I can finally talk about this in the open!. Being on the prerelease for both these products (and many more cool ones coming ;) ) has been quite fun. You get to see the latest features and the goods and bads before the world sees it. Some of the cool things from Flash builder have been that they have really integrated the data service model into the IDE. You can create CFC's based on the data, do other cool stuff and it just makes life easy as pie. With respect to Flash Catalyst, while I havent checked out the build on Labs yet ( I think i got the same one from the prerelease site) one thing that bothers me and *again* I do not know if this is implemented in the build on labs and *i do not even know if i can talk about this*, but you cant edit the code view for the tool. Maybe this is just because its a beta, and they dont want anything being messed up but other then that little bug, Flash platform is a real kick ass tool. The funny thing is, now that F.C is released I cant seem to find any use for it! I havent taken any client work in the past few months because of AndSpot so I have nothing to test F.C against. Well Ill just try some stupid PSD off the web and convert it to a Flex Desgin. Great work Adobe!

It was hard, took month and months but we finally did it. What we had to do first was use tamarain engine that Mozilla has and the Flash 9 Spec to develop a JAVA program to get flash to stick onto the android. It took months and months, mainly because it was just me a single developer doing it. I finally got it running last night but was too tired to post it. Here it is, a link to the main page, source code, downloads, etc etc all that cool stuff.

AndSpot's Page For Flash

Check this out . Weird? Any reason why it runs better if at all it does, which i doubt it does.
http://www.g-unix.com/screencap.jpg

ITS OUT!!!!!!!!!

One of the coolest things about Silverlight is that it is using languages from the .NET platform such as C# and Visual Basic. While we all know VB is crap , C# is quite a powerful language especially with its vast amounts of cool libraries in which you can do all sorts of neat stuff. One of these libraries is the ParallelFX by Microsoft which lets you make your code take advantage of multiple cores on the clients computer. But what does this have to do with silverlight, well you can make your silverlight application use C# and have C# take advantage of the cores making the application much fast. Also you can use PLINQ which is a parallel implementation of LINQ .

On a side note if your looking for a solution like LINQ on the flash platform, check out my previous post on GAIQL which is essentially a PLINQ implementation in actionscript

After watching the live webcast from mix08 , i promptly downloaded the new silverlight 2.0 extensions for visual studio 08 and started to play around with them. Well i know its still in beta , but like the great Doug Mccune said, i have yet to see something done in silverlight that cant be done in Flex/Flash. Sure theres that cool kick-ass 3D thing, but thinking from a normal client/customer point of view unless there looking into building a 3D interface (which ALSO can be done in Flex ..Papervision anyone?), they rather put their resources on something that has been in the wild for a long time and has matured properly. The big problem with silverlight is that its being called the "Flash Killer" , the way I see it Silverlight is just that , a Silver light given off by a Flash that will fade away quickly.

Silverlight which was called WPF/E which stood for Windows Presentation Foundation "everywhere" is just a waste of resources on Microsofts end. Instead of developing a plug-in to run WPF "everywhere" , they should just port over the .net 3.5 framework over to the Mac and Linux and developers can easily put there current WPF windows form applications on the web .

So is it worth learning, spending time and developing applications? . For now just download it and tinker with it, dont spend too much time trying to learn the inside outs. If you know C# then your half way there. Stick to the flash platform for now , and think about silverlight in 2026 :D