Uh… yeah… I’ll let you go to the link and do the obligatory, “Holy shit…”.
I learned a lot reading Robin’s book on OOP; most of my understanding how to meld OOP concepts with Flash was by reading his stuff in combination with Moock’s 1st AS book; I really dig Robin’s writing style… I guess I now dig his software product style as well!
…unfortunately, I took his survey for the product in my “I hate Flex” stage (I’m way over that now, Flex r0X0r$), so I obviously didn’t rank amongst the masses when I answered “I have no use for a SWF that is compiled from XML markup, coded in C# in Visual Studio”. I guess that’s a good thing he ignored me, eh?
Crazy title. And I thought you were all over flex? Or did I just mis-read that? Anyway thanks for the heads up on the book. I’ll have to check it out.
Yeah, I am now, but I wasn’t like the middle of last year when Robin sent out that survey… didn’t see the point then.
Yeah, his book has a very ‘story teller’ approach vs. the typical witty reference book routine.
I looked at the ‘web preview’ of Xamlon, and I don’t get it. What’s the advantage of creating a swf image from XML? Where does the XML come from?
Some (who?) would say that if you don’t get it, you don’t need it. I disagree. The whole concept of Flex, technically based around XML that you use to define your interface (like HTML or XUL), and your ActionScript which runs the View (like JavaScript making HTML do stuff), and both HTML and Flex use CSS for specific styles.
I didn’t see a point for Flex; my CVS run-ins have been few and far between (so FLA’s weren’t all that bad), and Flash works just fine.
…however, there are many serious software developers who just can’t ‘get into’ Flash. It’s not their lack of ability, but more their paradigm. Now, you can’t expect .NET developers who’ve been using VisualBasic or InterDev to just up and come to an environment that isn’t all the way to what their used to. Visual Studio is THE premiere application development IDE, period. If anyone has any beef with that statement, they are just jealous.
That said, many .NET gents still have a lame front-end; it’s forms in the most HTML sense, and since Avalon is leagues away, getting those developers involved; the ones who are talented coders, have the best IDE in the world, and have the desire to get in, but have a harder time than Java developers (since Flex and ActionScript are definately tailored to the JSP crowd).
Now, what if one were to tell those .NET developers that they could deploy to SWF in their existing IDE; all they needed to do was import a new class package, and utilize a familiar XML definition format, similiar to HTML? They’d be like, ‘…is that all?’ Considering Xaml is ascii (text), it checks into source safe really well. Visual Studio integrates well with the concept of C# sharp code in one file, and the view or front-end code, in this case a xaml file which can all be packaged into a solution (like Flash’s project file).
To answer your other question, you code the XML. You know how Dreamweaver writes the HTML for you? Well, you can do the same thing with Visual Studio. Flex does this too; if you click the button in Dreamweaver, it drops a button on the HTML form; FlexBuilder drops a button in the mxml form (which turns into a SWF).
If your used to Flash, you probably wouldn’t care. But for those whose workflow is like JSP/ASP.NET developers, this is great for the Microsoft crowd. C# is a phat language from what I’ve read, and considering it compils I think the to CLR (common language runtime), you could code in VB too. Imagine instead of using ActionScript, you could code in an alrady estabilised enterprise languaged such as VB or C#? Hotness!
Anyway, those are my inferences.