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Microsoft doesn't have a full listing of what the new beta provides, but a complete list was provided by Microsoft engineer Scott Guthrie on his personal blog. Scott's review is very in depth so I won't repeat it all here, but the high level view is that Silverlight 2 beta 2 provides a slew of new UI features, state management and better skinning techniques among many many many more.
Silverlight 2 beta 1 was still very much a beta product and not really ready for competition with Flex. If we're honest, beta 1 wasn't ready for release - simple things like re-skinning buttons were insanely hard and I heard nothing but screams from the developers we had working on it.
I haven't had a chance to try Silverlight 2 beta 2 yet, but from the screen shots I've seen and things I've read on Scott's blog I'm pretty excited. It looks like Microsoft made improvements to all of the right features and has really fleshed Silverlight into a working development platform now. I can't wait to see what the final release of Silverlight 2 looks like.
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Why is Microsoft still trying?
Hasn't Adobe won the war yet?
Let's see if we copy, steal, and recruit Adobe employees. Yes, Silverlight is much better than Flash. Me too, me too. When the lion wants to come down from his lair, find an established market, and feel like they have really innovated. Nice perpetual MO. Stock price was much higher 10 years ago. Then will pollute Adobe blogs, buy designers, design firms, and say we are creative. Neat.
Whoa, guys, please calm down! Have you tried Silverlight? Competition in this market is only going to breed innovation and spur both companies to producing better things faster - why get upset about that? It's not like Adobe invented Flash either you know :).
Let's restrict the fanboy-ism to positive comments, mmkay?
I'm still finding my Silverlight-on-Mac experience to be less than impressive. Both the 1.0 beta and now this 2.0 beta just refused to install.
1.0.Beta failed because I was running 10.4.10, and installer said "You need at least 10.4.5 to run Silverlight". It was comparing strings, not version numbers. But boom! I was locked out.
Now 2.0.Beta2 fails to install from Firefox. In both Firefox 3 RC2 and FF3 RC3, attempting to follow the links above crashes Firefox!
OK, fine. So use Safari to download and install 2.0.Beta2.
But now when I view the Silverlight "Showcase Gallery", I can select different apps, and a callout window appears, but clicking the "View Now!" button does nothing! No new site opens up.
So the user experience is just awful for me. I can't run any Silverlight apps on my Mac. If I was just a joe-customer, I would have gone elsewhere a long time ago.
Is there something special/weird about my MacBook Pro? I don't think so, but maybe. In any case, it sure runs the dozen different Flash/AIR runtimes I need to get my job done.
I'm all for competition, but my own limited experience of trying to use Silverlight has been way to hard. There is no way a non-techie would have been able to solve the problems I was having.
In the end, MS really needs to work harder on the out-of-the-box experience.
Silverlight and Flash/Flex both have a place, to contend otherwise is to completely ignore their strengths. Flash/Flex is AWESOME when working on end user facing material, when working with lots of animation and heavy design, or whenever your designers are handing you off flash to build. Considering these designers have been using these tools for a long time, this isn't likely to change anytime soon.
.Net Rocks! Visual Studio stands alone in my opinion as the best friggin IDE / Debugger ever and if I could code Flex in it I would die a happy man. That being said, Silverlight will be fantastic for building Management Information System (MIS) applications, aka back offices and automation tools. It will slowly start to reach more and more client/end user facing points as its player penetration increases, but I really don't see it taking over design centric points / sites / applications.
This however could also change in the future as the SWF spec was open sourced by Adobe, and Microsoft has free reign to build fully on top of this.
In the mean time, my personal favorite combo for now is .NET + SubSonic + FluorineFX + Flex. All the power of .net, all the beauty of flash, with some RAD thrown in just for kicks.
Gotta agree with Doug Schmidt on this one...Silverlight on the Mac is a ridiculous experience. I've tried V1 and Beta v2 in Firefox 2, Firefox 3 and Safari, and everytime I go to a Silverlight site, it asks me to install Silverlight! Lame, unacceptable, and they are trying to ruin the web, one page at a time.
If anyone gets http://watch.tsn.ca/ working on the Mac, please reply here! You might have to be in Canada though, I'm not sure. I wish TSN had just gone with Flash...Silverlight is a big loss.
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