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!

Flex 3 In Action released. It's getting amazing response from the community. Why lose in on the action?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933988746

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

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

Manning's has put up an early release for Flex 3 in action. Its a book me and my developer buddies have wrote and worked hard on . Hope you guys like it

http://flexinaction.com/
http://www.manning.com/ahmed/

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

I haven’t blogged for over 3 weeks and no I’m not dead. It’s been really hectic, firstly me, Abdul Qabiz  , Jon Hirschi , and our leader Tariq Ahmed have been working day and night on our new book Flex In Action! flexinaction.com/.
Its a beginners guide to flex and I cannot comment on the release date (soon) but we are in the final stages of book writing (editing, polishing up). Another thing that has kept me busy is tons of new projects that we are working on and with investors to make them a reality; the home page will be updated with product pages and details about how you can work with us! It is going to be a great year for G-uniX and one that will put us on the map.