Things like your quote that Silverlight will be installed as standard on windows 7! Not likely, considering IE will not be bundled with windows 7 (this has been confirmed for the European version – not 100% sure about others) due to monopoly issues, Silverlight most certainly isn’t going to be installed. I’ve seen various performance charts and depending on what slant they wish to show will have the various technology at the top of the chart.

You say XAML has ‘awesome binding’ (dubious from what I’ve read on other Silverlight sites – but I don’t know enough about SL so I’m not sure), but if you knew anything about MXML and actionscript 3 it has binding that works (maybe it’s awesome, maybe its great? But I know it just works when I need it to). Adobe ‘hacks’ codecs, well if that’s a professional statement as an evangelist then I certainly would not invite you to talk about Silverlight, keep it factual.

Having a quick scan through some of the posts, flash player will play AS1, AS2 and AS3 code in the same browser and I can code in all versions using flexbuilder or CS3/CS4 so no need for separate environments! Actually if your project uses both AS2 & AS3 then it will be run in 2 separate threads. Which brings me onto multithreading. You can use pixelbender to use as many cores as your processor has in order to manipulate numbers/graphics.

You should also check out flash catalyst if you wish to compare Silverlight’s developer/designer workflow with Adobe’s range for an accurate comparison.

One of the problems I’m having with Flash / Flex is that to run Flash Paper two separate Flash environments are needed – one for ActionScript 2 and one for ActionScript 3! Nuts.

Not hard to out-do AJAX is it?

I hear you about how VS is a better IDE though I haven’t dug into it. I don’t believe anyone has a code hint template for it for AS yet.

I don’t know how to describe those design people more accurately for you but I want to point out that they are mainly working in I.T. and media industry. That’s why they also do UI programming. For me it is easy to understand that they extend their skills to include coding for standing a better position in the competition.

Also versions of ActionScript have never been a big problem to them, just like what I said before, the problem is on the developer/designer workflow that they think it is so inefficient that they’d rather choose to stick on Flash IDE with AS2 for the projects they are doing.

For those projects I am doing, it is a different story. Those are mission critical applications and they require very good realtime performance and my clients also take quick delivery very seriously. We initially develop them in WinForm and then WPF. I also developed some pure Web front-ends in AJAX for my clients becuase WinForm and WPF are too heavy. The purpose for introducing Silverlight into developemnt is that not only Silverlight has almost the same performance and coding productivity as WPF and is much richer than AJAX, but it also helps a great deal on release deployment. Namely almost the same “reach” as AJAX.

My conclusion is, Silverlight really fills a gap in the ecosystem of Microsoft products.

I did try to learn and use Flex Builder and AS2/MXML myself before we had Silverlight as a viable solution. Of course I didn’t dig into Flex in depth before I gave up the learning. The biggest difference between Visual Studio and Flex Builder is that Flex Builder is only front-end development IDE. You can try Visual Studio (90 day trial or free Visual Studio Express) and you will understand the difference.

I didn’t try to use other free stuff because my clients are happy to pay for tooling as they think the sooner we deliver the software, the more money they can make more quickly.