Its been a while – what are your opinions now that some time has passed?

I think Silverlight is compelling for organizations using Microsoft’s platform, and developers with existing .NET skills, but I’m not sure that it will escape that (admittedly large) niche.

Tim

Any changes of heart?

Lee

Tim, any idea why the recommend not using LiveCycle w/ Flex? I’m not a Flex expert…but didn’t LiveCycle start out as “Flex Data Services”?

This is only in the case where the app server is .NET. Comment edited to make that clear. Further, this isn’t the official recommendation, just one of several options.

The problem is that LiveCycle (which was once Flex Data Services) needs a Java app server to run on, which can be inconvenient if you are using .NET. So one option is not to use it.

For push you might want the Flex Message Service which does need LiveCycle.

Tim

As to the first point, I’m going to take a serious look at what it would take to drive a WCF service using LiveCycle. Could be an interesting combination — the primary goal being to turn Basic Http Web services into a push/synchronized service, rather than relying on polling (very specific to something that we need to do).

Actually the .NET interop is interesting. Some of the folk at Adobe MAX advised not using LiveCycle with Flex when you have a .NET app server: just use web services. Main snag is that you don’t get the faster binary protocol used by LiveCycle, but that might not be the bottleneck anyway. You can also use LiveCycle as an intermediary. Try a few tests.

Tim

Given LiveCycle’s ability to push data, does WCF stand a chance? Web services are great for interoperability, but when it comes down to performance and programability, can it possibly compete with LiveCycle?

This is, of course, assuming that I have no choice but to support Flex/Air on the client.

I guess my question to the community is — can LiveCycle potentially consume WCF code, treating it like any other data source? Can WCF behave like LiveCycle, and push data in an interoperable manner?

Any thoughts?

Huh, where did you get this information? There isn’t even a DataGrid in WPF yet, and none announced, yet somehow there will be one for Silverlight? If you’re right, What does that say about WPF’s importance?

Specifically, we were promised a bindable GridView control at the UK Mix07, during Scott Guthrie’s presentation.

I believe Microsoft want to keep some measure of compatibility between WPF and Silverlight; this could just be the WPF ListView control which can contain a bindable grid, I’m not sure.

As for WPF – see my post earlier today. I think Silverlight is just as important if not more so.

Tim

We’ve been told that a datagrid for Silverlight will be in the next pre-release of 1.1, skinning is supported as well. Look forward to your tests!

Huh, where did you get this information? There isn’t even a DataGrid in WPF yet, and none announced, yet somehow there will be one for Silverlight? If you’re right, What does that say about WPF’s importance?

Oh, agreed! But that context does show why a title such as “Microsoft Silverlight vs Adobe Flex” drew such quick attention….

tx, jd/adobe