I had a nice discussion with TimothyP I agreed on most of his points that Silverlight is indeed a nice framework (as is XAML as a language,standard,…). This evening I was doing some more Flex development and I noticed that I had forgotten to mention one thing. Maybe ActionScript is weakly typed, but the Flex Builder tool allows you to have code completion as if it was a strongly typed language.
You could compare it to VB.NET as there you also have code completion but are allowed to call functions that aren’t visible. (sometimes handy when you’re dealing with an ActiveX and don’t want to dependent on the version)
I’ll put some screenshots and code in the near future. Now I’m wrestling with a deadline 🙂
BTW Timothy sorry for the many spelling mistakes. I don’t want to lose time with writing stuff and normally correct it when I’ve published it, but seems there’s no way to edit a comment ?
Hey, at the moment no. I was still working on the blog system when we ran into a bug in Mono. We need to sort out the bug first beforce I can put some more effort in the blog 🙂
Btw, you got me thinking… and I woke up in the middle of the night wondering.
You mentioned using Flex as a front to some ASP.NET application.
So what’s the real advantage here? Are you doing things you can’t do with Ajax?
The reason I’m asking: Here you are creating your ASP.NET application, probably using libraries you’ve created in the past and used in Windows Forms or other applications, etc… And then you make the jump to another piece of technology, dropping support for whatever base you have established. Why would you do that? That would mean Flex, at some point, gives you a huge advantage over using ASP.NET Ajax or even Silverlight. So I’m wondering what that advantage is,
why it would be a good idea for someone, even me, to do this.
For one of the projects we’re currently working on, we’ve written a library which
we use in windows services, desktop apps and asp.net applications. And eventually we’ll use it in Silverlight applications as well. (The library implements a hardware communication protocol, not important but just to point out I’m not talking about something trivial). If we decided to use Flex instead, we could probably still use our codebase, but we’d have to do it on the server.
Please note, I’m not saying what I’m saying is correct,
this is just how I understand it, so feel free to correct me (just don’t kill me :p)