ya poor bugga' Scott - you've really got your work cut out for you... 1) it's a shame that all the nice Silverlight folks on this list (yeah I've been lurking since it started) will have their passion undermined by short-sighted tossers like Silky.
Sadly, while the numbers are small, there's still too many "Silky's" in the MS sphere with a blood-sucking mentality: too interested in get rich quick instead of growing the pie. These Silverlight ppl here get it - elsewhere most don't. (present company excepted) too busy to sell you controls instead of getting off collective backsides and just making it happen - many hands make light work of the sourcecode: http://code.google.com/p/flexvizgraphlib/ (**see below) I'm starting to think you haven't got a snowflakes chance in hell at the moment in trying to establish the same sort of web 2.0 collaboration and groundswell that Patrick and Downey and Stewart are tapping into - don't get me wrong, those guys are no angels nor towering intellects - but I am saying core ethos just isn't there in the same way as the ground-troups evangelism that sourounds Flex and AIR. I can say this coming from MS land - from VB5, VB6, ASP (classic), ASP.net... I offered to help turn this around - strengths and weaknesses from both camps, as you know, but time marches on and I gotta get back to the core and move on - the situation demands it. Good luck, man, you're gonna need it. 2) Silverlight features: you and I have been having the same argument for a year now, and I swear you still don't get it. you keep going on about there being more .NET developers where Silverlight can offer the part of the technology stack that Flash/Flex does while keeping it all inhouse. and I say "so what" a f'r'instance: the place I'm working at right now (yeah, I've moved) I'm developing a prototype for an app that will eventually be done in Flex. Not Silverlight. Why not? Apart from Silverlight not being ready for prime-time (for what they want), the answer is in the "bitmap manipulation" suggestion in the other thread. As soon as you make "some Silverlight runtimes are more equal than others" compromise, you're lost. It's not just pulling out the guts of the CLR for Silverlight - it's about making it _platform_agnostic_. Their supported SOE is Windows/IE and yet it makes more sense to go down a SWF path - not because of the fear of introducing the first Mac into the organisation, but to start tapping into the mobile space which they are now having to play catch-up on. with that little 1.something Mb runtime I can tap into everything from client-side PDF generation, through rich apps to powerful datavisualisations to Breeze videoconferencing/collaboration and on to 3D rich interfaces. And it's not just the fact the Flash runtime is everywhere - it's the assurance that the experiance will be identical no matter where I am or what machine I'm using. *THIS* is the choice I keep haranging you with. 3) an off-the-wall thought: (an analogy) some of the smartest (Cricket) batsmen - when facing stupidly quick fast bowlers - use the speed of the delivery to angle a shot for a cheap boundry - provide a "value-add" to the momentum created by the bowler at little cost to themselves... a la Sir Don Bradman. ... so ... ... for the life of me I can't work out why MS isn't using Adobe's pace attack. There is (or soon will be) enough open-source/published bits of the Flash/Flex runtime and libraries for MS to create their own version of controls and server products leveraging on to the Flash runtime. If you look at one way, Adobe are already leveraging off the Windows platform. Why not MS leverage off an Adobe one? Beat them at their own game providing better controls and development environment to run on a ubiquitous platform. Borland (Delphi) was doing the same leveraging off the Win32 runtime - It's nothing new. Will it sell more Windows licences? Man, that's a stale argument growing colder. The soutions are winning, not the platforms. best of luck in Redmond. call me for a beer before you leave. cheers barry.b ASP.net/ColdFusion analyist/programmer teacher/educational analyist Adobe User Group Manager - Brisbane (mutimedia tools) PS: "as i took 3 steps back financially to move from Australia to US to become a Product Manager for the Silverlight/WPF space." FWIW: While Scott and family won't starve, what he says is true. But then again, for Scott it's never been about the money - he's a pretty passionate guy where integrety is part of his ethos. b: over and out ** http://flexvizgraphlib.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/vgExplorer/bin/VGExplorer.html# or perhaps (model-view-controller code generator) http://www.ericfeminella.com/blog/2008/03/31/cairngen-project-moved-to-google-code/ these are just a couple of (very) recent community projects I keep tabs on/help out with. ------------------------------------------------------------------- OzSilverlight.com - to unsubscribe from this list, send a message back to the list with 'unsubscribe' as the subject. Powered by mailenable.com - List managed by www.readify.net
