Robert: Silverlight's Common Language Runtime approach rocks IMHO. You can have blazing fast Javascript, Ruby, or Python running ***in the browser***. They already have most of what Flash 10 has. But adoption will be the challenge with Flash's pervasiveness. - Dion Hinchcliffe from twhirl

"They already have most of what Flash 10 has." That's completely wrong. I'm a big fan of the CLR and think it's great but to say that Silverlight already has most of what Flash 10 has is bogus. It has almost nothing that Flash Player 10 has. The Pixel Bender stuff, hardware acceleration, text APIs, 3D stuff. WPF (the desktop runtime) has some of that but Silverlight doesn't. - Ryan Stewart

Ryan: Just can't agree, Silverlight has 3D support, excellent text APIs, much of the Pixel Bender capability, and more sophisticated coding models. True, however on the hardware acceleration . Bottom line: It's great to see what Flash 10 is doing and I'm a fan of both but both platforms have the majority of their capabilities in common. - Dion Hinchcliffe from twhirl

Dion, I think you might be talking about WPF. Read this post from an engineer on the Silverlight team - http://silverlight.net/blogs... - he describes all the current limitations in Silverlight 2 including bitmap filters, text, and local file storage. - Ryan Stewart

FLash 10 is a nice iteration of a fundementaly last gentechnology. Silverlight is very next gen (and young). The CLR is a huge win along with mature dev tools (visual studio). Flash 10 does good stuff, but it doesnt have the depth Silverlight does. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

Ryan: The 3d mystery solved, since we demo Silverlight 3D frequently: A little digging and it appears Microsoft itself doesn't offer the 3D support for Siliverlight. The 3D support that exists today is commercial and community libraries at this point, some which are very impressive. Will have to look at Flash 10's native support to compare. - Dion Hinchcliffe from twhirl

Silverlight Player's rendering quality is not upto the mark even when compared to Flash Player 9 .. so much so that Microsoft chose to build their latest site http://worldwidetelescope.org in Flash .. when you say CLR is a huge win you are trading developer comfort in exchange for the final quality of the product - Mrinal Wadhwa

Dion the kind of 3D you are referring has been done in Flash since ages .. the FP10 3D support is about natively supporting 3D in the payer .. te way WPF does on windows desktops .. silverlight does not do that - Mrinal Wadhwa

Silverlight does not do that, yet. Clearly the CLR is capable of it and clearly MS has the technology. - Soulhuntre from twhirl

Exactly !! silverlight does not do a lot of things "yet" ... a lot of the basics actually .. like decent font rendering (http://is.gd/h6t) ... like render smooth gradients .. like render animation that does't flickr (http://is.gd/h6l) and draw curves that aren't jagged (http://is.gd/h6l) .. like run the same on Mac and Windows (http://is.gd/7EF) - Mrinal Wadhwa

From the point of view of a person comfortable enough to build in either platforms, skills wise .. the only reason for me to build in silverlight today is deepzoom .. and that is a very specific use case. - Mrinal Wadhwa

I'happy for adobe that google maps has a new flash api. Silverlight is good... it's just flash is better. Why does Microsoft have such rendering problems in everything. It needs' fixin. Top priority! - DC Crowley from Alert Thingy

Mrinal the reason MSFT hasn't built all on Silverlight is not because of feature set nor maturity. The WWTelescope is an easy project for Silverlight and I don't see any of the things in that example nor in most Microsoft's Flash driven content that could not be delivered by Silverlight today. Keep in mind that there is a lot of investment done already in Flash and that will have to continue until there is another round of dev that will, if ROI permissible, build upon Silverlight in a case by case scenario. - Gilbert Corrales

There's little question that's it's David vs. Goliath when it comes to Siliverlight vs. Flash, with MS in the unusual position of playing David as the RIA community is mostly pro Adobe Flex, Air, Flash. But Silverlight is definitely innovating (powerful compiled dynamic languages, extensive XML parser, deepzoom, etc) while at the same time early in its maturity curve. It'll be years before we understand how it will shake out. But with apps like ttps://buzzword.acrobat.com/ delivering on what Siliverlight should be providing in terms of sophisticated Web apps, it'll be a long road for them. - Dion Hinchcliffe from twhirl

On the other hand it is great that both Adobe and Microsoft seem committed to keep the ball moving in the advance and fully rich interactive arena. Competition is always good and me as a technologist will support in all the ways this feature and enhancement battle to make reality all those Spielberg-like interaction realities sooner rather than later. - Gilbert Corrales

Gilbert: I agree worldwidetelescope.org could have easily been built in silverlight and and yet it wasn't and that to me feels like a lack of confidence in their own platform .. I was ready to buy the ROI argument all this while with Vista's home page and Halo3 site .. but i don't buy it for a site released a year after Silverlight's release .. microsoft needs to give me more confidence in their platform .. the places where Microsoft does use Silverlight dont give me a very good experience either - Mrinal Wadhwa

Here are examples of my bad experience with silverlight.net .. silverlight's home page http://is.gd/7EF http://is.gd/fKU - Mrinal Wadhwa

Dion: I totally agree with what you just said and I do commend Microsoft for the speed with which they are innovating with the platform .. but as you said it has a long way to go - Mrinal Wadhwa

good god, this comment stream is about as interesting as "Twitter is down again!" - metageoff

I would have been much more excited if the Sparkle/Expression technology had been applied to making authoring tools targeted at the Flash runtime rather than inventing a new runtime. CLR means nothing to me if the user experience in the player is sub-par. Actionscript 3 is a very solid and flexible programming language. Since Sparkle targets a Silverlight and I have no use for that, I'm anxiously awaiting Thermo. - Jason Wehmhoener

actually @Geoff I have founf the comments really interesting as it has been a level headed discussion about two different technologies that are only going to gain in importance the road forward. - Steven Hodson

Flash 10 is doing good stuff for sure, but Actionscript is still a horrible kludge of a language IMHO. With more and more of my corporate customers willing to move to Silverlight it is becoming less attractive deal with AS3 when I can have the CLR to work with. At this point .Net provides me tools and a great dev environment that can target the 360, my phone, the zune, the web, the mac, the PC desktop and embedded systems. If I need to do something only Flash 10 can do I would rather just build a WPF app as a software + service tool and move on. I still do AIR and Flash work for those clients that want it, but I avoid it when I can. - Soulhuntre

@Soulhuntre You have some semi-valid points but they are more about the development platform and framework rather than AS3 itself. I think AS3+mxml is far far FAR from a 'cludge of a language'. That would have been valid for <=AS2 but not AS3. I really like Silverlight but it is nowhere near as good as Flex - yet. Might get there soon and the CLR factor is a definite plus but in an increasingly non-Windowed world & outside the enterprise, users+developers will definitely find Flash the better alternative. MSFT needs to work on their support for other platforms but Adobe needs to work on the visual part of their Flex IDE.I my friend, soon am planning to write a DSL to port AS3 to the DLR and thus CLR support!!! Sponsors anyone? hehe - Kamath (ಮೆತ್ತ ಭವನ)

Semi valid? I'm moving up! :) I'm just not that impressed with AS3 as a language. mxml isn't horrible by itself bit I don't find it as elegant as the WPF stuff.At it's core, there is nothing about Silverlight that is single platform and a lot fo cross platform work already in the can... so Flash has no intrinsic advantage there. For now it has advantages and it can run on the Anti-MS sentiment for a while... but in the end it will wind up being the tool of the MS hating minority while a whole lot of work happens in Silverlight. We see this over and over. - Soulhuntre

How 'bout Flash 10 is a significant improvement with more versatility. That's my take. Silverlight is really new. Adobe is innovating and a viable competitor in a lot of spaces. - Charlie Anzman

Soulhuntre: There are two perspectives to look at this .. you look at it form what is easier to develop, while I look it as what creates a better final product ... one could surely argue that over time Silverlight will be able to create an equally good final product as Flash .. when it does I will start building for Silverlight .. until then though it does not matter to me if the Microsoft's development env/tools are slightly better - Mrinal Wadhwa from Alert Thingy

Oh and if you really feel ActionScript 3 is not very good then you might want to somehow stop the guys developing the new version of Javascript - Javascript 2 because that is essentially going to look a lot like ActionScript 3 today and we'll soon see ActionScript 3 aka EcmaScript 4 aka Javascript 2 become one of the most widely used programming languages - Mrinal Wadhwa from Alert Thingy

Promising competition for Flash is indeed a very good thing. I hope MS is not planning to acquire Adobe. It would be a good fit for them, for Flash and PDF alone. - Ole Begemann

I don't need to stop anyone from developing anything. A lot of bad technology gets to widespread use (look at Javascript v1!). Anyone is free to use anything they want. Ajax aside Javascript is itself pretty kludgy... a new version won't change that either :) - Soulhuntre

I do see what you are saying about user experience... but I am unconvinced. The stuff that rightly belongs in Flash could happen in Silverlight today and the rest of it is basically begging to be a client + services app anyway. The beautiful thing about having two strong contenders is that the battle makes both better. - Soulhuntre

am curious as to why AS3 particularly. AS3 looks like a C# fanboy was asked to architect it so considering u r all for .Net (and presumably C#) , curious as to what about the language bothers you. Disclaimer: I work as a designer in a hard-core .Net shop :) - Kamath (ಮೆತ್ತ ಭವನ) from twhirl

Soulhuntre: isn't user experience the key feature in an RIA ? .. the R there stands for a rich experience .. so if one RIA platform can facilitate a better experience for the users of apps built with it .. then that RIA platform in my opinion is superior - Mrinal Wadhwa

Soulhuntre: you are absolutely right about competition .. its good for everybody .. I dont think the traction RIAs are getting today would have been the same if Adobe would have been the only player .. also Silverlight is great because it enables thousands of developers who are already comfortable with microsoft's development technologies to explore the RIA space - Mrinal Wadhwa

Kamath: actually AS3 feels more like a Java fanboy was asked to build it .. C# also feels the same way to me :) ... that said there are some things that cannot be done in AS3 today ... private constructors, method overloading, operator overloading etc. that make it slight less attractive to developers .. although as you said its very similar to Java and C# .. although there are some differences, these differences are not huge - Mrinal Wadhwa