex development could quite definitely proceed even if Adobe fell into the ocean tomorrow. (Flash runtime is not open source, unfortunately, but it's a quite good multiplatform implementation of a mostly open SWF standard, with open source implementations progressing)
I work in a .NET/Flash shop. We use Flex to talk to a .NET back-end. It can be a pain in the ass to get them to interoperate (although not impossible). I like .NET. It would be great to be able to develop our front-end in C#. I would love it. But we're not willing to bet the farm on Silverlight, given MS's technology parade.
One of the most important thing in our decision on our future RIA technology is RTL support (specifically Arabic). I am very disappointed to hear that Arabic(RTL) is still not supported in Silverlight 3.0, on the other hand it is now supported on Adobe Flex 4. and I don't want to apply all non-standard tricks again that we used in our existing version of application (which is based on Flex 3). so Now One problem is solved in Flex but still remains in Silverlight... and still no docking framework in Flex, so it is going to be stalemate I guess.. :).
I will keep you updated regarding any new findings of our research...
One word (or two) --> "Open-source"
The world is going open source. Think android vs apple
How will you run applications for clients on Linux platform with any amount of confidence.
Right now I am not a netflix customer because no "Moonlight" support.
I have three computers at home all running Linux (Cannot shellout money to buy Windoze license) !
Think target market (and where it will be in the next few yrs)
Flex is more compatible with browsers, as it runs on top of Flash. Silverlight, however, needs to be downloaded, which might be a problem for users behind a proxy or network (in a workplace, for example, you can't install things). Flex also has a better framework than Silverlight, so you can customize a component in a few clicks and keystrokes.
I agree with you that VS and C# are more mature than their Flex counterparts (FB3 and ActionScript, respectively), but you'll get used to it quickly.
Then again, I am a Flex developer, and not a Silverlight developer, so my opinion can be somewhat biased. However, I did choose Flex over Silverlight because I thought that it was more compatible (nearly everyone has Flash Player) and has better support than Silverlight, and I don't regret my decision thus far.
If it is a stock trading product, does it stream the stock price in real-time? If it does, the cost of streaming the data will make some difference.
Both of them support some kind of data push (RTMP vs. Socket) and smart polling (RTMPT/RTMPS vs. HttpDuplexPollingChannel).
Infrastructural cost: Flex uses LCDS/BlazeDS while Silverlight uses IIS.
Development cost: RTMP/RTMPT/RTMPS is already defined (and cannot be changed) while you need to define your own protocol for socket (you need to handle security and compression yourself)
From programming perspective, Silverlight should be better since XAML is drawing the interface and C# updates the state of XAML components. There are plenty of C# developers and Expression Studio to create the XAML components.
MXML is relative simple and you need Flash to draw the fancy UI. You can wait for Flex 4 (in beta) with FXG support, however. Then, it might get better support for third-party components.
If you have expertise on both products is hard to say, from my side having an IDE like Visual Studio is a plus (I'm a .net developer), and using the same language on server (services) and client side it's something that makes me feel quite comfortable.
I would say... go for a Proof of Concept, take a week, make two teams (same level approx.), and check in a week (without any formal testing, or formal designing) to progress in Flex and SL (for the third parties they can take advante of all the trial versions). After that week check how far the have gone and their findings.
A waste of time one week? Try to focus as a live wireframe for your final app.
Good luck
Braulio
I don't think I could speculate on when or if Flex will have a similar number of 3rd party components. Many of the Silverlight components developed by companies like Telerik and DevExpress are ports or updates of existing .NET components. You might want to do a survey of companies that develop components for other Adobe products and ask on their forums if they plan to release a Flex product. Aside from that all I have to go on is what's available today and it sounds like you've already done the research on existing technologies. Good luck!
I have worked a bit with Flex but being more .Net oriented I can't say Flex can get any close to Silverlight in terms of developing business apps. Specially with RIA Services V2 and all the suit of .Net framework and visual studio everything is so integrated and professional.
The only reason I would consider not using Silverlight is if the product has public audience and you are going to loose customers due to low penetration of silverlight.
Ther is flex dock : http://code.google.com/p/flexdock/
And there is dock able flex : http://code.google.com/p/dockableflex/