Microsoft targets Adobe, by offering a Flash alternative called SilverLight.Unlike Flash, the SDKs are free and the content is Hi Def! (well, the ! is for those of us who appreciate HD content :)).
You can download the player and watch a demo of a site combining XAML (subject for another tech review) and SilverLight. Content can be downloaded or streamed.
Silverlight ties nicely into WPF/E - the new Windows Presentation Foundation (the download will install WPF on your machine - no worries - just a set of .Net classes - njavascript:void(0)
Publish Posto restart required).
Why is this interesting? Well if you haven't been following the Web development trends, the 2 main client-side methodologies right now are AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) - used everywhere - but not appealing graphically.
On the other side is a technology called Flex - essentially the same, with Flash (needless to say - more appealing).
Now that Microsoft has this new tool, they can (and will) combine it with AJAX to create something that will erase Flex (after a few service packs :))
The technology allows seperating design from development: the designers will work in a suite called Expression, while the developers be able to stay in Visual Studio and add content and business logic to the design.
Be that as it may, a good friend of mine just bet me $5 that Adobe will get it's act together and beat this new technology :)
2 comments:
You wrote: "Unlike Flash, the SDKs are free"
Not quite. The FlexSDK has been 100% free for a long time.
Regards,
David
Adobe
Thanks David, I stand corrected - the SDKs has been free, but the tools to create/maintain Flash applications haven't been.
Regards.
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