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.

That’s “G” for Gansta’, not Guru; I do not impart wisdom, rather I lay da funk!

A Flash G Talks about Silverlight

One particular show was Entertainment Tonight. Walking back to my office, I saw the Microsoft Silverlight logo. Naturally I slammed on the breaks, and stood there staring. This guy, one of the ET hosts, talking in all announcer voice went “Go to ET online where you can view other video content powered EXCLUSIVELY by Microsoft Silverlight”. Wow. I think I’d convulse on the ground like a 1980’s break dancer if they said that about Flash Player. If Ice-T wasn’t enough, now we have TV shows marketing it. Holy fish.

Miles away from Adobe. Granted, both companies I think do a great job at engaging developers, but while the Adobe community makes their own banners, Microsoft fronts the bling for a media blitz.

In other news, I got my first Silverlight 2 startup email. All through 2006, bit smaller amount in 2007, I’d get a least 3 new emails a week from startups looking to create some web app using X back-end with a Flex or Flash front end. It was really weird timing. I just told my CTO last week that we should hold off on any huge Silverlight endeavors that are greater than video players until at least Q1 2009. The reasons were Silverlight 2 is still in alpha, there are no official components yet, and we’re still at an early stage. For all of my positivity about Microsoft’s toolsets, Silverlight the plugin still needs to become ubiquitous in reality. Everyone can talk about how Microsoft can use Windows update, installation CD’s, etc., but it’s all talk and no action. Until I see numbers of successful installations and I can duplicate the ease of install on multiple computers, it’s not viable.

Hopefully by Q3 of 2008, we’ll have all the toys ready to play with. At that point, we can start doing some serious investigation into the realities of porting some of our existing Windows Media content into a more Flash based realm; where video is dynamic and multimedia centric. Granted, we can do this now with all the alpha bits. Tons of people and companies did this with Adobe’s Flex 2 Alphas and Betas, building real-world projects, just waiting for the final release. They are doing the same thing now with Adobe AIR; in beta 3 and people are chomping at the bit to release on a final version with their already built products. I just mean actual development that isn’t considered skunk works and done off the company clock to make real progress with investigations.

I can see how a company could perceive on how they could effectively build a product on alpha bits given both public videos such as Top Banana, and Adobe’s track record with usable beta’s. However, Silverlight doesn’t have a component framework out yet. If I’m wrong and it has an alpha version, then you’re good to go; if not, there is no point. Spending your time creating a List component vs. using a List component to build your product is a waste of time unless you plan on somehow monetizing your component work.

Anyway, the tone of the email was the same as the rest I’ve seen in the past. Meaning, there will be more emails like this one. The Silverlight marketing is working.

Here’s a picture of the Mix n Mash invited attendee’s getting their picture taken with Bill Gates (I somehow got in there, booya!)

From left to right:

Jonathan Snook, Julie Lerman, Kelly Goto, Rob Howard, Bill Gates, Molly Holzschlag, Kip Kniskern, Jesse Warden (me!), Keith Peters and Erik Natzke

Last year’s event apparently had a lot of designers who thought the Silverlight content was really over their head. So, this year, they has 2 tracks; 1 designer track and 1 developer track. I told Tim (Microsoft’s Ted Patrick) that I wanted to go to both. In the end I had to choose one. I planned on going to the developer one because I wanted to give the community a play by play of the features Silverlight 2 will have and do a fair comparison with Flash Player 9 & 10.

However, after about 5 virgin fruit punches at Trader Vics, I was really hyped up after talking to various Microsoft employee’s. I believe they are doing everything right with Silverlight, and tons wrong with Blend. After draining every employee I could meet of info, I decided the next morning I’d hit the design track instead. The 4 of us got to meet some of the designers and dev’s working on Web and Blend.

This career histories’ these dev’s have is just unreal. If I’m 80, and can talk even a 100th of how they talked about where they worked, what they worked on, and how those projects affected them, I’ll feel confident I enjoyed my career. I’m not really sure how in the hell I got invited into a small, informal room to talk shop with these pro’s. Yet, the informal nature made it damn fun. Free coffee was pimp, too!

Web seemed like Microsoft’s version of Dreamweaver. Clean, well laid out, and the focus of the conversation was about integrating a good set of CSS features to help raise the bar for the industry. Apparently there is tons of CSS done horribly wrong. They had some cool ideas, and I’m sure we only heard 5% of all of them. At first, I just listened to Snook and Molly. They are both smart, so just absorbing the dialogue was rad. As they started to show PHP code hinting, and SWF embedding, I felt it was my duty to step up. I got shot down pretty quickly about using SWFObject by default for SWF embedding, or even considering using the Embed tag. It’s all good, I have Pimp Cloth Armor +2. I still need to send the Web team an email of the additional parameters one needs to allow a developer to modify to embed Flash content with more control.

Additionally, I asked about what version of PHP code hinting they would support. It sounded like 5. While I appreciated code hinting for PHP, I asked that they also provide a way to improve on those code hints via configuration files in case they don’t get auto-class hinting like Zend for example. If you’ve ever tried to write your own custom code hints for Dreamweaver, attaching a hook to the back of your neck and jumping out of a helicopter with no parachute is more fun. Bottom line, even version 2, if Web is installed on my machine, I’d use it. I primarily use a Mac, but on my home PC, heck yeah, Web looks fun, and their CSS re-factoring tools sound yum. I suck at CSS so any tool that helps me become a better coder by enforcing best practices… woo woo!

Next up was the Blend crew. Some pro’s and cons here. First off, Blend has it rough right out the gate. It’s a phat tool for doing both Vista application design for WPF and Silverlight development ( as subset of WPF ). Creating a tool to support both environments is a challenge. Flex Builder 3 does it pretty well from the Beta 2 that I’ve played with. Choosing the older SDK or the new 3 one is just a radio button, converting older code is a snap if you aren’t using charts, and choosing an application to be an AIR app is just another radio button. The AIR API isn’t monstrous compared to WPF, so Adobe has it a lot easier getting Flex Builder to support the Flex SDK, ActionScript 3, and AIR api’s. Furthermore, people like me don’t really give a flying flip about developing applications for Vista (until customers come calling offering more bling than they do for web appz). The demo’s they showed for Vista were hot, definitely had good designers employed behind their creation, and the syntax just drew me in.

For example, their binding syntax was sick! Instead of just being a variable like Flex does it, it actually had parameters IN the binding. The 2nd one was one way or two way binding. OMG, I write so much bloody code to do 2-way bindings in Flex. For the simple stuff, you can use 2 binding tags, or just another bind… but for the complex stuff, you end up writing your own getter/setters. WPF’s way is just… awesome. So awesome I forgot what the 3rd parameter does. Adobe, copy that shiz.

…alas, I didn’t really get a feel for what the app had for Silverlight 2 creation. You can only show so much in an hour when someone keeps running their mouth about how they hate the Solutions Panel. We used the Blend September preview on a project, and I felt it was good. The integration between Design & Blend needed some work, but you COULD get your designs there, just not 100% intact. What really beefed me about Blend, though, was their timeline. With XAML (the XML markup language for WPF & Silverlight apps) having all kinds of wonderful options with regards to animations being separate elements and applicable to objects either as integrated or re-usable resources, I was really irritated that the current timeline in Blend doesn’t leverage that framework to it’s fullest. Furthermore, the community has asked Adobe countless times over the years for Flash to have an After Effects like timeline option. I told Samuel Wan almost like 2 years ago that they really need to use that as a selling point for Blend as an advantage. I guess they think that LiveMotion had that, and didn’t out-sell Flash, so why should they? I still disagree with the current incarnation; to me it needs a lot of work. The newest Blend preview I saw had a bezier tweening panel for some of the keyframes. Dope; it was big, and for a specific keyframe. Regardless, I still think it’d be cooler if it were integrated into the timeline itself. Once you go After Effects, you never go back. I liked what I saw. It was hilarious to see the project manager take it personal that they didn’t have a specific month (October?) preview.

I debated for an hour about that damn Solutions Panel. Maybe the Visual Studio guys like it, but after 1 project using that SOB, I hate it. I argued that we need to have a regular explorer window in the program. I don’t want to remove it, rather just for those of us web developers who are fully capable of managing our files in Windows Explorer / Mac Finder, we don’t need some glorified panel to hand-hold us. I’ve never seen an app do well that built their own explorer like metaphor whereas the ones that do good use the OS based explorer as the base, and built atop it. A lot of the text editors like EditPlus, TextMate, etc. do it very well.

Raise your hand if you think, in retrospect, the Project Panel in Flash MX 2004 was a complete failure? Of those who raised your hand, do you dig GProject? I know I do. Grant Skinner built his own, and it did well. I’d argue, though, that it was merely Grant’s skill and long history of Flash that made it successful. Most of us would of preferred just a simple explorer window we could point to our project directory, give the IDE some class info, and call it a day. Kinda like FlexBuilder….

Their counter-argument was that they need the Solution’s Panel for 2 reasons. First, it allows the same project to be opened in Visual Studio. Fair enough. The second reason was that it allowed them to determine what assets needed to be compiled in the Silverlight app. Whatever. Give me an explorer window, and parse the XAML or C# to know what assets I used. Either that, or make it not suck; like work like Windows normally works. Drag and drop, a REAL folder structure, not some made up one, and auto-refresh.

Another funny part was when I asked why their XAML didn’t use proper namespaces. The only namespaces it used was for custom stuff or some attributes. They replied that it’s perfectly valid XML to not show the namespaces unless you are writing elements outside of the default. Then Molly chimed in her agreement with that “tone” that implies, “What the f$*2 are you talking about?”. It’s pretty awesome to have one of the project leads of Blend and the web standards queen shoot you down at the same time. Owned. Naturally, I’m left wondering why in the heck MXML in Flex has the namespaces like that… and what’s the default namespace for MXML? Grr!

Last thing I asked for was, “The less HTML & JavaScript we have to write for Silverlight 2 via Blend & Visual Studio, the better.” 80% of my time creating the Scale 9 example was spent scouring the web & the Silverlight forums for the right HTML & CSS combination that made it work in all browsers, all OS’s. The whole point of using a web plug-in is so you don’t have to deal with that bs.

I could rant all day about Microsoft Surface. All I’m going to say is, first, YouTube doesn’t do it justice; you have to see it in person. Second, it changes everything. For those who can’t take the epic sentence, here’s some sarcasm to compensate.

Lastly, we got to introduce ourselves to Bill Gates and ask him a question or two. I thought long and hard about what to ask, and every question I came up with could probably be found to be already asked and answered by crawling the web. Although I felt pressured to ask something relevant technically to the Flash & Flex community, I just couldn’t find something that was appropriate. So, I asked about his decision to focus on the Gates Foundation full time. Keith covered all the questions in his series of blog posts. I’m re-posting my question here with a few corrections since the transcriptionist couldn’t hear me too well.

————————–

Jesse Warden: So, your a (almost called him a dude) man who has really influenced a lot of software industries and then as soon as you announced the Gates Foundation, the media jumped on it and talked about how you were influencing philanthropic endeavors. Was there a turning point that made you feel like you wanted to do that full-time or was it a culmination thing? How did you get to the point where you now want to focus on it full-time?

BILL GATES: Well, I said even in my 20s that I didn’t think somebody who was 60-years old should be deciding the technology strategy for a state of the art software company. So, you know, I’m pretty old now, and it’s good for somebody else to come along. I’m still the guy who thinks, hey, saving a few bytes of memory is a worthwhile thing, let’s spend a few hours and save a few bytes here. Nowadays just saving a megabyte, it’s not worth it, don’t waste your time. So, you get a certain mindset about what makes sense. To me, computing power is still a little scary. Now, compared to the people before me, I was a revolutionary in how I thought about those things.

So, there comes a point where somebody should pick things up. Since the age of 17 I was CEO and sort of chief software architect until seven years ago, and then I got — that was a big change, maybe not as big but it was a big change, because then Steve took over and has run the company since the year 2000, and that was sort of getting ready for the idea of running Microsoft in a different way.

The foundation stuff has turned out to be very exciting, and I’d say there’s one thing in common with the foundation and Microsoft. When we announced a software-centric vision of the world, 1975, there weren’t a lot of people involved in that, and it’s been exciting to see it sort of developed as we dreamed that it would, and many people coming in and contributing to that.

When the foundation got going in global health, there just wasn’t that much — there was nothing going on in terms of Malaria, TB. We have 20 diseases that we do. And we think we’re going to conquer the majority of those in some reasonable period of time.

So, my ability to spend full time on that, go get the pharmaceutical companies more involved, get the best scientists more involved, back some risky approaches there, I may be more unique in terms of facilitating some of that than I am in software.

And sometime in my fifties I was going to make a change, and so about a year and a half ago, we picked the date and told the world, and we’re on track for that to happen.

So, there’s nothing magic about the date, but it seemed like Microsoft was in good shape, Ray Ozzie was the person stepping up to take on a big part of what I’d one uniquely, and so we made the choice.

————————–

Afterwards, a few of us went out to finish the night out. It was really cool to meet a lot of new people in my industry; that’s one of the reasons why I got into consulting in the first place. They were all smart and clearly dug their professions, being passionate about what they do. I got to learn a little more about some of the Microsoft people, and how they got into their roles.

I finished off the trip by meeting one of my old co-workers at the Atlanta airport, Tom Link of Universal Mind, and debated about AIR. They are having mucho success with AIR in their business, whereas I’m still bitter. I had to clarify my position that I’m more irritated by Adobe’s allocation of resources to a desktop endeavor vs. improving the work-flow & integration of their products. Taking people of the caliber and experience level of Mike Downey and Mike Chambers and putting them on a particular endeavor clearly shows the importance Adobe perceives in that project. Don’t get me wrong, having Mark Anders and crew on Thermo (careful, mean window resizing JavaScript) is definitely awesome, but I just feel there was a lot of work left to be done on the design side, a side where Mike and Mike clearly had booku amounts of experience. Regardless, it’s in Adobe’s best interest to continue satisfying all the kids dreams who grew up with Java and were let down with false moniker of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” (client, not server). Now that Adobe has delivered that on the web with Flex 2 & Flash Player 9, putting momentum behind a cross-OS desktop endeavor just sweetens the deal, and tightens their hold on a market. I agree from a business perspective. I’m just selfish, and it’s my job to be critical; things can always be made better. …like having gems like this not be hidden on some awesome employee’s blog, and rather trademark features of a product suite.

By the end of the day, I had pretty much lost my voice. I had never talked about software for so long, and so vigorously. Insanely fun!

All in all, the trip was a blast. I met new people, learned a lot, and hopefully helped Microsoft out. Most importantly, it really changed my perception of Microsoft. I never grew up in the world a lot of other people did with regards to Microsoft being a bully against the openness of the web. So, I never had a negative perception of them to begin with. Instead, I grew up with Corel, Adobe, and Macromedia software so just never really cared about their products because I never used them much. Yeah, Word, Excel, and XP, but I didn’t make my career on that software. Anyway, you hang out in the web world for a length of time, and there is enough Microsoft vitriol that some is bound to get splashed on you. It was funny to hear some of Microsoft employee’s, especially the new ones, talk about their shock, and ways of dealing with the hate and anger thrown their way the minute they say they work at Microsoft. This is apparent visually in the body language of those that are in parts of their designer division. Even some of the contractors who merely consult on some projects for Microsoft recount on how they borrow notorious death threats from colleagues with similiar Microsoft ties, and use those as de-sensitizing measures by posting print-outs of them on their wall to constantly remind them that “someone else has it worse”. Really wild. Regardless, they are a lot like Adobe. They are cool, having people there who clearly love what they do, and are insanely smart.

What really drove it home for me, though, was the internal strife; the healthy kind. When I was about to go work at IBM, I had peers exclaim how horrible it was in their web technology division. This couldn’t be further from the truth; meaning, if you actually do software development vs. extremely simple and tedious HTML updates. Clearly, IBM is so big, that you can’t judge a company by one employee in one part. Having an opinion of a company so large is personal, it makes it really hard to stereotype. My experience there was really positive. Naturally, a company that large has a lot of internal companies vying for their own self-interest. So, it was really cool to hear about how Microsoft has these internal mailing lists, with lots of traffic, and various other politics that play out over time across these areas of the company’s product lines. The company’s best interests are fiercely debated. No one employee I talked to could (fairly) give me a sense of how much one concept was agreed on percentage wise.

For example, a lot(?) in Microsoft believe, like I do, there is room in the Rich Internet Application market to do things right that others have done wrong. To provide good tools and technology for people to build cool experiences atop of. Like, say… downloading fonts and using them on the client in Sliverlight 1.0. The counter to that is those who believe they should instead be nurturing their existing .NET developer market towards these tools, and allow them to leverage their existing skillset in the RIA arena. The example here is how Blend and Visual Studio’s integration model ENFORCES the code-behind methodology. You design, layout, and transition your app in Blend, and write the code for it in Visual Studio. Each view or component has associated code that makes it work in an associated .cs file; aka, code behind the design, that is visually represented in an associated .xaml file.

There are 3 ways to do this in the Flex world, and I hate them all. Although inheritance still is bleh compared to composition, when you grow up extending GUI base classes to create your View’s in Model View Controller, it’s really hard to relate to these mature Java & C++ programmers who come in and go, “OMG… that is so gross! You need to separate your View and it’s implementation.” Say what? The 3 ways are: MXML is all GUI, and ActionScript is externally referenced in your mx:Script tag; MXML is all GUI, and you extend that MXML class with ActionScript to handle the implementation; or the reverse; you write ActionScript implementation code, and extend that with MXML for layout.

So, while I dislike code-behind work-flows, it clearly works in the Microsoft realm at least in theory. A lot of .NET dudes I know haven’t had the opportunity to do a lot of hardcore front-end work. Why would they when .NET writes all the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for them? While they’re technically “supposed” to stay in their Visual Studio sandbox, a lot are chomping at the bit to do some Blend work. I have a feeling this will die down, and those who are server dudes at heart will return to VS and stay there.

The down-side is the constant “throw it over the wall” mentality that I see in the perception of work-flows. The best teams (villages?) are those that have designers and developers working together, regardless of tools. Having Blend be the experience creation liaison between Design and Visual Studio isn’t a good substitute for a qualified Interaction Designer. If you read Grant Skinner’s initial entry about Thermo, Adobe’s tool in development targeted at Designers that will allow them to leverage the Flex SDK from a design perspective, and actually be empowered to design good Flex apps, you can see how again, you run into dangers when you try to supplement a tool for a qualified person. Unfortunately, it’s hard to sell a client on needing another $20,000 so you can afford the proper Information Architecture contractor on a project. “What? We’re already paying for a DBA, back-end developer, front end coder, designer, and project/client manager… what the hell is an IA really going to add?” The same goes for hiring Interaction Designers, or any really good designer / developer hybrid who can specialize mitigating work and designs between the designers and developers on the team. No tool can replace the importance of those people on projects. No one can get around production art (aka break up).

Regardless, I still like the tools. To me, Flash MX 2004 proved that the tool is mightier than the run-time. Yes, AS1 bytecode was slow, but when you give someone a tool to leverage a class based (ActionScript 2) language to create really compelling and powerful web applications… that just says a lot about how effective good tools can be at empowering people to leverage runtimes. Allowing those tools to integrate, and integrate well, is what really helps facilitate good team interaction in a work-flow that works. I hereby request Microsoft refrain from using the term “throw it over the wall” and instead focus on Expression’s mantra being “tool integration”. There’s something special about how Blend and Visual Studio can share the same project. You don’t see Flex, Flash, Photoshop, or Fireworks doing that shiz. You need to leverage that, build upon that, and empower teams, especially those who have never done hardcore RIA work before, to be successful on their own merits and not have the marketing suggest they retreat into their own camps. Instead, it’s a collaborative effort.

My vote for representatives from the Flash/Flex community for next year (2008) are:

Developers = Grant Skinner, Colin Moock, Darron Schall, Chafic Kazoun, Claus Wahlers, Joe Berkovitz, Doug McCune, Ben Stucki

Designers = Joshua Davis, Bradley Grosh, Hillman Curtis, Your Mom

Thanks again Microsoft, it was dope! I hope I helped out.