I attended Microsoft’s MIX 2010 conference in Las Vegas the week after 360Flex.  I had previously attended I think the 2007 or 2008 one.  I had actually recorded a lot of video from the first one and trashed all of it.  The 200x one was an EXTREMELY weird conference.  It occured in the Venetian, the same hotel that Adobe’s MAX was at.  So, I had the opportunity to see the vibe differences between the 2 communities, and whoa man… what a difference.

Adobe has more chicks, more of a party vibe, and “appears” more diverse in terms of backgrounds.  In talking to some of the individuals at after parties, the majority at MIX were involved in the Microsoft technology stack in some shape or fashion whereas at Adobe, you had no clue what those people did.  There were patterns, yes, but design, back-end, Flash, Flex, Python…. all over the map.

At the 200x one, when they showed Silverlight 3 new features, I nearly lost my shit.  The audience was really excited about features that I perceived as things the Flash community had done 5 years ago.  Yet, if you looked at the audience, they were eating it up, excited, and you could tell they couldn’t wait to start coding.  After taking some time to reflect, I realized that Microsoft developers use Microsoft technologies.  They don’t “branch out” like Adobe ones do.  That’s why it’s rare as heck to see a .NET dev who uses Flash/Flex for their front-end.  Most use AJAX… generated from Microsoft tools.

This year was different.  I was armed with the understanding that Silverlight really isn’t just about competing with Flash/Flex/AIR in the video arena, but rather providing a missing piece that .NET devs didn’t have in the past.  The features added into Silverlight 1 through 4 match a lot of what us Flash/Flex Developers have.  They also validate our work. It’s also about building on Microsoft’s platform, which is great. You need a great web runtime + a phat browser + device to kick some tail. Apple does it, Google’s doing it… Adobe? Well, no device or browser, but Flash Player rocks, so….

However, no matter how on parity those features get, or even surpass, the Microsoft community clearly is missing the design aspect in terms of designers working with .NET devs.  There are some, yes, but it’s a night and day difference compared to your average Flex consulting firm, or Flash agency, or small software shop that uses Flex.  I even talked to one small .NET shop manager who hired a Flash Designer specifically to get his UX/Design help with their Silverlight/WPF endeavors.

What many predicted finally came true: Microsoft forewent fighting Adobe on the design front, and embraced it.  It’s actually scary vs. cool.  I mean, it’s cool, but damn they did it well.  I haven’t used the tools in production, thus this entire paragraph is suspect, but wow.  They are now supporting PSD (Photoshop) and AI (Illustrator) native import as well as FXG.  Holy.  Shit.  I was on my 2nd cup of coffee, and I still did a triple take when Scott Guthrie mentioned “So, we’re going to import some FXG…”.  Say what?  Where’s Design!?

“Designers don’t use Design, they use Photoshop & Illustrator.”

said Mike Downey when I confronted him about it.  His tone was very matter of fact, confident… almost like, “Yeah man… exactly”.  What that means, though, is that they are on the RIGHT path.  Very cool stuff to embrace the design tools we all use.  Also lowers the barrier of entry for the design agencies to work with these Microsoft shops as partners.  Wow.

Yet again, it was great to see Sketchflow in action.  Rapid prototyping is HUGE in helping sales snag gigs, and now that the .NET world has a way to do this WITH valid design tools, man.

The common theme of the conference was “mobile, mobile, mobile”.  They were pushing their Windows Mobile 7, or whatever the heck it’s called, HARD.  I body checked ’em on the 3 buttons, and they had some valid use cases.  Everyone codes a back button in iPhone apps… why not remove that step and put it natively on the phone?  Also, making search a first class citizen.  Well… can’t argue with that.

Like I drunkenly yelled at Jens, this was the most amazing keynote I’ve seen in terms of flow and momentum.  Microsoft this year clearly had it down pat.  They had a consistent message, it was effectively communicated, and it inspired the audience into action.  Well… mostly.  While the developer story was picturesque with all the tools working together with a device & marketplace just waiting on you to start coding, the phone doesn’t exist yet.  iPhone does.  When it arrives, though, holy fish.  I believe Adobe can definately have just as a compelling story… but there was just something really professional, confident, and effective at this MIX keynote.  Maybe it was the speakers’ experience level.  Maybe it was good rehearsal.  Maybe it was good content.  Every speaker was certainly very positive and didn’t come across as better-than-thou like in times past.  Maybe it was all it.  Bottom line, it was great, and set a high bar.

….but like I said, the audience is just not a Adobe audience.  If it was, it would of been a lot louder, with random screams and yells, perhaps some heckling.  .NET devs need more Redbull… that’s all I can say.  Maybe some Picasso too.  I don’t know.  Maybe that’s why all the Flex & Flash devs were there. *ahem*

I hopped around sessions to “see what people were working on”.  They were doing the same things we’re doing. CMS systems that have rich front-ends to manage & deploy media.  Video players.  Mobile development for phones that don’t exist (see what I did thar?).  Dealing with scaleable client-side software via modules.  Bottom line, they are a lot like us, doing very similar work.  Sadly, most of the Silverlight specific stuff is still funded-by-Microsoft vs. a client hiring someone/some firm/company.  While the technology seems to be ready, the market isn’t.

And that leads me to my conclusion.  Once they get to 60%, we’re in trouble.  Not big trouble, but we WILL start losing work.  At that point, you have 2 choices.  You can take the Cynergy approach of a few years ago, and go, “Dude, we do both ’cause they both rock!”, or you can just deal with the reduced amount of gigs.  I don’t know to what degree this will affect the Flash/Flex world, but I know a lot of the big clients I’ve had in the past 2 years will no longer exist… unless I code Silverlight.  I, like others, still get a lot of work, so it’s not like we’ll just become unemployed, not in the least.  It’s just that the “MLB’s” and the “Olympics” style gigs will start to flow towards the Microsoft realm vs. the Flash realm.  And no, just because Flash has a higher install base won’t matter.  I can’t compete with free, regardless if my plugin of choice is at 99% and theirs is at 60%.  That said, Java/Python/Ruby etc. still exist in large quantities.  They target specific markets & verticals.  A lot of those is where Flash & Flex still shine, and will continue to do so.  Not everyone on the planet uses Microsoft technology stacks.

ESPECIALLY in the consumer sphere.

That’s what was interesting about the way Microsoft pitched their phone.  To consumers.  They hired all the right people, said all the right things, integrated all the right tools.  While I’m sure the manufacturers will make pimp devices, it’s challenging not to be cynical about Operators.  I guess if Apple can do it with glib, perhaps Microsoft can do it with dough?

Finally, Microsoft is definitely hiring the right people.  They are positioning key individuals in certain parts of the company, removing the old guard who just don’t get the web, nor younger consumers.

Will I be doing anything different after my 2nd MIX?  No.  Yes, I’ll be keeping in touch with my new found Microsoft friends… but until the Silverlight work flows to me vs. me having to form Microsoft consulting/partner relationships, nothing changes in my world.  It’s all about the money.  If people pay, I’ll do it.  Right now, Microsoft pays.  I don’t mind working as a partner for Microsoft, but right now the world knows me as a Flash & Flex Dev who likes to kick ass with Flash Player, not Silverlight.  It’s up to the greenbacks flow to change that. I know it comes off as reactive, but the Microsoft market is large enough that if I did dive in, I’d have zero problem finding clients even if am “late to the game”.

Oh yeah, and lastly, all the “free” software Microsoft is releasing to get you on board is a smart f’ing move.  And Visual Studio still looks awesome… so does C#.  Maybe I’ll go learn Unity this weekend to get taste without having to dust off my PC or install VMWare or whatever it’s called.  Anything I can do to avoid Objective C….

Anyway, thanks a ton to Microsoft for inviting me, I really appreciate it and all the events, they were fun, and I love meeting new people.  It was the best MIX yet, I learned a lot, and I look forward to speaking at the next one!

Contents

• Introduction – What and Why MIX?
• Conference Grounds – Where was MIX and how did it go down
• DoubleClick – Syndication ready Silverlight
• Have we seen this before? – “Dude, Flash did that years ago.”
• Silverlight Adaptive Streaming – Curious about how the buffering works.
• Silverlight on Mobile – Same problems as Flash Lite has.
• Silverlight for Flash Developers – I do Flash; can I do Silverlight?
• AOL’s Silverlight Email App – Enterprise Silverlight
• Bloggers Mingling – A-list bloggers, and who I met
• Conclusions – What I took away from MIX.
• History Repeating – Some of the .NET crew is doing what the Java crew already did.
• Force Fed Silverlight – Silverlight is an alternative, not a choice.

Introduction

I was invited to attend the Microsoft MIX 2008 conference. After discussing this years conferences as well as the technology involved with my CTO, he decided we should go together. We headed to Las Vegas, where the conference was held, with the sole goal of evaluating Silverlight for use in our self-service video platform, one of our company’s main products I work on.

Although a lot our focus nowadays is on Flash video, we have a significant amount of money and technology invested in Windows Media. We also do way more Windows Media business, especially in the fun Live events arena. We currently create a lot of custom Flash video players that interface with our back-end video CMS system. Some are simple while others are full blown multimedia applications.

Can we do the same with Silverlight 2?

That was the fundamental question to answer, or have answered, at MIX.

Conference Grounds

I’d been to the Venetian Hotel in Vegas before for Macromedia’s / Adobe’s MAX 2006. The MIX conference had about 1000 less attendees than MAX 2k6 (2000+), but was no less grand. You could spot the geeks everywhere, and they seemed to outnumber the suits. Registration was simple, our hotel accommodations were great, and the facilities and layout were a lot more informal that I originally expected. I had this expectation of Microsoft being stodgy, formal, and just overall “proper like”. This was smashed when I visited the HQ in Janurary and met Bill Gates in person, but apparently that experience wasn’t enough.

The conference, however, felt a lot like MAX. It definitely was a fun multimedia event with code. My CTO and I made a decent attempt to talk to a variety of conference goers, not just Adobe & Microsoft employee’s. My interest was solely to identify what their background was, why they were at MIX, and what they hoped to get out of it. That, and I like meeting new people, especially people outside of the Adobe sphere who do software for a living.

Identifying a technology’s validity are based halfway on the technology’s merits. The other half comes from identifying the community around the technology, and seeing if the 2 have a future together. Do they mesh? If not, is that a big deal? Is there even an identifiable community? How does it compare to other technology communities that I’m familiar with? What are the pain points, and what are the great matches?

All of these questions I was continually asking myself quietly as I listened to speakers, both official and informal.

Keynote Day 1: DoubleClick

The were a couple things that I found interesting about the keynote.

The first was Ari Paparo from DoubleClick. Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President in the Developer division at Microsoft, was talking about some of the Ad features in Visual Studio. I had Twittered how irrelevant this stuff is in the media industry. If Silverlight had any chance of making a dent in what Flash is doing, it needed to integrate with a real ad platform, like say,DoubleClick.

Not 5 seconds had I twittered that, Scott Guthrie had a witty introduction to Ari who showed a brief overview of the SDK of using DoubleClick with Silverlight. For those who don’t know, DoubleClick is one of the largest ad platform providers. I think last week in fact, the FCC approved Google‘s acquisition of them. One of many, we utilize DoubleClick at work to allow customers to have relevant video & image ads to show in their video players, allowing them to monetize their content.

Getting an ActionScript 3, heck even an mxmlc (Flex‘s compiler) compatible version from them has been like pulling teeth. While frustrating, what was more frustrating was the lack of ANY Silverlight information a few months ago. Our first project utilizing Silverlight, used primarily as a solution for Mac users since Flip4Mac is noble, but flaky. One of the things that eventually forced our Silverlight player to be removed, replaced by Windows Media, and thus flipping the bird to Mac users was the lack of official DoubleClick support. It’s joke really since both Windows Media and Silverlight take the same ASX play list file (text file with a bunch of URL’s to media basically).

Now, it’s official; they can play ball in the online media & syndication world.

Keynote Day 1: “We” Have/Haven’t Seen This Before

The second thing that really jumped out at me was a lot of the Silverlight content shown that could of been done in Flash, or had already been done years ago. It was extremely frustrating to here the “oohs” and “aaaahs” from the crowd. I’m like, “Have you all actually used the Internet in the past 5 years?”.

You couldn’t deny it, though. There was a subtle vibe. I looked around the crowd and saw muted discussion as each Silverlight application was shown. Whatever negative thoughts I had clearly were not shared by the majority. There was muted discussions amongst co-workers. People sitting next to each other were in quiet, yet excited conversation. Clearly they had ideas about how to utilize the technology and wanted to act on them.

As Ryan Stewart said, “This crowd isn’t just familiar with our technology”. Ryan’s typical & positive Care Bear Stare attitude did nothing to sway my feelings. I call bs ; this has nothing to do with technology familiarity and everything with technology approachability. The Microsoft crowd DID and DOES know about Flash & Flex, at least some. The only reason it was apparently invalid in their eyes is that it didn’t integrate with Visual Studio & .NET easily, and wasn’t presented as a valid business case by Microsoft. That has to be it. There is no way the thousands of competent developers and designers there had no clue these abilities couldn’t be done pre-Silverlight Beta 1 in Flash or Flex.

Keynote Day 1: Silverlight Adaptive Streaming

Everyone thought it was really rad. I yawned. While down-graded on-t3h-fly streams has always been a touted feature of Windows Media, especially over Flash Media Server, I’ve never seen it work… at least at my place of employment. Additionally, if you have enough bandwidth to down-grade streams on the fly from 500k to 100k, you’re clearly running on a network that has issues. You’re best bet in this case is not to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to be clever and preload lower bit-rate streams into the buffer. Instead, just feed them a 100k stream, and call it a day. Disagree? Works for YouTube, so…

Even Flash Player’s double-buffering has left me not impressed on uber-slow speed connections. Besides, the graph they showed was VERY well designed, making me question the validity of every image thenceforth I was shown. Bottom line: I’ll need to play with it on a production environment to really believe it has any value. With most broadband customers, decent double-buffering prevents all problems with On Video & 24/7 video.

There is a company out there that has a comparable solution for Flash, but that’s for another blog entry. This does add ammo that Adaptive Streaming is valid, and thus usable.

Keynote Day 1: Silverlight on Mobile

It doesn’t really matter if it works, nor if they formed a partnership with Nokia. I’m American, and as such, my country is held in the grip of operators who have walled gardens. Meaning, I get tons Flex & Flash work, but only received 2 Flash Lite job offers in 2007. Flash Lite is not popular here for the same reasons Silverlight won’t be.

Windows Mobile and CE have always been good. I had Flash 6 running well back in 2003 on a Windows Mobile device. Logically, one could assume Silverlight would work just as well. At that point, though, I’d much rather utilize WPF, not Silverlight… unless the content was already created, and you’re merely porting, but that’s never how I’ve seen it work.

Sessions: Silverlight for Flash Developers

Not the exact session name, but close enough. I sat in for half of this; I believe one of blokes from Cynergy Systems was presenting. In the 40 minutes that I caught, he went over the API and how you can code Silverlight without using Blend just like you can code Flash without using the Timeline.

It was really uncool to see, even in C#, that working with XAML via code is still a bitch. Some could argue that it’s nice to have such low-level access to XAML via code. The presenter did the same thing in C# that I did in JavaScript in Silverlight 1.0: Abstract everything you normally do with GUI objects in a base class to act like the nice API of Flash.

So, instead of guiObject.SetValue(“Canvas.Left”, 30), you instead make a base class do that as a getter / setter, so you can instead go guiObject.x = 30. Lame.

I’m not sure if the new GUI components fix this. While boilerplate access can be fun if you’re an uber-geek, high level abstraction into easy to use components allow you to get stuff done. Just ask Simeon and his adventures in not-using the Flex SDK, instead trying various pure AS3 approaches.

What was nice, though, was that clearly XAML & C# are definitely do-able by traditional Flash devs. You’ll do the same thing that you did learning Flex & AS3: Learning the new tool(s) and learning the new API.

Although the Adobe CS3 installation process is horrible (not Flex), I’m pretty sure the Visual Studio + Blend is worse, especially for the beta bits based on mourning Twits I read. You’ve been warned.

Sessions: AOL’s Silverlight Email Application

The only true Enterprise application I saw during the keynote was AOL‘s email application. A whopping 10-billion alarm bells went off when I saw it for a few reasons.

First, I’ve had the pleasure of working with & meeting one of AOL’s good acquisitions. They are a smart, talented team who’ve already had proven results. That doesn’t mean that all of AOL is, but it certainly gives me the impression those who are doing the acquisitions know what they are doing. Second, the AJAX version of their email client was really fast and seemed to work great.

You have a perfectly well and good AJAX email client… why in the heck did you make a Silverlight version? I made a note to attend this session to find out. I got my answer at the end during questions. Someone asked did you look at Flash as an option (he should of said Flex, but whatever). They responded with “Microsoft Partnership”. That’s all I needed to know. It was nice to know that they had an existing .NET team that already knew C#… whatever. Programming is programming. C#, AS3… if you can code, you can learn another language and platform.

However, this session overall was enlightening as to what Silverlight developers perceive they need. Aka, all the stuff the Flex SDK already has. Keep in mind, they built this while Silverlight 2 was still in early development, so I don’t think they had any access to the controls.

That’s right, they had build their own component framework. $10 bucks says they spent 6 months just building the component infrastructure they needed to actually build an application.

What they DID go over were high level & low level details of each of the facets of their development. This was the really cool part. They built their own component base classes, and controls. They built their own measurement engine. They built their own skinning engine (read run-time skinning, not just Blend). Basically, anything you’d find in the bowls of UIComponent in the Flex SDK and all of his helper classes, they did some of that on some level. In short, a TON of work just to get started. Very impressive from a developer perspective, very crazy from a “how much R&D money did this team actually get from Microsoft, ZOMG!!!1111”.

Hopefully, other teams won’t have to do that much work assuming the components, both Microsoft’s and all the 3rd party ones I’ve seen advertised, do a lot of this already.

It was pretty annoying to debate quietly with my CTO in the audience. “Dude, they have AbstractClass as a keyword.”

“What, AS3 doesn’t have that?”

“No dude… you just add an Abstract prefix and follow the convention.”

*grumble* *grumble*

“Dude, Silverlight has threads?”

“What, Flash Player doesn’t have threads?”

“OMG, you don’t NEED threads to produce a nice, working Enterprise application.”

“I can’t believe Flash Player doesn’t have threads.” *grumble* *grumble*

In conclusion, I was very impressed with what the AOL team had done. I was also impressed that Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is already creating this level of applications. “This level” will have be carefully scrutinized; I did not get a chance to play with the real application to see how it felt compared to Gmail, Gooey, etc. The AOL team also didn’t discuss their battle scars. I love Flex & Flash, but even I have tons of battle scars to talk about.

Bizzness

I managed to tag along on 2 business meetings my CTO had with 2 cool companies. Can’t really say who they were, but can say they are relevant to my business: online video. Totally out of my element, so naturally it was fun to learn how those things go down. One was all formal with the pretense of informality, and the other was just an introduction to get to know each other.

It’s more likely for these things to happen since everyone is more likely to be at the same place at a conference like MIX.

BlogZone MIXer

I got invited to the BlogZone MIXer; a who’s who of the blogsphere. I brought my CTO along to this A-List event. There, your usual celebrities like Robert Scoble, Molly Holzschlag, Eric Zocher, Ryan Stewart, etc. The one dude I really got to have interesting conversations that I never finished was Alex Russell. Among other things, he’s one of the creators of Dojo, the Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript that helps abstract browser incompatibilities. Anyone who does JavaScript for a living is a prime target for my wrath. Unfortunately, he was really cool so I found it really hard to take the piss out of him.

I drilled him about his role on the “Board”. You know, the ones who are shaping the future of JavaScript 2. I tried to get as much dirt as possible since I only ever hear mostly positive things which I know can’t be right. As central a role as JavaScript plays on the web today, you KNOW there is some drama up in that mug.

Alex is bright. Regardless of the historical reasons of how he got on the Board, if you ever have some spare positive karma, be sure to throw it his way. Encourage him to keep fighting the good fight, to battle cynicism, and to never give in. He’s clearly qualified. He’s got some good ideas that apparently are shared by others.

Like all standards boards, I felt like some of the non-vendors give a flip for the implementers. For example, Object.prototype was a great idea, but I’ve yet to see a tool that helps you identify who’s mixing what on your prototypes. Who’s fault is that? Those who built tools like Adobe Flash or those who built the language and didn’t give an easy way in the language for tool makers to latch onto? It’s pure speculation; we didn’t get to finish our 3 concurrent conversations so maybe they do communicate each other’s concerns and I’m just not seeing it. I’ve read like 1 blog entry on Colin Moock’s blog with a summary of the action. After talking to Alex, I’m glad that’s all I’ve read, and that people like Alex are in there.

Hang in there, buddy!

Conclusions

I had a good time at MIX and definitely plan on speaking next year. Not sure on what yet, but it doesn’t matter. I’m really appreciative of Microsoft for inviting me. I loathe Vegas, yet really dug the event and how everything was put together. I felt their execution was good, and the topics relevant. There were also a lot of cool & intelligent people there, which is the most important part of conferences for me. Also, thanks to Cynergy Systems (I believe it was them) for the Tao party. Had a lot of fun there.

Blend and Visual Studio still look appealing and valid, but I’m not looking forward to my first Silverlight project mainly because I’ll probably spend yet another 3 days getting up and running again. The install requirements as well as required times are just insane. Flex Builder 3 takes 40 minutes to download on DSL, and 5 minutes to install and configure. The Eclipse plug-in + various JRE’s can definitely take up a lot of your day, but not days plural. In all fairness, it IS still a ton of beta bits working together. Maybe it’ll be decent by launch.

…did I mention I’ll have to do Bootcamp or Parallels since Microsoft doesn’t appear to have any plans for supporting Silverlight development on my Mac, just debugging? My PC at home will be fine since I’ve got tons of alpha and beta bits working (somewhat, *ahem*) on it.

I can see why .NET dudes are so excited about Silverlight. The coding style and language look a lot like regular .NET development. I don’t do .NET, nor do I do server-side development, but I’ve debugged .NET code other people wrote in the past and the learning curve will hopefully be just API and runtime features since it’s C#.

…and that’s the confusing part. What is .NET 3.5 now… 48 megs or so? Let’s just pretend it’s near there. Silverlight 2.0 probably won’t cap 4 megs (unofficial cap based on rumor from one WPF project manager I talked to). What of .NET is missing based on those 44 megs NOT being in the Silverlight plug-in? What of XAML isn’t supported? What of C#’s features aren’t supported? VB, JPython, JRuby ? Those are questions I need to answer to see how well their execution of making it easy for existing .NET developers to transition.

History Repeating

The most important thing for me that I took away from MIX was that I’ve seen this before. Flash Developers had an awesome multimedia platform to build upon for years. Java guys came, and then left. A few masochists stuck around really helping the community, and growth of the platform, out a lot.

Years later, Flex came out, and changed everything. Java devs came in droves. Then came PHP guys, Python, you name it. Flex allowed traditional developers to succeed where they apparently could not before using Flash or various other open source alternatives like FAME, Flash Develop, or FDT, etc. After learning to code for years, I physically cannot go back to Flash to do large scale development. Therefore, I totally understand why traditional developers couldn’t fathom how to do large scale scale projects in Flash.

I’m seeing the same signs in the .NET world. It’s been 2 years+ on the new runtime in Flash Player 9. Building applications in Flex, both Enterprise as well as widgets, are now proven to work well. Aka, we have a great runtime and a great set of tools. I worked with a .NET team 5 years ago to do the front-end in Flash & HTML, and the back-end in .NET. The work flow was good enough. I know a lot of .NET guys who use Flex for the front end.

Yet the impression I got from the conference was that this side of .NET is unknown by a lot of people. Either that, or just that client side development in something other than server-side generated HTML/JS/CSS was, and is, possible.

I’m seeing the same signs. These traditional server-side .NET devs ask, “So, how do you handle session data?” …and then the cliche response we’ve read soo many times in the Flash & Flex world, “We’re a stateful client. There are no pages. This is an application.” “How do you store local data?” “So the middle tier no longer handles the rendering of the GUI?” etc., etc., etc. Some get frustrated. Most get excited, see the light, and start asking both themselves and their cohorts a multitude of questions how much better things could be.

2 years later, Flex is the poster child for Java developers. In 2010, will we be seeing signs of Silverlight being the standard for .NETerz?

Every word above this sentence is invalid until they get their plug-in installation correct. A lot of the Silverlight installs that were 1.0, and people upgraded to 1.1, is where the trouble started. Some of the plug-in detection code got confused, asking you to upgrade even though you were. Some of those affected blogged conflicting reports, causing confusion of what the real problem was.

This is exactly the opposite of what you want to happen. This is also one of the main reasons Macromedia Director‘s “Shockwave” Internet plug-in failed. I’d create something, upload it to my website, and my mom couldn’t view it because of plug-in installation issues. That’s a serious problem.

Flash didn’t have this problem. It just worked. For years. Silverlight the plug-in INCLUDING THE DEFAULT DETECTION CODE needs to just work. For years. If not, it’s doomed. “Doomed” not meaning in never being a viable solution, but rather, Microsoft will have to spend major PR money to compensate for the negative perception that plug-in installations gone awry will cause.

Force Fed Silverlight

What does this mean for Flex & Flash devs? If you’re a Flex dev… not much. We need to wait for someone to intelligently blog their experiences with not just the controls offered by Microsoft, but by the multitude of 3rd party developers.

If you’re a Flash dev in the agency world, you need to pay attention. Yes, please temper this with the fact that, even though it’s a week+ past, I was still at a Microsoft conference bombarded by marketing hoopla. Regardless, media work will come your way where a client will want Silverlight. This can either be because of a partnership, because the company already has a plethora of Windows Media content that cannot be cost-effectively converted to Flash, or because like most clients, they don’t care about the technology choice and therefore the decision was already made long before the requirements hit your PM’s desk.

I would HIGHLY suggest you get training in Blend in a official capacity if you’re job can fund it. If you’re bored, add Visual Studio to the mix as well. This will save a lot of frustration and a lot of time. Blend and Flash aren’t a lot a like when it comes to animation and work flow. Blend is NOT alien, however. You can learn it. I’ve seen a traditional designer use it (caveat, at Microsoft HQ) and was impressed at how fluidly he made things.

If you’re a Flash dev as a contractor, you can wait a few more months. I’ve gotten 1 Silverlight job and one WPF designer job in 2008. This compared to at least 1 Flex or Flash job a day, every day. Once Silverlight 2 gets out of beta, it may behoove you to at least be capable of compiling a simple app… say, drawing a circle to the screen in XAML and then making it clickable . Sounds simple enough, but you’d be surprised how much time that effort really can take. And as you know, time is money in the 1099 world. Hopefully it’ll take less time by launch to get up and running.

If you’re a Flash designer, you’ve actually got it pretty good. Blend and Design are not just for Silverlight development, but also for WPF development, aka rich desktop application development. This means that if you become familiar with the tools, you’ll suddenly have a lot of traditional .NET shops looking for “designers”. Not all, but more than are now. A lot of the .NET shops will be just as fine with 2 shades of gray as some of the small software shops using Flex. All that has to happen is to have upper management see a demo, recognize that their team is already “capable” of using their existing skills, and demand Silverlight. Someone who’s had experience, and has the budget, will request a proper designer / consultant be hired. The work flow between Design and Blend wasn’t that great for me, though. Probably because I’m a n00b. PNG FTW!

4 years ago, I choose to experiment in Flex, and eventually make it my full-time career. This was a choice I made. There were no job offers for Flex. Enterprises were still experimenting in Flex projects. Flashdevs loathed the Enterprise price tag and having the compiler be on the server. I didn’t care… I loved it! 4 years later, Flex is still rocking strong, and has a bright future.

Silverlight? The marketing machine at Microsoft is awesome. You don’t have a choice to learn Silverlight or not. You can choose not too, but companies WILL be utilizing the technology, some requesting it specifically. For the later, you can either cater to that, and take their money. …Or not, and find some effective way to sell them on Flex / Flash. In a sense, we’re being force fed Silverlight. Assuming things go well for Microsoft, I’m not “choosing” to be a Silverlight developer. Rather, I’m merely reacting to market conditions. Flex was easy… it was love at first sight. Silverlight? It looks fun if I actually had people to pay me do it, but Flex is more fun.

Either way, you can relax. Flash Player is still king, and there is still a lot more money to made for a long time.

Now that I’m W2, I have to give my CTO a list of conferences I’d like to speak at this year. I negotiated 1 per year as part of my hiring agreement. Since I don’t see the need to be uber-engaged in selling myself when I’m 100% focused on my at work endeavors, that seemed fine as opposed to the regular 2 or 3 per year. I figure I can possibly finagle 1 more in if I play my cards right. The worse he can say is no. 360Flex doesn’t count because it’s in my backyard… well, sort of. Closer than Italy.

If I attended MIX, it’d be the first conference I’ve attended where I didn’t actually speak. I learn a ton at conferences in between the sessions; I don’t actually like attending sessions as much as I like engaging people outside the sessions. Either way, both are great places to learn. However, speaking at a conference allows you to be perceived as an expert at a subject matter, even if you really aren’t (same as writing a book). Further, it builds credence to your personal brand and thus makes you a more desirable candidate for hire. You get to learn, you build brand awareness about yourself, and you get to practice being a better public speaker. Therefore, it’s pretty easy to justify the money for travel & accomodations since if you speak, you don’t pay for conference admission tickets.

Not speaking at MIX 2008 isn’t such a bad thing; I’m a n00b in the Microsoft world. I’m a Silverlight n00b as well. Therefore, going to a conference out of my comfort zone, yet still relevant immensely to my industry, still seems like a good thing.

From a business perspective, there are a lot of reasons. First, I work for an online video company. We make money in allowing customers to have video on their websites and used in their software. They can deliver 24/7 networks, on demand video, syndication, and live broadcasts. Silverlight’s trump card, which its using to pole vault quickly into relevancy, is its cross platform angle at delivering windows video. This is important for a number reasons. My company has a significant amount of investment in Windows Media forming an end to end solution for live, 24/7, and on demand video with support for remote locations.

The technology that supports this based on what I’ve seen is way more mature on the back-end with regards to transcoding than Flash video. No one uses Spark anymore. On2’s price and back-end encoding solution examples are a joke and thankfully will hopefully get annihilated pretty soon by the tidal wave that is H.264, aka MPEG-4 Part 10… assuming licensing doesn’t spook people away. Thankfully, I have the luxury of bitching about those back-end solutions, but not actually having to code nor maintain them.

After seeing a 2 meg bitrate H.264 video stream from a secret FMS3 enabled-Akamai server today with no hiccups, I’m chomping at the bit. And so are our customers. Yes, they want to pay the extra bandwidth fee’s that are associated with the higher bandwidth consumption of H.264. Why? ‘Cause it’s the hotness! Curious if they’ll do so for VC-1?

To be fair, we debated getting 15 of us to all do it at once to see if we could clog our 30 meg pipe.

All you Net Neutrality people need to give up. H.264 content, and thus its immense file size, is yet another reason why telecoms and cable networks need to charge by bandwidth to make any money off of their, currently, dumb pipes. While I’m a major fan of flat fee’s as a consumer, I have a feeling that as businesses pay companies like mine to deploy H.264 content, millions of consumers will consume it. That is also consuming a TON more bandwidth when you look at it in scale. Mark my words, Texas is only the beginning.

As more and more customers ask for Flash video, both open source and commercial institutions are releasing a lot of better support for getting Flash transcoding solutions into a back-end work flow. That’s great, but there’s still a lot of great code deployed on Windows Media, today. The front end is the only problem. Silverlight hopes to remedy that with not just a solution to the suck that is using Windows Media on the web, but also a multimedia client technology to build atop of.

Some customers will ask for both as the marketing machine continues to crush all in it’s path. Therefore, Silverlight and Flash cannot be viewed as solutions unto themselves, but merely a solution for a particular customer’s need. Aka, you need to support both. This isn’t to return to the horrid HTML window pop-ups of the past where you chose what plugin to use. Rather, it’s to take advantage of already coded and working back-end services, additional codec options, and the fact that Silverlight is a rich internet platform just like the Flash Player is.

That last part is the main key here. We are using Flex and Flash at work for both PHP and .NET and so are a variety of other companies. However, I have a feeling a lot of companies that are either using .NET exclusively, or are associated with firms that use .NET for specific services will want a Silverlight solution from us when given the choice between Flash or Silverlight. You can either say no, and not take their money… or you can say yes, give them Silverlight, and take their money. What’s the cost?

That is a rehetorical question as I don’t know… building Flash video players that scale for millions of customers is hard. Maintaining that code, sequestering custom development for those customers who front bling in organized code repositories, and balancing legacy features with additional latest greatest is REALLY hard.

As I read the above 3 paragraphs I just wrote, it really has less to do with learning Silverlight for it’s own sake (features that Flash Player doesn’t have, some features done differently, and different way of doing things to expand my personal horizons), but rather to ensure that when customers (while I’m W2) and clients (if I ever go back to 1099) ask for Silverlight solutions, I can give an informed answer.

Do I want to be capable of responding? To be honest, no. I love doing Flash & Flex, and using Blend and Visual Studio is not yet as fun. If it’s fun, I’ll use it; if it’s not, I won’t. That joy in using products is what drives me to create quality software for my clients and customers, even when I’m exhausted. I think I see the potential, however. More importantly, I believe. A lot of people during the Flex 1 and 1.5 days said Flex was destined to fail because of it’s draconian business unit (except for Lucian Beebe, he is the f”ing man!), its insane price tag, and with a compiler that was on the server instead of the client.

Yet Flex is now an insanely successful product. Regardless of what the Adobe financial reports say, businesses are dying for good Flex talent. I knew it wouldn’t for 2 reasons. The first reason, and the most subjective and thus invalid, was my “aha” moment when using Flex 1 for the first time. I used 1 binding and built a form. What was special at how damn quickly I did it, and how flexible the component layout engine was. I knew I was using something special… even if it cost me $17 bucks for 2 demo CD’s since you couldn’t download a demo of Flex back in the day. I made that $17 back in consulting, so it’s all good.

The second was in meeting those in charge of Flex and deluging them with questions, accusations, and frustrations. They had a good grasp on the industry, fearful perception (I’d argue un-resolved frustration) around the Flash communities vitrol laced reactions, but most importantly a consistent drive across the team to take Flex to the next level. You could see this in the early days of the Flex team and their participation in Flexcoders. They’d not only answer questions in the community, but ask them back. They’d do what other companies sometimes consider a faux pau, and use their customers as sounding boards.

I saw that same thing at Microsoft, both while I was there, and outside the walls. That determined attitude, drive, and already deployed marketing budget means Microsoft means business. Granted, there are a lot of different facets, multiple hands in the jar, and way more challenges. Regardless, this isn’t Liquid Motion.

Us Flash Developers know that the only reason we were successful was because our plugin “just worked”. Those 2 words (in present tense) became a catch phrase used to sell Java developers on what Flash Player was a great runtime to develop for vs. JRE. If Silverlight gets there, and actually works well enough on both Mac and PC across browsers, we’ll see more and more agencies doing Silverlight work. We’ll start to hear about more and more Silverlight projects done behind the firewall (that’s where Flex started remember) and undoubtebly the obligetory Techcrunch series of posts about startups using Silverlight in some shape or fashion for the crux of their business. Even if it isn’t the crux, bloggers in the .NET sphere will be sure to tout it up as being so.

In conclusion, I want to go to challenge my assumptions. I hate Las Vegas with a passion (if I were single and 22… sure, why not, but I’m not now, so…). I want to see if the majority .NET shops really do conform to my stereotype of “using Silverlight because it was made for our back-end even though Flash or Flex would work just fine right now”. I want to also see if they conform to my stereotype of the same way Enterprise Java devs view design; as not playing an integral role in the development of applications, being only useful to make initial sales via eye candy. That same attitude results in hiring hybrids or “Silverlight Developers with design experience” to augment teams when confronted with customers who are used to working with agencies and are wondering why this software development shop doesn’t give a flip about the accuracy of their design comps. I want to see if the general consensus and excitement is really towards WPF, and not Silverlight… or if the .NET guys are really just biding their time to jump on board the RIA band wagon. I want to see those Designers who are actually getting paid to not just do WPF design, but Silverlight specific design work and actually using Design and Blend.

Additionally, I want to see Microsoft’s reaction to these things. Does it affect their attitude? Do they give off the appearence they’ll change direction or merely confirming they are on course?

Reading the blogs outside the Flex / Flash / Java / ColdFusion bubble, a lot of the .NET bloggers seem to be a lot like us. Completely in love with their technology, and willing to push it into areas other things may be better at, yet their love and drive make it work. I see a lot of similiarities and I’m curious how this story begins. Knowing so helps me contribute effectively to the business I now work for.

Besides, there is everything right with getting out of your comfort zone, meeting new people, and learning.