[BNM] Silverlight night

[wayne]

Hey

 

I don't want to alienate myself  - but I feel I should defend my words
as there _was_ truth there. I guess this thread could have been broken
into two discussions:

 

1 - my claim that certain persons could have been more considerate and
less negative.

2 - my claim that there is more to Silverlight than its comparable
attributes with Flash.

 

I don't want to focus any more energy on #1 than I have to for obvious
reasons but feel I should also clarify some points.

 

<aral>

[...]

I'm sorry you feel that it felt like "a pack hunt". There was no "pack"
to speak of but as I was one of the 

people asking questions, I feel I should reply in an effort to cut
through some of the demagoguery and hyperbole 

in your post and to clarify some facts.

</aral>

 

Fair enough on the hyperbole, that was meant to be tongue in cheek, to
take some of the edge off the way I was feeling at the time. It is
however undisputable that there was a negative voice stealing focus on
the night - and there was one corner that person was looking to for
support. I deliberately didn't want to name names - the reason being
that it is unfair, de-constructive and far too easy to pick one person
out of the crowd. The downside of that was that I needed to use
generalisations. This undisputable element though, is exactly that for
anyone that was there, anyone that was not may well prefer your take on
it over mine, bearing in mind you may well/should understand this point
to be an untruth - as it was blatant:

 

Demagogue : "one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men
he knows to be idiots."

 

Please, I hope you're not doing that. 

 

<aral>

(Then again, we are hearing this from someone who hails from a domain
called "codingvista.com" so I think we can be pretty certain as to where
his own 

affections lie).

</aral>

 

Yeah - it's true - it's the technology I love, what's your URL?
www.aralbalkan.com?!?! JK ;)

 

<aral>

The feeling I got from the presenter was that he wanted this to be a
question/answer-style discussion. If not, then he did not do a very good
job of communicating that fact. (And I say this as someone who has
presented at over a dozen events, most of them international
conferences, this year). Perhaps part of the problem was that he did not
have a microphone and spoke so softly that people were straining to hear
him (this is not a combination that bodes well for a traditional talk).
Regardless, he appeared to welcome the questions and, while I cannot
defend the style and tone of the questions posed by others, I am fairly
certain that I kept mine civil, polite, and on a purely technical level.

</aral>

 

Your questions were excellent, there were some _really_ interesting
thoughts being batted about the room and in all honesty I learned a lot.
Again - this was 

never in dispute - I guess a result of my constructing my initial email
in  generalised manner.

 

<aral>

[...]

What you state is beautiful as utterly abstract marketing speak but
would you mind clarifying exactly _how_ Silverlight is different from
Flash? (Because the speaker at the event sure couldn't do it and he
_works_ for Microsoft.) Your "either you're with us or against us"

("if you don't understand how it's different - you don't realise it's

benefits") doesn't really cut it in a technical discussion if you cannot
back it up with the sort of cold, hard facts that us technical types
like to cut our teeth on when learning about new tools and technologies.

 

This just tells me that you don't have a lot of knowledge about the
Flash Platform. Flash did not grow "organically" -- it was deliberately
and consistently developed by Macromedia (and now Adobe).

Silverlight is being developed by Microsoft in the same way. Both are
being developed in line with the goals and ambitions of those
corporations. There's nothing "organic" here to speak of.

</aral>

 

So what you're saying is that Macromedia never took onboard the input
from users and developers using Flash? They built it in a steal box with
no outside, public input? Organically in this context doesn't mean
growing in mud without the need of chemicals to make it big and strong
and bug free. I've never been to MS's offices and sat next to Scott Gu
while he goes about orchestrating the dev of Silverlight but I reckon
the input from the public plays a large part in where Silverlight goes.
It would be raw stupidity to base a product on anything but that.

 

I spent some time in the early days _playing_ with Flash, all of my
presentations at college were done in Flash not [power?]point. Here's
why I never took it beyond that:

 

It is (or at least was) an animation tool. It is based on timelines.
Animations are broken down into frames. To create 3d animations in Flash
I had to take snips of a shape at it's different angles and copy them
into Flash in separate frames. It wasn't actually 3d - it was an
animation of 3d. If I wanted to consume xml - I couldn't. If I wanted
database integration - I couldn't. The scripting language was buggy,
ugly and well - a scripting language. I want to be able to program
against things, I want context, semantics, strong types, complex types
and deep expressive language features that let me express an intent in a
rich and stable way. At the time Flash did non of those things. I know
it's moved on a _lot_ since then (papervision 3d, your work with SWX (I
watched your screen cast - very cool)). but that's how I felt at the
time. It feels crazy me taking on this debate when I know comparatively
nothing about either technology! Though in truth - and here's a big plus
for Silverlight - my knowledge of C# and the .NET framework
automatically means I can dive right in. With estimates of world OS
usage being around the 90%-95% Windows figure, automatically updating
with Silverlight - you can bet penetration is not going to be an issue. 

 

Here's a thing which I believe still stands. We talk about
accessibility, and MS have done a lot to screw with that in the early
days - they're making amends and it will be a long time until they pay
for that - true. But for me the biggest crime against accessibility was
Flash. I know there's ways of adding degradation, meta information to
describe its intent in the absence of a plug-in etc etc. It feels hacky,
there's duplication of information black boxes of assets and
functionality. 

 

XAML is XML. Its elements can correspond to strongly typed objects, it's
DOM can be walked and manipulated. It understands fonts, it has
excellent media support. I'm not going to pussy foot about and not take
into account it's huge level of built in support for the .NET framework
in 1.1, because, well, it's _good_ . It has Linq support ffs, inside the
browser - anyone that doesn't know what that is - it means you get
automatically created, well coded, highly extensible domain objects
which can run queries against pretty much any innumerable (local or
remote) datastore in a strongly typed environment - for free or 'out of
the box' and inside a plugin that weighs 4Mb!! That makes me go all
tingly just thinking about it. I've worked on a few Flash 'mashup'
projects in the past utilising things like youtube, google apps etc etc.
The flash dev constantly struggles to shoe horn Flash to consume web
services or whatever we need at the time - which it simply wasn't
designed to do (I know Aral has done some amazing work on SWX - which
makes Flash a much more appealing tool to me personaly). Part of my job
would be to create a simpler API for the flash dev, spoon feeding xml to
the flash app in simple, easy nuggets. More duplication, more pointless
work.

 

Silverlight isn't that different from Flash in V1 - the next revision
will have support for creating SL apps in Ruby, C#, VB, JScript, Python,
VB10 etc. If that's not a significant difference, combined with the
framework (are we really going to compare the .NET api to the Flash
api?) I don't know what is. I agree - Adobe may be pulling its socks up
as a result of the newly competitive environment - but for me it's too
little too late. I currently work in a research dept where the apps we
create crunch huge amounts of data (each data store can hold 3>TB of
highly sensitive data containing statistics describing our population)
and we're looking at using SL in the new year. No matter what - Flash
was/is never an option for us . That is how it is be different. 

 

<aral>

[...]

Regardless, I find it sad that instead of celebrating the exercise of
our right to open debate as intellectual beings, we are being forced to
defend ourselves for exactly the sort of critical thinking and
intellectual discourse that I feel separates us from the suits. Thank
goodness we have a community where asking questions and engaging in
intellectual debate is not frowned upon but where efforts, such as
yours, to stifle intellectual discourse and ridicule those who ask
questions is.

</aral>

 

There _was_ a level of hostility and _THAT_ was what I was protesting
about. Sorry if that didn't come across clear enough. I know you're
defending a friend so I won't take offense.

 

It was an amazingly successful night, I didn't want to alienate myself
with my post - I heard others talking on the night which just confirmed
what I felt. I apologise for the generalisations I made to anyone who
felt they were affected. There's a really interesting conversation
around the technical aspect of this which I can go on about for hours
and I love the fact that I live in a town where the debate and community
doesn't just happen time to time - it's everywhere, all the time.
There's real innovation, huge players in all fields surrounding software
and media. I would _never_ want to stifle that. From where I'm sat, we
form the software we use. The contents shape the container.

 

W://