Blogs are beginning to fill with posts about Air vs Flex and a recent Techcrunch prompted this post.
Firstly, let me state I’m neither a Flex or Silverlight developer, I consider myself first and foremost a CF developer and I’m watching the whole Adobe/MS space with anticipation, excitment and caution. I’ve read the recent Silverlight 2 tutorials and i’m excited - Silverlight 1.1 was a beta product (much like Flex 1/1.5), 2.0 looks a much more usable product. One thing that constantly crops us (like the subject of this post) is that Silverlight is not comparable Air - it’s more a Flash competitor. Now, remember I’m not proclaiming to be a Silverlight developer but I can read and i’ve read through all of the Silverlight 2.0 tutorials, after the first 7 it sure seems like a Flash competitor but tutorial 8 moves away from the web and back to the desktop and brings an existing Silverlight app onto the desktop app via Microsoft WPF (with only minor changes to code - hey, it is beta afterall!). Granted it’s not portable (platform) like an AIR app but it leaves me still torn between two camps because on the surface it would seem that Silverlight mostly definitely IS a competitor to AIR - remembering that AIR is the runtime and for the larger parts of the world Microsoft already have a runtime out there, it’s called Windows!
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