Anyway, I’m hoping someone like you can point me in the right direction about tutorials or books…

thx, Lieven Cardoen aka Johlero

For me, the most important thing, is the ease of use, for developers and customers…

Another thing that bothered me is that very few examples of complex RIA done with Silverlight can be found online. Examples involving Messaging, Remoting, Databases, …

I like this article because it’s been written by someone who actually tried to create the same application with the two technologies.

Regards, Johlero

Really looking forward to that release. Currently, there is no easy way to push data to a Silverlight application, and not being able to push data defeats the purpose of creating a truly web 2.0 RIA application.

You are really doing an awesome job with your products. I am currently working on a messaging application using MSMQ and WebORB. I just wish there were more tutorials out there. There is only one example on MSMQ with the installation and it is a bit confusing. It tries to demonstrate too many things which makes it a bit complicated.

Regards,
Buzzy

We’ll be releasing WebORB support for Silverlight soon, so it will be interesting to see your assessment then as we think we’ll overcome many of the current limitations in developing with Silverlight with the added functionality provided by WebORB. Stay tuned…

Cheers,
Kathleen

>>And why do you consider debugging in flex hard?
I have been using Visual Studio for quite some time now and when you compare the debugging capabilities of VS and Flex Builder, VS wins hands down. Thats not saying that debugging in Flex Builder is a pain though. I was just comparing the two.

>>How do I implement push with silverlight?
Silverlight 2 introduced sockets. System.Net.Sockets namespace allows Silverlight 2 clients to connect back to the host of origin. An excellent tutorial of the same can be found here.
http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2008/04/10/pushing-data-to-a-silverlight-client-with-sockets-part-i.aspx

>>How bout VOIP stuff?
If you have socket support, stuff like VOIP won’t be far behind (hopefully).

>>3D applications??
Good point. But the future looks promising with the release of the new Flash Player ‘Astro’

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

and the slew of new features released in the recent services pack for .NET 3.5,

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/12/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-service-pack-1-beta.aspx

one of which includes ‘WPF Interoperability with Direct3D’. Similar stuff for Silverlight is a possibility in the future.
Enabling hardware acceleration for web applications is very exciting indeed…

>>Can somebody sue Microsoft if they push a runtime as a critical update..ahem unfair advantage?
Who knows. Mozilla was not too happy with Apple bundling Safari as a ‘helpful update’ with iTunes
http://john.jubjubs.net/2008/03/21/apple-software-update/

>>’cost and developer strength ‘
I am just a student with way too much time on my hands
Yeah, but I agree that Flex will win there….

Thanks for writing
Buzzy

Check out swftohtml and may be this link would help

http://techmytongue.blogspot.com/2007/12/fear-not-flash.html

And why do you consider debugging in flex hard? I use flex builders debugging and profiler options extensively and I find them to be extremely intuitive..

And a few questions from my side.

How do I implement push with silverlight? I know that we can do it with flex using fds producer consumer patterns and by using the good old xmlsocket.. How can silver do this??

How bout VOIP stuff? Flex has folks like ribbit on there side? Can silverlight do this?

3D applications?? Flex plays very well with graphics… whats the silverlight equivalent of Papervision 3D. ?

Can somebody sue Microsoft if they push a runtime as a critical update..ahem unfair advantage?

I would love to see you mention aspects of cost and developer strength behind the technologies . I guess flex will win there ..

Excellent write anyways!

Thanks for the comment. The first one on our blog!!

To answer your question about databinding, I just found the concept of the two way databind to be interesting. It is amazingly easy to set up (though not as easy as Flex), an it offers an simple way to keep the UI and the underlying instance in sync. I ran into this problem a copuple if times while working with Flex. Though the solution is not that complicated, Silverlight makes the process more streamlined. This definitely makes the code less cluttered, fewer “why did I do this !!” moments.

WCF has been on my todo list for quite a while now. However, I don’t get what the advantages of using WCF over the tradional web services. Both of them transfer via XML. Testing web services is also easier if you are working with primitive datatypes. Having said that, I will definitely try to use WCF over web services in my next project.

Regards,
Buzzy

Thanks for the writeup,

=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com