I considered doing an in depth comparison of Flex vs. Silverlight, but I came across an article written a few months ago written by Serge Jespers, who works for Adobe on the platform evangelism team. His blog was down at the time of this writing so I’ll briefly paraphase and expound where necessary. After a 3-day crash course in Silverlight he breaks down the good, the bad and the ugly of Silverlight.
The Good:
- Multithreading – Silverlight has flexible threading options which allow processes to be run in parralel taking advantage of today’s highspeed processors. For more information on Silverlight and multithreading take a look at this article which finds that “Microsoft’s new parallel library wins out on a 2:1 ratio over the single treaded equivalent”. This is a huge plus for Silverlight, if developers take advantage of it. So will Flex follow suit? Kinda. Flash player 10 has something like multithreading. Jim Corbett, an Adobe Flash Player engineer, said multithreading wasn’t being built into the ActionScript Virtual Machine, however, processing for the new bitmap filters using the programming language Hydra would be using multithreading! What’s more is that you don’t need to focus on manipulating DisplayObject items with Hyrda, but are able to send it plain math equations as well, which it will be able to crunch blazingly fast, thanks to multithreading! So any math heavy Flash applications will get a HUGE performance boost, not to mention the various 3D engines and physics engines. So it seems that animations will work in a separate process thread.
- Silverlight can easily communicate with the DOM of the host HTML file for easy integration with existing applications. This is a huge benefit for organizations who want to introduce some Silverlight components into existing applications.
- Being able to code in either C# or VB
The Bad:
- XAML is verbose. In my limited experience with Silverlight, I also found that it took several lines to create a simple button with a label, whereas with MXML it is one line.
- Databinding – Flex has simple databinding with curly braces syntax ‘{}’
- Styling Controls/lack of CSS – It seems that Microsoft forgot about the paradigm shift of 10 years ago… separating layout from content.
- Limited control set – there are some grid controls leaking out of component providers such as Telerik, DevExpress, and Infragistics, but in my opinion they leave much to be desired from the standard Flex 3 datagrid.
The Ugly: Microsoft Expression
In my opinion, Microsoft Silverlight is at least 2 years behind Flex in overall capabilities. One of the most significant challenges with Flex 2 were the difficulties associated with acccessing native .NET objects– there are 3rd party tools that help, but I understand that it isn’t fun. If you’re working with a service oriented archtecture, there is no reason not to consider Flex 3, since it can consume web services into strongly typed objects.