The Silverlight Problem
Published on September 30th, 2007 by DannyT. Filed under .Net, Expression, Flash, Flex, SilverlightAs anyone who regularly reads this blog will know, I’ve been looking into Silverlight of late. Nothing commercial as yet, just to fulfill my own geeky interests (if anyone is looking for Silverlight development get in touch). Throughout this experimentation and research I’ve also discussed Silverlight with other developers and designers from various small and large agencies particularly at a recent MS web agencies dinner in London.
Through all this investigation and chatter, I’ve drawn a conclusion of a problem that MS still have to solve:
There are still no way near enough “creatives/designers” willing to to experiment with the tools available for creating Silverlight applications.
Maybe this is obvious and I’m sure MS are well aware of this but I’m not sure enough is being done. The reason being, I myself and others are getting frustrated by not having anyone available to work with in order to create good-looking Silverlight applications and experiments.
.Net developers are excited by Silverlight, MS partners are excited by Silverlight, MS is excited by Silverlight… Designers couldn’t give two hoots about Silverlight.
This is pretty frustrating because there are a lot of very skillful .Net coders waiting to work with someone using this amazing workflow that is available between Visual Studio and Blend but there’s no-one there on the Blend end! Blend is a good tool, I’ve played around with it and realised what could be done if I could work with someone who, unlike myself has even the slightest bit of artistic flair. Unfortunately this person doesn’t exist yet, or at least is very hard to come by.
Microsoft,
Get the Expression tools available for Mac ASAP.
Do whatever’s needed to get designers comfortable and happy with using Expression Design and Expression Blend.
Throw more resources and free training at creative decision makers.
Make integration with Photoshop and other design tools as seemless as possible.
The devs are sold on Silverlight, the appeal of being able to use CLR languages in a rich environment is huge. But it’s fruitless without designers. We need more designers picking up these tools if you want your massive .net community to do some amazing things with Silverlight.
Until then, Flash and Flex are here, available on both platforms and have a passionate and loyal user-base. I appreciate Silverlight and the tools are only at version 1, but if you’re out to compete (and let’s not kid ourselves, you are), you can’t measure success on version numbers.
John
September 30th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
At our work, we did a two day training on Blend and Expression Designer. I’m a designer and I did the training w/ two of our developers. We actually found out that the Adobe Fireworks to XAML plugin works better than Expression Design. 1) its a tool I’m much more comfortable with and 2) Expression Design XAML output is 1 way only (like FW-XAML) and doesn’t handle bitmaps (which Fireworks does).
On the Blend side, our WPF programmers don’t like Blend for the most part because it creates bloated code. So our workflow has been that I comp it in Fireworks, export it in XAML, and they build it in Visual Studio. Due to performance on our client machines, we’re not pushing a lot of animation so the animation that we do use is easy enough to do w/o Blend.
But I completely agree w/ you though — MS will never make a significant impact on Flash until the tools are made for Mac.
Steve
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Iv been working with WPF for almost a year now and so far it seems to be my favourite platform to develop on, especially since last december with the release of 3D capabillities. I was disappointed to find that (so far) silverlight is not using these, much to my disappointment.
On the blend side of things, yeah its a good tool, but as john mentioned “it creates alot of bloated code”. Visual Studio is the main one to use, and blend is still in beta release, so we can expect to see improvements.
To the flash war, Silverlight will only get bigger with cross platform capabilities and personally thats something i really want to see.
Jon Harris
October 5th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Hi Dan… the good news is that we’ll have training rolling out from the end of November/early December – ‘Silverlight for Designers’ is the first course that is going to be run, and this will be repeated on a monthly basis. I’ll keep you posted when the dates are locked.
While I think about it not sure if you’ve seen this yet – the Farseer Physics library – this is a XNA C# library ported to Silverlight – ported may be too stonger word… less than 10 lines of code needed to be changed!
http://www.bluerosegames.com/farseersilverlightdemos/
And it’s on Codeplex here:
http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics
Looks like it’s going to be a fun year
Jon, UXe Microsoft
Rostislav Siryk
November 3rd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Nice points, just my two cents about Expression: MS done it a bit wrong. As you might know, Expression initially was developed by another company and then bought by MSFT nearly two years ago. I saw this tool that time and it was pretty rich in possibilities: vector + raster, a lot of exclusive features. Then, they ripped off a lot of cool things from Expression and release it as Expression Designer. This one s pretty poor, I’m working wit it for the last month and noticed a lot of weak points designer will be afraid of. For example, there’s NO ALIASED FONTS in Expression. Only smoothly ones. This is awful. Flash Designers struggled with the same weakness in Flash for years, reinventing the wheels until Flash Team introduced the normal bitmap fonts. Now MS proposes to use the Tool w/out the bitmap fonts. More: There’s no raster drawing in Expression. But honestly, there’s a lot of good points too. But MS must attract designer with something more valuable. Designers are so lazy: they often refuse using the new version of Photoshop! What Expression can make with such inertia – only give the much best tool.
Or MS will make the market for SLight so will force the designers to use Expression with the help of Project Managers. But this is another point.
Rostislav Siryk
November 4th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
There’s interesting discussion on the Ryan Stewart’s blog regarding Thermo features, which is I believe pretty related to the topic:http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1123
casey stalnaker
January 13th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
nice article Danny. Ive been saying this since MS started PR’ing SL as a “Flash Killer”.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070501-microsofts-flash-killer-steals-the-show-at-mix07.html
That was very funny though.
MS makes great developer tools…but I dont see them even making a dent in the designer market. Adobe will always rule that side of the house, and imho, its for the best. For designers, by designers kinda synergy there.
I do think MS needs to start catering to experienced flash developers and “programming designers”…those rare few who work on both sides of the house. Instead they have seemingly been focusing on convincing the development community that they too can now make eye-popping flash-like apps. Thats just not true with these tools alone.
It would be nice if they took a bit more humble approach in trying to attract that creative talent as well. Claiming to have “killed” anyones bread-and-butter (Flash) is not exactly starting off on the right foot.
That said…I think most web 2.0 professionals are practical enough to realize that the project/client needs will dictate the technology used. Its not that you have to know one(flash) or the other(SL), you can use both as needed.
Its also interesting that MS is again going against a tchnology that has become a web-standard for 99% of the internet (flash). Not a good track record thus far.
my 2 cents.
Who’s got my change? 8]
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