The Great Comparison:Part 1a - GUI

Well, I've finished my Silverlight Interface for my project. Here's what I grade it.

Time to Develop: 35 minutes - Grade: 4
Difficulty to Develop: Easy - Grade: 5
Community Support: Enough - Grade 4.5
Fun : Fun for the first time - 4.5

Average score: 4.5

Explanation:
Well, Xaml certainly is fun to work with, a little complicated, but still fun. Part of the GUI was creating basic functionality for my buttons, such as click effects and roll overs. This is where the fun stopped... I build a generic button componant to cut down on the tediousness of placing them around. I also added a list area, though with no list control, I'm a little worried about that section. Over all, it was fairly quick, and the UI looks nice.

The great comparison!

Ok, so I decided to test for myself whether or not to continue learning silverlight, since all I seem to run into is problem after problem, and after the problem.. a stupid work around because a certain feature isn't implemented and blah blah blah..

So, I decided to put it to the test with Flex from adobe.

Starting today, I will build the exact same program, an mp3 player that pulls a playlist from a local xml file, displays the download, play progress, and preloads the next track; in both Flex with Actionscript 3 and Silverlight using C#.Net. I will grade each section of the project for both technology as I build them, one piece at a time.
Topics to be graded are:
Time To Develop
Difficulty to Develop
Examples/Community Support
Fun

I will rate all topics from 1(lowest) to 5(highest) and explain why I gave that grade.
Since I'm already moderately proficient at AS3, I'll add 10% to all times, to equal it out.

Let the games begin!

Another fun bug in VS:Orcas + Blend

Seems when you create a Silverlight project in VS: Orcas, it generates XAML that will not render in Expression Blend. Funny, right? Great part is that if you create the project in Blend, modify the code to look identical to the XAML in the VS project.

This is the basic start up code in VS: Orcas. (New Project->C#->Silverlight Project)



Now when you right click Page.xaml in the solution explorer, Blend loads up and gives you this lovely little screen.



Now, lets start up a new project in Blend, which still doesn't offer me the ability to make a 1.1 project. Tada, the Xaml renders... amazing.



Well apparently there's something up with that code that VS:Orcas creates for us.. or is there? I'll copy the code from the VS:Orcas project and paste it into the Blend project. Surely it will fail.
Wait...




What is this?! It works? Oh me oh my. Why could it be? This is one of the multitude of little annoyances that I'm finding in the tools. Not to complain that much, certainly a bit more fun than my previous encounters with Coldfusion and Dreamweaver. I just wish when I posted my questions on the forums I could actually get a useful answer.. even a "it's broken, we're looking into it" would be nice.

Two steps closer!

Finally, I've got Expression Blend August Preview installed, it's pretty buggy but still a fairly intuitive tool. I've also got Visual Studio "Orcas" installed with the Silverlight controls add ons.

Though I still can't get Blend to create C# SL projects, nor can I get the C# projects to open in Blend, I'm happy with how they are right now.

I've built my first button. it's a basic play/pause button that has a rollover effect and a mouse click effect. Basically, I took the super useful quickstart at silverlight.net , converted the javascript to C# and then extended the functionality. It was really quite a good learning experience, I don't have alot of experience with C# so I got to learn a bit about casting and the likes.

The installation process is a pain in the butt right now, but I suspect MS will iron that out before long. Though all things aside. I think Silverlight is a good fit for the next generation of RIAs.

The journey here.

Well the purpose of this was to post my advances on my projects and get some correctional feedback. Though, I think I'll probably post just about everything that seems worth posting, from my ridiculous rants about stupid people to my opinion on the latest movies.

Mostly, this blog will document my workings with Microsoft technologies as I learn them from the ground up. I currently have a good understanding of java, coldfusion, and AS3 with flash. But I'm only moderately skilled at Java, and coldfusion is simply too expensive for the independent developer. Flash is nice, but I find myself wanting to work with something new that I can possibly get a job with later without having a 9 page resume of skills. I loved the object oriented nature of the languages I already knew, and the incredible speed of building a coldfusion app, so I decided to look for a platform that could offer me some of both. First, I thought Ruby.. after looking at the syntax and feeling like vomiting, I decided against it. Next, I went to cobol. And after finding that there are pretty much no learning resources for that ancient language, I moved on.
I remembered that I once wanted to build games with c++, so I decided to see if there was a web implementation of that yet, which led me to C# and ASP.net. I really enjoy the technology and now that they've added C# to the languages that you can write Silverlight in, I'm hooked.