Silverlight - Flash Killer or a Flash in the Pan? (Part 2)

Posted by Phil Martin

Last time we talked about Microsoft's first release of the supposed 'Flash killer', Silverlight. Silverlight 1.0, while interesting, came up short of matching Flash's capabilities. But - over 1 year later in June of 2008, Silverlight 2 Beta was released. "Beta" is Microsoft's way of saying 'Hey, all you masochistic nerds out there, test our half-baked products and tell us what we need to fix - and we're not going to pay you a dime.' Which is not much better than Version 1.0 of anything Microsoft releases. So, I digress. Again.

But, behold - what is this? Native support for real languages like C#? (Notice I did not mention VB.Net, because VB.Net has so many evil carry-overs from VB that it's more of a handicap than a help. But there I go again.) I can code in my favorite language, not have to deal with Flash's "we hate developers" mentality, and still look really, really cool??? But - C# is a .Net language, and we all know (well, us geeks know) that the desktop CLR requires the 20MB monster download to install (if you don't know what the CLR is, think solid, heavy foundation - every house has to have one). The biggest bane for us .Net developers writing Windows applications is that .Net is not on every computer, and who is going to download a 20MB file just to get a really, really cool web page? Bill Gates does NOT get a vote here. The answer? Holy Roach, Batman! Silverlight comes with its own embedded CLR! All in a 4.6MB package! That's still 3 times bigger than Flash (Version 9 is 1.5MB - but the version 10 beta is reported to be over 5MB!). Point awarded to Silverlight for making development brain-dead easy without any penalties.

One of the coolest things about Flash these days is its ability to play video without requiring any additional installations. Ever try to play a Windows Media File (WMA or WMV)? If you don't have Windows Media Player installed and functioning on your computer, you are just out of luck. That's why YouTube loves Flash so much.

But before you award a point to Flash, listen to this - Silverlight has its very own embedded media player. Now it can play WMV, WMA and MP3 files without any additional downloads or installations. And it works on Macs and Linux (soon). Noooowwww we're talking! No point awarded to Flash.

Flash 2, Silverlight 2. So looking at both pros and cons, they come out about even. So should you jump on the Silverlight bandwagon or not?

Next time, we'll bottom line this whole discussion and see if Silverlight is worth buying into.

Posted August 28, 2008 1:21 PM   |   View Comments (1)

Reader's Comments

I'm not sure if I should post this as a comment on my blog or yours, but ZDNet has an interesting short article on the future of JavaScript (due at least in part to what Google is doing with Chrome), and how it is likely to compete with Silverlight more than Flash will.

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-219799.html

Posted by Daniel St. Clair on September 05 2008, 02:02 PM