The Sixty Percent Solution
Microsoft rolls out another "tool" or "product" (however you classify it) that is 1) Already delivered by others, and 2) Done better by others. And they want us to be impressed.
Should any developer descend into the depths of evil that is Flash/Silverlight, those with any shred of self-respect (undeserved, admittedly) would be advised to stick to Adobe.
But this is like all the other "innovations" from Microsoft.
Silverlight is done better by Adobe.
SSRS is done better by Crystal Reports.
LINQ is done better by just about everybody.
And if any enterprise web developer using ASP.NET uses any of the Microsoft web form components, they should be summarily tossed from the "best practices" club. Enterprise development deserves two-day's worth of developer's pay for some world-class web components from Infragistics or DevExpress.
I could go on.
The list is just too long to recount here, but suffice to say that everything Microsoft releases in these areas are nothing more than beans so the Microsoft marketing bean-counters can loudly proclaim, "We have that."
And I'm a WineDOS fanboi. Really. I just don't like to see incompetent middle managers and novice programmers hurting themselves while trying to buy into Microsoft's tools. These tools are what I call the "60 percenters."
Microsoft tools like Silverlight and LINQ and their web or form components are competent for 60 percent of the tasks an enterprise will need. The other 40 percent is not there. The base on which the product is delivered may have a promise of those extra capabilities, but the capabilities are just not there. Developers will spend weeks trying to re-invent the wheel that could have been purchased from third party vendors at a fraction of the price -- and in a maintained and supported form, too!
Regardless, Flash and Silverlight are the big vendor's big joke on the web, in my opinion. If they weren't pretty, we'd consider them a virus. They bloat web pages, they annoy users, they add nothing, and the "developers" are not usually developers; they are art-school bum-outs who turned to the web to make their living. But that's just my opinion. (How many users have web browsers or tools that allow them to turn Flash off unless absolutely necessary? I rest my case.)
The world would be better off without either Flash or Silverlight. The world, if it wants one, should choose the better product. One virus is annoying. Two viruses are an epidemic.
Paris, because she probably knows a thing or two about Flash.