First, let me preface this by stating that I am not trolling. I am a pretty big Silverlight cheerleader, but what I'm looking for is a bullet list of concrete points that justify the use of Silverlight instead of the use of Flex. Obviously with Silverlight you get XAML and you get C#, but, I need more. I've got a lot of skeptics around me, and I've been coming up dry when they're asking me "Why would I want to use Silverlight instead of Flex?"

 So, hopefully those of you in the know, or maybe the MS team themselves, can answer this one. Why do I want to use Silverlight instead of Flex? I have my own personal reasons (C#, XAML, etc) but I need more than that. I'm looking for some concrete value-add.

The .NET Addict
http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com

 I've been playing around with Flex recently but found that tying .NET data to it is not as straightforward as I'd hoped; simple tasks can be quite painful. One great reason to use Silverlight is that it ties into the .NET architecture, without having to come up with any kludges. There are 3rd party tools (WebOrb and Flourine) that might make the task easier, but it shouldn't require any 3rd party tool to begin with.

I'm new to Silverlight, but if developing within Visual Studio is easy, then that's another great reason. Flex doesn't tie into Visual Studio; you have to either write the MXML in Notepad and compile or use Flex Builder. I've also seen some resistance on the part of the folks at Adobe to do webcasts on .NET + Flex; they do Java but not .NET.

With Silverlight, we can expect countless how-to articles to come out in the coming weeks and months; not so much with .NET and Flex.
 

I can talk about the Flex side...

1. Flex is available today and works.

2. Flex 2 is viewable in 85+% of web browsers, Flex 2 SWF files run in Flash Player 9.

3. You can use any HTTP Server and any backend technology (.NET,JAVA,PHP,Ruby,CF, Python) with Flex via XML, SOAP, Sockets, ZLIB, Etc. 

4. Flex 2 has a mature and growing component set. There are lots of developers creating open source components for Flex and the source code for all components is available today in the Flex SDK. See: Flexbox, FlexLib, FlexComponents for details.

5. Flex does not integrate well with .NET on the backend. We are working on a great solution to make .NET integration seamless. Additionally strongly typed SOAP Web Services support coming in Flex 3 (very soon) including full support for .NET SOAP encodings.

6. Real-time data push with Binary Sockets using any TCP/IP Socket server. FTP/NNTP/SVN/POP/XMPP  Example: http://webmessenger.yahoo.com

7. Graphical and Programatic skinning with Illustrator/Flash/Photoshop/CSS

8. There are many large companies actively developing RIA's with Flex, from JPMorgan/Chase to Yahoo to Google to many Web 2.0 start-ups.

9. If you develop using Flex or AJAX you can port your app to the desktop using Apollo. Apollo allows you to build desktop applications for WIN/LIN/OSX deployed as a single .AIR file cross-platform. One toolset for Web RIA and Desktop RIA development.

10. Flex has gone fully open source Mozilla Public License. All compilers and framework will be available for extension and embedding within the Flex 3 SDK. 

Plus all the minor video advantages that SL1.0 has will evaporate in weeks.

It is an easy choice for me but I am pretty biased.

Regards,

Ted Patrick  (ted@adobe.com)
Flex Evangelist, Adobe Systems
 

ummmm I'm really not trying to start a flame war but..at least one thing struck me as frankly uninformed and overly biased.    In what world will the "minor video advantages" ever be evaporated...   Adobe has had enough time to try and best Windows Media for years and frankly it will never happen at this point in the game.  Now that microsoft is fixing the one advantage flash has had in cross browser embeding, any chance of Adobe catching up is about to evaporate. The Windows Media VC-1 standard is being used by more professional and enterprise entities than any other standard in the world.   Flash does what it does and Silverlight is playing catch up to flash, but frankly MS is attacking a completely different problem in the end game... to think Adobe will ever have the enterprise scalability, DRM, Compression size, Bandwidth management, CDN support, HD quality, live broadcasting, developer api's, hardware device accessibility (including STB's, Mobile devices, XBox360's, and HD-DVD players), is wishing for something that frankly the war is over on.   Just ask Jeremy Allaire over at brightcove about why he's supporting VC-1 and Silverlight as soon as he can? 

Ohh in case you forgot...  In 1995 Jeremy D. Allaire co-founded Allaire Corporation with his brother JJ Allaire, creating the web development tool Cold Fusion. When Macromedia acquired Allaire in March 2001, Jeremy became Chief Technology Officer. At Macromedia, Jeremy helped create the Macromedia MX (Flash) platform.

....END OF LINE.

Silverlight:

• Its still an Alpha. You can't use "Flex is available now" as a slight against Silverlight. It's not an accurate/fair comparison. When Silverlight 1.1 goes RTM, then you can compare.
• Silverlight will apparently run in Firefox, Safari, and IE on OS X, Windows, and Linux (thanks to Miguel @ Mono project... he said by end of year)
• Silverlight does not require any backend technology. I can double-click the HTML file on OS X and it works.
• Again, your #4 is a comparison based on how long Flex has been available. I need real facts here, not just "Flex is older"
• ok, the binary sockets "push" thing is awesome, and quite compelling...and looks really bad for Silverlight. Pushing data to my app was the first thing I wanted to try when I heard about Silverlight.

 So seriously, does anybody have any facts on why I should use silverlight instead of Flex. I already have a plethora of reasons why I should use Flex instead of Silverlight... what I'm looking for are hard, concrete reasons why I should use Silverlight instead of Flex.

The .NET Addict
http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com

Don't all flame wars star with "I'm really not trying to start a flame war...". I do not mean to disrupt the conversation, Flex was brought up on this thread and I am happy to answer any questions about Flex as this is my role at Adobe.

Here is what is supported today in Flash Player 9:

Enterprise Scalability - CHECK (Supported today)

CDN Support - CHECK (Supported today) - All major CDN's support Flash Streaming today.

Live Broadcasting - CHECK (Supported today) 

Developer API - CHECK (Supported today)

The other items you listed will be addressed soon. It has been too long since a major update to our video solutions but that time has come and we have some great things in development. Additionally there is a nice eco-system around Flash Video from a production/platform standpoint. Expect that things will change in this area.

I cannot speak for Brightcove but they use Flex 2 for many customer facing applications. They showcased a new video editor made with Flex at Adobe Engage and are very actively involved in many Flash/Flex based projects. They have stated publicly that they will continue to support Flash ongoing given the market demand for the format is very large.

Regards,

Ted Patrick (ted@adobe.com)

Flex Evangelist - Adobe Systems
 

Flex does not require any backend technology. It has always been just HTML, JS, SWF files. You can optionally exchange data with any existing backend in the formats of XML, SWF, AMF, ASCII, and Binary (ByteArray support).

You can double click an HTML file on OSX, WIN, Linux and it works in all browsers today including FireFox, Safari, Opera, IE.

Regarding "Flex is older" - We have seen a nice ecosystem form and many open source components are being created for the toolset. My point was rather, that an eco-system has formed and is thriving.

Glad you like flash.net.Socket! I will be posting some Twisted Python servers for Binary Socket support on my blog in a weeks time. Nothing like a free server for chat, im or the ability to write your own binary protocols.

Again not trying to upset the discussion here, I am just trying to addressing the Flex aspect of this discussion. If Flex/Flash hadn't been brought up then I wouldn't be posting at all. :)

Regards,

Ted Patrick (ted@adobe.com)

Flex Evangelist - Adobe Systems 

adobeted:

Glad you like flash.net.Socket! I will be posting some Twisted Python servers for Binary Socket support on my blog in a weeks time. Nothing like a free server for chat, im or the ability to write your own binary protocols.

[Ears perk up, smile hits face] - I'd love to see that, I've been too lazy myself to work on such a thing so I'm glad to see someone has done it.  I believe the fact Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 not supporting real sockets like Flash/Flex does have me a little disappointed.  It looks like Silverlight 1.1 has a chance of getting support for WCF which would be nice, but I really want socket capability like Flash's binary sockets.

 I look forward to seeing your blog post about the Twisted server.
 

I think the biggest advantage to SL + related tools and services is that you get to work with a robust, scalable, flexible and cost effective platform that works all the way from script kiddie level up to full on enterprise scale apps.
You get to code in Javascript all the way up to multithreaded C# applications, bringing processing power to the UI that we have not seen before on the web.

As opposed to the make-believe enterprise readyness that we've been hearing about for years, make believe scalability and flexibility where video is concerned, the complete lack of cost effectiveness, and the akward single threaded scripting language in competing technologies. Not to mention the lackluster state of development tools.

It was time for a new kid on the block in the RIA space. Now that it's here we'll see how many people are really that much in love with the competing way of doing things. Of course there is going to be some resistance against SL because it comes from Microsoft, but in the end people always go with what makes the most sense, is the easiest and cheapest to make, maintain, deploy and support. The choice is fairly simple really, and obvious at that.

One of the biggest problems of new technology is not the coolness of the technology, but the possibility to utilize this technology in a productive way.

Developer resources get sparse these days. Silverlight supports multiple languages, both static and dynamic languages, and a well known framework, and you develop in a well known development environment. So I think it is easy to find developers who can get productive quickly on Silverlight. Another thing is that there is a lot of code out there already written in C#, VB, Ruby, JavaScript, Python etc, that can be easily ported to Silverlight.

Only a small group of people knows ActionScript (I know it is a JavaScript implementation with some cool extension like the XML extensions), but JavaScript is really the domain of web developers, not of application developers that can now jump on the RIA bandwagon.

I must say I'm impressed by Flex 2 and Flash Player 9, but it is a steep learning curve for new developers (ActionScript, other framework, Eclipse, ...)

Serge van den Oever [Macaw]
http://weblogs.asp.net/soever

Some of the reasons why I think you may want to consider Silverlight are:
1. Unification. If you already invested in .NET, the learning curve will be much lower. You can use what you're familiar with. Also, you get new technologies (such as LINQ) often for free (whenever those technologies are useful in both environments anyway).
2. Integration. While Silverlight runs on other platforms/browsers besides Windows/IE, it's fairly obvious to expect tight integration with ASP.NET/VS/etc. Context switches are generally rather expensive and painful.
3. Extending the browser programming API. There is plenty of stuff already in Silverlight that you can use to raise the bar on the client. I'm talking about things like AsyncFileUpload, client storage, interoperability between JavaScript and managed code, etc. You can expose those services to JS if you want, without sacrificing any of your existing client-side development technologies/practices. Please refer to my site where I'll be writing more about this.

- Wilco Bauwer (MSFT) / http://www.wilcob.com

I guess Adobe is getting worried (and rightly so), if they've got "flex evangelists" trolling the Silverlight boards.  The only advantage that Flash has right now is the penetration rate.   The real problem with Flash/Flex though is that you're forced to program in ActionScript, and it doesn't have a VM like the CLR.  Wake me up when I can program Flash in C#, VB, Ruby, Python, F#, Nemerle, Boo....for Flash.  On a technical level, there's the no comparison between Flash and Silverlight.  Flash is way behind.

The real question lies in where do you want to shift your development direction going forward. I've been in the Flex trenches among folks like Ted since 2003, and while it sounds clean / cut and dry as Ted would project it, it's not exactly true.

Flex takes time to learn, the ramp-up is quite extensive and when you take into account re-wiring brains to ActionScript 3.0, then exploring the framework and fully immersing yourself with the concept of a "mix-in" approach to life (Decorator pattern for OOP folks). Then you've probably hit the point of mastering the language in question. If one was to weigh up black and white approach to which direction one was to head, I'd look at it more from a direction of self-paced ROI. C# + XAML can get you open ended access inside the Microsoft product stack, ranging from IIS7.0 to Sharepoint through to Powershell, it's your passport into many things.

This is important thing to note, as if you find that Silverlight (Great Experience) isn't your cup of tea then you could always revert back to ASP.NET AJAX (Good Experience) or better yet upscale to WPF (Ultimate Experience). There is a degree of depth in which you can move in and out of the product stack. I should also point out that this is Version 1.0 and the level of complexity and degree of interoperability between our existing product offerings, one can only imagine what 2.0 and so on are going to be like.

Flex has a set of issues surrounding it's use, and there are a lot of pro's and con's around choosing it no matter which of path you choose. I can honestly say from experience that Flex isn't just about picking top 10 features from a glossy brochure, as it has what I would call "devil in the details". It's something you should really speak to other Flex developers that aren't from Adobe Staff (as well as Microsoft Staff) as they will give you a true unbiased transparent answer.

http://www.mossyblog.com is a personal blog I had pre-Microsoft, feel free to look over it's archives as you'll notice I developed a love/hate releationship with Flex over the years.

I personally think Silverlight is a wise investment either way you choose as Microsoft are committed to making it stronger and have a solid history of building the right tools for developers.

--
Scott Barnes
Rich Platforms Product Manager
(WPF/Silverlight)
Microsoft.

blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog

Ooo.. touchy subject.

But I think the comments from people from both sides of the fence have been pretty constructive so far.

To me the best reason for going with Silverlight is of course being able to reuse my VB skills and experiences to deliver a cool interactive experience, before Silverlight I already know about Flex, and I already know about how powerful ActionScript can be if I took the time to delve into it. But that's what I dont have.. time to learn yet another language. :P

I would have to say that Flash is definetly the stronger animation tool right now since Blend is unable to do animation for Silverlight yet, but Silverlight is on familiar ground for me so that's where I'm going to go.

I do hate the fact that I have to wait till 1.1 to be able to use VB for code though!

Yup, it's an emotional issue and the only real answer to any Flex vs Silverlight thread has more to do with the context of a project going forward. You could actually also look at ways of combining the two if you're keen on both but want each world as that's the power you have right now. There is no black/white decision to be made here?

Ahh but the power of interoperability :)

--
Scott Barnes
Rich Platforms Product Manager
(WPF/Silverlight)
Microsoft.

blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/msmossyblog

Some of the posts have been talking about being able to leverage VB and C# skills as an advantage.  I agree with that, but don't count out IronPython and IronRuby as a big magnet - especially Ruby.  I'm having fun just playing around with Python in the SDK samples just using Vim (no compile needed), but I drool at the thought of having top notch Ruby support in VS.  Flex just has no answer to these things. 

Of course, there's more than just geek-developer coolness for choosing a platform, but as someone already pointed out, you have the entire stack with Microsoft (ASP.NET Ajax, Silverlight, and full-fledged WPF).

If I was running the Flash/Flex division at Adobe, I would sponsor someone to write a Java compiler for the Flash VM, along with a port of some of the libraries......like yesterday. 

I have been working with Flex since 2.0 beta, and I speak from experience. Here is why I am so ready to move to silverlight. Excuse my tone here but as a dotnet developer Adobe's ignoring of dotnet means, no love lost here, and I am going to tell it like it is...

5. Building modular apps is a pain in Flex Builder, especially if you have used Visual Studio. I hate opening the IDE and actually do most "scripting" for flex in VS using code generation. You really need to spend some time with Flex Builder, at first it looks cool, but when you get beyond the simplest of tasks it bites back, and hard.

6. Exchanging data between Flex and dotnet is not for the faint of heart. I am not talking about simple stuff here, true data management, sync, concurrency, etc.. In flex if you have 10K to spend on weborb or FDS for java and you are only half way there. In silverlight we can now share dotnet business components and leverage WCF, VAB, share sync and validate data in a way that meets the domains needs.

Interesting topic.  I work for a large video producing news company.  We encode video for Windows Media and Flash depending on our syndication client's needs.  My opinion is just my opinion and may not be the opinion of the company. 

With the above disclaimer stated, a lot of our clients (internal and external) are wanting to produce interactive experiences by integrating video and app code.  When evaluating both here are some of the findings/comments:

1. Resources - We have been evaluating Flex and attempting to find additional resources to address the development needs.  We have found that the learning curve is very steep and good resources are almost non-existent in our market place.  Those that claim to be Flex experts seem to only be a few pages ahead in the manual.  I had been evaluating SilverLight aka WPF/E for the last several months and when the execs came back from the Broadcaster's meeting in Vegas they were singing about SilverLight and not Flex/Flash.  They quickly realized that our internal C# group could and have produced proof-of-concepts for justification for more research into SilverLight.

2. Video - Big for us. 

A. Creating a Flex/Flash video player is very simple.  Creating a SilverLight video player is even easier.  Both can do easy overlays and produce nice controls.  However, we found the video brush in SilverLight with Matrix calculations to be superior and simple to manipulate which caused the creative wheels to begin moving.

B. Codecs/Encoding.  This could be one of the biggest for us.  FLV (Flash Video Files (latest versions)) uses On2 proprietary format with very steep royalties [Sidebar: One thread mentioned BrightCove - Their client encoder uses On2's client APIs that encodes on the local machine before uploading to server and may cost 5 to 6 digit royalties.  A major reason.]  We understand that future versions of FLVs will be based on H.264 to hopefully address this very issue.  It's current version makes it difficult to justify developing around this platform.  The server version of On2 is less expensive but more resource intensive creating another set of issues.  We can also leverage C++/C# encoding expertise in-house to produce VC-1/WMVs at higher quality.

C. Resource Intensive.  Our own analytics has shown that encoding for Windows Media is less stressful on our infrastucture than encoding FLVs. 

D. Full Screen.  This is a great feature.  The ability to manipulate the canvas without hindering the playback is huge as far as user experience goes.

I could continue but the point is ROI and quality of experience.  We have stopped our search (temporarily - hopefully for good) for Flex experts while we continue our evaluation.  Our results so far are proving that SilverLight could be a platform of choice moving forward.

[NOTE: Xaml represented its own learning curve but the level of documentation is incredible.]

Thanks,
Hans

I think personally the big advantages I see to Silverlight beyond the things mentioned here is that it does integrate well with .NET.. I downloaded and took a look at the ASP.NET futures release and was very pleased to see a very configurable video player asp.net control as well as one for XAML, not to mention that it integrates well with ASP.NET's support of ADO.NET databinding and of course it's completely integrated with AJAX. I think it's an apples to oranges comparison to compare flex to silverlight alone. It would be more fair to compare flex to asp.net with the silverlight integration.

Well, I personally prefer Silverlight, as both provide same kind of functionalities like RIA, Web 2.0 but if I can develop RIA using .Net supported languages like C#, why one should learn Action Scripting, which really take long time to learn.

The good point about flex is that, its flash based (swf) so users are quite fimiliar with it and almost all browser have flash player installed.

hanzalah:

The good point about flex is that, its flash based (swf) so users are quite fimiliar with it and almost all browser have flash player installed.

I understand that point. but sooner or later, people will have Silverlight installed just like they have Flash player installed. I heard that the next version of Windows after Vista will have Silverlight installed by default.  

(If this has answered your question, please click on "Mark as Answer" on this post. Thank you!)

Best Regards,
Michael Sync

Blog : http://michaelsync.net
Feed : http://michaelsync.net/feed

DotNetAddict:

So seriously, does anybody have any facts on why I should use silverlight instead of Flex.

Well first off, Flex Builder 3 is a complete joke compared to Visual Studio, its features suck, and debugging in it is like you are running on a 386. Secondly, Flash is a dead technology, yep, dead. Ask yourself, how is a platform going to survive when its single programming language is an antiquated feature incomplete POS compared to what is available in .NET. The controls and code that development community is going to start putting out for Silverlight is going to be like a tidal wave. I can pretty much predict now that Adobe will be suing to prevent Microsoft from bundling Silverlight into the next Windows release(they'll make up some crap argument about it being bad for consumers, and find some moron Fed judge that sucks it up.) This release is the beginning of the end for Flash. Ted, you might want to start looking for another job.

Jack,

Flash Player is installed on 98% of machines today, 95% are Flash Player 9 where Silverlight 1.0 is on maybe 2-3% tops. Chosing Silverlight would be like opening a donut shop in the desert. Who is going to see your content? Who is going buy your donuts? Now mind you if MSFT is funding my donut operation, it just might make sense, free capital, few customers, whhhhheeeee party in the desert! It will take well over 2-3 years from today for Silverlight to get over 80% installed if it gets there at all. Where do you think Flash Player will be then? (hint: Installed on 98% of machines)

75% of advertising online ==> Flash Player

70% of video ==> Flash Player

A few enterprise applications ( Oracle, SAP, SalesForce ) ==> Flex3 with Flash Player 

Give me a break man, it will be a very long time before Silverlight makes sense from a market perspective. Regardless we are not sitting idle. Flex will get better as will Flash Player, shoot the WPF shader features announced today at MIX will be shipping Flash Player 10 come Oct. Full hardware acceleration and we will have very good support for other languages, programming languages that is. :)

Keep an open mind Jack and stop eating everything Microsoft feeds you, it has been known to make people and companies very sick. Regardless it makes for good competition and great forum conversation.

I love my job and Flash Player isn't going anywhere!
 
Ted :)
 

adobeted:

Flash Player is installed on 98% of machines today

Hmm, about the same percentage as Netscape, until it had competition. You guys have never had ANY real competition, so you've gotten by with what is quite frankly crap software. Ask yourself this, do you really think you can compete with Microsoft in a platform war, because that's what you've got yourself now.

adobeted:

It will take well over 2-3 years from today for Silverlight to get over 80% installed if it gets there at all.

Ever heard of Windows update? I imagine you'd say something the same about PDF in regards to XPS? I ask you then, why did your lawyers sue to keep "Print to PDF/XPS" out of Vista? Adobe argued that it was bad for the consumer, it was like newspeak right out of 1984. Microsoft wanted to give something away that your company charged money for, and you argued it was bad for the consumer. It was at that point that I decided your company SUCKS. And you have the audacity to tell me to "stop eating everything Microsoft feeds you." What arrogance! I pointed out why I think Flash sucks, a POS language and horrible dev tools, which you quite conveniently didn't address. Tell me, when will ActionScript have generics and linq? What's really telling is that I said Flash sucks, and about your only response was, "hey, we've got installed base, and yah, we'll have shaders in 6 months" Some evangelism.

Bottom line, if you are counting on your installed base to save the day in your fight against Microsoft, I've got a few words for you: Wordperfect, Notes, Netscape, 1-2-3, Netware. Might as well put Flash on the list.

P.S. Will I be able to watch the Olympics in Flash?

P.P.S Stop regurgitating everything your bosses feed you

Topic is side tracked a bit, but anyways.

I am equally loyal to Adobe and Microsoft, been using Adobe and Microsoft products for a long time, and this is what I have to add the argument.

You are bragging about the install base of Flash (98%) just ask yourself if Microsoft had not included Flash player in Windows XP/Windows Vista if you would have had that install base.

Scott announced today that Silverlight plug-in was downloaded on an average of 1.5 Million/Day and he was referring to Silverlight 1.0/Silverlight 1.1. Not many people are interested in Silverlight 1.0 so you haven’t see the tidal wave of Silverlight application on the web yet, the reason that Silverlight 2.0 have go-live licence allows us to deploy meaningful applications., again Silverlight is giving you goose bumps while still in Beta (one day into beta actually) just wait till Summer, and then we will discuss the plugin ubiquity.  I say Microsoft should include Silverlight in IE8 they always did include Flash, who would be laughing then?

I have used Flash/Flex and I completely agree that the learning curve is just too steep, they announced programming in C# for Flex/Flash to be migrated to AS3 but I really don’t see it helping the learning curve in anyway, the fault is not just AS3 it the complete platform, and when are you going to go beyond defining objects in OOP? Again Silverlight controls are released as open source, ever heard of open source? Adobe has every line of code patented, or pending.

The only leverage Flex have over Silverlight is the graphic and media engine, I have see some pretty flash sites (my personal best, PlanetInNeed , and http://www.gettheglass.com/ make sure you watch the Messages on Brittlelactica on PlanetInNeed to get what I mean) and I completely agree that Adobe got a higher hand in Imaging and Media compatibility, even in Beta Microsoft didn’t impress me with the imaging and media engine there is a lot left to be desired, but that might change in Final version if not in Beta 2

My verdict - Never touched Flash/Flex after tasting Silverlight and don’t ever want to.

--
Imran Shaik
If this answers your question please select "Mark as Answered"
Old Blog | Silverlight 2.0 Quintessential Rambling |My Feed

There is no simple answer what to choose. I am using Flex since version 1.0. I really like it and would love to see event model from Flex in Silverlight. For a long time I wasn't able to build socket connectivity in .NET by myslef - using all these async methods is just horrible while in ActionScript you just to addEventListener - job done.

About ActionScript 3.0: good language but has some fatal concepts. I need strong typed language. Adobe says AS3 is strong typed language. Well... not everywhere. Why there are things like Object od dynamic classes? What is the point of creating classes and then making them dynamic so I can declare properties at runtime? I don't get it. It breaks the whole idea of strong typing in AS3. And I'm even more scared when I see proposals for AS4. Replace var with let at some places, compound types (forgot the name of it) but basically to one variable I will be able to assign int or string but not Date - ???, triple-quoted string - OMG. On the other hand nice features like typed collections, operator overloading, method overloading. But when they drop them into one bag with Object and dynamic classes they will make huge mess there. For me it looks like guys at Adobe think: oh - this feature in Ruby looks cool, lets add it to AS, oh - and that from Python/whatever other language looks cool so lets add it too :)

Another point - Flex SDK goes open source. Nice, but if I understand the license correctly (license notes in source files) I can't just take the compiler out and build my own compiler on it. I can just improve it for Adobe which then sell it to me when I will need more than BlazeDS for example. Thats not all. When my potential client will send request for some job to be done, Adobe Consulting will offer their services. That means Adobe may steal my job. So I rather pay for the tools and stay on closed platform but at least I'll be sure I am doing my job, no one else.

I am more into Silverlight right now. I can see progress made by Microsoft on Silverlight during last year. I really appreciate it. It just proves Microsoft is learning and listening.

At the end: sorry for my English. It's not my first language.