I was over at Ryan Stewart's AIR blog on ZDNet, reading his post Vista sells! More WPF apps coming?. I was reading a comment that Jason Etheridge (a Unix developer) wrote.

It's entirely possible that Microsoft's Silverlight will overtake Flash more quickly than most would think possible. Flash may have over 90% deployment of its player into browsers, but all Microsoft has to do is deliver Silverlight as part of a regular IE update... and suddenly it's almost everywhere. The more compelling argument for Silverlight is the ability to write browser-side apps in languages familiar to developers (C#, Ruby, Python), using Visual Studio's IDE. That's a much, much better story than using an effectively proprietary language like Actionscript (even if it's a variant of Javascript). How long before Microsoft release a platform like AIR that can run CLR apps on the Mac? Mono already allows .NET apps to run under Linux.

He goes on to write:

A platform can only survive if developers are willing to write code for it; with Flash now, there's not really a viable alternative.

Read the entire post and Ryan's response.

Jason's comments do ring true to my ears. A simple Windows Update can make Flash's market penetration seem not that grand. Microsoft already has an existing developer base that Adobe can't match (at least at the moment).

Here's the trump card (or rather, ONE of the trump cards) as I see it. We all know enterprises hate changing technologies. Mostly because a lot of code needs to be overhauled or rewritten from scratch. With Silverlight 1.1 (and going forward) you can virtually pull out your business objects from your existing SQL + ASP.net setup (or even a MySQL + Python whatever) and hook it up with a new simple middle layer to Silverlight. You get to reuse existing code - which saves a LOT of money and time, AND you get to leverage the full potential of RIA. While Flex does tote some nice compatibility features, but somehow I don't think it would match this.

Flex, etc. has become a much more respectable programming language than what ActionScript used to be. But it would have trouble competing with something like C# or VB. Many Flash/Flex/AIR people have been talking about the merging of the desktop and the web, but IMHO I think that some things are better left on the desktop or the web where they belong. The net is not really all that stable as it needs to be for such heavy things. In the future, sure, it could happen, but not yet. Moving things to the web for the sake of moving things to the web is just wrong. In fact, while it was an excellent technology showcase, I didn't particularly approve of the web-based media editor shown at MIX'07. I refer you to my previous rant.

Right now things may look unclear as to where the tide goes or turns, but I have a feeling in the next year or so, we will see some major changes in the RIA space.

In closing, I'd like to provide some insight into the whole WPF adoption thing that Ryan was asking about.

So now that we know people are actually buying Vista, what’s going to be the story for Windows Presentation Foundation? I’ve seen a lot of internet chatter about there being a lack of good WPF apps out there because of a lack of an installed user base. That actually runs contrary to what I’ve heard from shops like IdentityMine and Cynergy who have seen strong demand for WPF applications. I get the sense that most of these are on the business side and less on the consumer side however.

WPF presents a major change from the familiar Windows Forms that developers are so used to. See my Myths post about some of the (percieved or otherwise) obstacles in adoption. But if you look at the amount of excellent 3rd party stuff coming out from Developer Express, Infragistics, Telerik, and even Nukeation, there is a massive demand for WPF. In fact, about 80% of the work at Nukeation for the past year or so has been WPF rather than web-based stuff. Of course, it takes TIME to develop good applications. Expect to see many good applications that use WPF very soon. Some, like RIPT, are already out in beta. I myself have worked on a medical application, a large store chain management app, extremely large enterprise data management and visualization app, and various other applications. Most of these are to be released internally in corporations or select circles - but they shouldn't be discounted from the WPF adoption block.

Before I go, I'd like to ask why we're not seeing AIR and Flex and all that showing up everywhere - especially since they have 90%+ market penetration. ;)

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