« Compile to ABC | Main | Understanding "offline" »
February 29, 2008
The French Drop
The French Drop: Wonder why there's so much confusion out there? Scott Fulton of BetaNews asks Jason Zander (General Manager, Visual Studio Developer Division, Microsoft), what Silverlight will eventually do that AIR and Flex today cannot. The reply: "I think the big thing you're going to get with Silverlight...is the richest possible solution. Because sometimes the problem you can have with a solution that runs everywhere is, you're basically bringing yourself down to a common set of technologies. Your look-and-feel may or may not match the environment that you're in, things like that. So with Silverlight, we've really tried to make sure that you can take XAML and you can do that cross-platform, so you can use it on the desktop application itself. We give you .NET consistently across the board. Those are the key things that we're trying to concentrate on." The question asks about desktop; the reply mixes cross-browser cross-OS distribution with the specific-configuration delivery of desktop WPF. The French Drop and variants can be persuasive, but most of the time it's pretty obvious that the one hand has what the other hand doesn't. (Background: Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin, first announced in March 2006, which will soon have a public beta for "1.0" delivery maybe this year. Adobe Flex is today a declarative development methodology (with framework, SDK, compiler, authoring), and Adobe AIR is today a way for web developers to deliver cross-OS desktop applications with local file access, native windowing controls, system notifications and more.) Look for the core realities; resist the attempts to confuse, delay, and defer.
Posted by JohnDowdell at February 29, 2008 12:57 PM