In LABS, the blog of the creative agency Big Spaceship, Jamie Kosoy tells all about his experiences building the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show site in Silverlight.
He started the project with no small amount of trepidation:
I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment — Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project’s detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right?
Now that the project has concluded and the site has been delivered, he has this to say:
So now that the project is launched, I’m feeling reflective. And I have to say: Silverlight is a worthy competitor to Flash. It is a lot of fun to build in. I recommend it. I think there are times when it’ll be faster to build certain things in Silverlight than Flash and vice versa, and it is a matter of learning where the strengths and weaknesses are for each.
There were some things that frustrated me, but overall I found Visual Studio to be a great environment to learn to code in, C# was an extremely easy language to learn and most importantly of all the Silverlight player to be really flexible to the stress we put it under. Our team noted several times that we especially like Silverlight’s animation capabilities — we felt like we had far more "control" over what was happening on the screen than in Flash.
He makes a list of his observations, a notable one of which is that he feels that Silverlight is a better videoplayer solution than Flash. There are more, both positive and negative, and they’re covered in the article, titled Thoughts on Silverlight.
3 replies on “A Flash Developer’s Take on Silverlight”
As a .NET developer who’s been in a past life a Flash developer (*shivers*), I need to say that I believe that there’s no comparison in developing on those two platforms.
The .NET platform is much superior than Flash (and even Flex) to develop in. But, I do not agree with developing a whole website that requires a plugin that reaches much less public than Flash and, most importantly, is not available at all (officially) for Linux.
So, in order to access Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show website, I need to have paid for a license of Windows or Mac OS. Or else, I need to install the open implementation Moonlight — which, if it is as compatible with the official one as Mono is with the .NET Framework, it’s just the same as viewing a still image of a video.
Anyway, just my thoughts. As much as I rather by a long shot developing for .NET, I don’t think it should be considered as a feasible solution.
Silverlight may be better for videos under the hood, but unfortunately it copies the UI brain damage from Flash that doesn’t let you have a fullscreen video without focus. Apparently nobody at Adobe or Microsoft has ever used a computer with more than one monitor…
Also I’ve never seen an embedded video player that could speed up a video (speeding up playback of many technical lectures is a must for staying awake).
I hope it’s as easy to save a silverlight-fronted video for local playback with a real video player as it is with Flash…
[…] Devilla posted an interesting article about a Flash developer’s reflections upon delivering with Silverlight. It’s worth a read. […]