Microsoft “Really Worried” About the Upcoming Release of Flash
I’m sitting in Ben Stucki’s presentation on ByteArrays here at 360Flex. Ben is a funny presenter, so if you get a chance to see him speak, do it. He knows his stuff and tells the kind of unassuming jokes I find hilarious. Josh Tynjala from Yahoo! is right behind me (it’s an all star room).
But in the process of updating my link blog, I came across an interesting article by Paul Kinlan that summarized Day 3 at Devnet. He had an interesting paragraph on “WPF/E”:
Jeff Prosise WPF/E talk was another great talk by Jeff, he basically demonstrated WPF/E and how “easy” it is to create rich UI’s in the web browser simply by writing XAML. I double quoted “easy” because he pointed out that WPF/E at the moment doesn’t have any Input Controls or Data binding in, this means that you will have to create them all by hand yourself. Saying that his sample photo browser was pretty cool. I did notice that the VisualBrush in WPF is not present in WPF/E so things like reflections (like in his demo) have to be hacked in. I asked him if he knew if it was planned to be, however he said it is hard to say because he has only just started to work with the WPF/E team. He also that mentioned that some people in Microsoft are really worried about the upcoming release of Flash (Version 9) because it does very similar declarative mark-up to WPF/E.
I think he must mean Flex, but I’m not 100% sure (anyone closer to the Flash IDE care to shed some light?). I love hearing this. Why? Because it means Microsoft is trying. They care about this RIA stuff whether it’s on the desktop or the web. As long as both of these companies are competing, we all win. What do you think about the comments? Is it more proof that Microsoft is taking RIAs and “WPF/E” seriously?
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
March 5th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Microsoft would be boneheaded if they don’t care about RIAs. Why? Since I saw the Apollo introduction at DEMO I’m working on a business Flex Application. The web model just has so many advantages over classical software. But in some cases you just need the Desktop (eg. office apps). Apollo is the missing link.
What is the holy grail of software platforms: enabling unsophisticated developers to produce sophisticated software.
Well, I’m one of those…
March 5th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
It is nice to see Microsoft finally trying, but man do they have alot of catching up to do. I’ve been putting together some demos with WPF/e and it leaves much to be desired. I built a simple image viewer that took twice the number of lines of code for the equivalent Flash version. It wasn’t just the extra code that bothered me but the lack of objects, methods, properties etc. I hope they plan on adding alot more in future releases because its always nice to have another tool in the development arsenal, but currently there needs to be some major additions before this is anything worth devoting my time to.
March 5th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
We All win as long as Adobe wins. Otherwise for Mac users like myself, Microsoft won’t hesitate to throw their weight around. Bill Gates saw Office as a barganing chip in 1996/97 with Office for the Mac. I expect nothing less from Microsoft and I’d rather have Adobe control Middleware than to have Microsoft leverage it against their competitors.
Sebastian
March 5th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
I think they’re planning on doing a very rapid development cycle, because as you not, they have a LOT to catch up on.
Sebastian, I think my main question for you guys is “does this mean Microsoft is in cross-platform RIAs for the long term”? I agree Microsoft has had a bad track record, but do you think those days are gone?
March 5th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Ryan, Camino, my browser of choice that also shares the Gecko rendering engine with Firefox does not display http://ideas.live.com properly. It doesn’t display Windows Live Hotmail properly, and Microsoft’s experimental Photosynth (I think that’s what it’s called) is Windows AND IE only. Also the default browser, Safari, is forced into Lite mode as well for Windows Live Hotmail.
That New York Times reader which I believe uses WPA which is supposed to be a technology based online (I think, I haven’t actually payed attention) is Windows only, along with a few other readers from other publications.
To their credit MSN Soapbox plays back fine in both browsers though.
The Final Judgement, Microsoft’s actual product structure is thrown all over the place and I don’t trust them about as far as I can throw the entire city of Redmond. Given a choice between Adobe and Microsoft, no matter how great Microsofts Middleware WPA/E or RIAs may be, I’ll never support them because they’ll just turn around and stab me in the back for it, as they have done to developers and users alike in the past. No I don’t believe those days will ever be gone until a major restructuring at the company when their monopoly is finally shattered to pieces by the combined assault of Firefox, OpenOffice, Linux, and Apple.
Sebastian
March 6th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
“I think he must mean Flex, but I’m not 100% sure (anyone closer to the Flash IDE care to shed some light?).”
I think the “flash 9″ reference may have been offhand, third-hand. The next version of “the visual authoring tool previously known as ‘Macromedia Flash Professional 8′” does focus on visual creation rather than markup creation. I wouldn’t read too much into it.
Good libraries of user interface controls are indeed vital for many tasks. You might want to compare the controls scene in WPF as well.
Making a solid base for development of various user interface components isn’t a trivial task… there’s a lot of work before you see any results. But it’s also a lot of work to enable fullscreen video playback within any supported browser, atop any supported OS, and this was achievable. (You’ve seen the illustrations on this page, right?) Priorities can be inferred.
NB: That Microsoft support page uses the word “controls” in the sense of “applets”, not in the sense of “parameterizable components within an applet”.
jd/adobe
March 6th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
In your blog post, you mention:
Jeff Prosise WPF/E talk was another great talk by Jeff, he basically demonstrated WPF/E and how “easy†it is to create rich UI’s in the web browser simply by writing XAML. I double quoted “easy†because he pointed out that WPF/E at the moment doesn’t have any Input Controls or Data binding in, this means that you will have to create them all by hand yourself.
It is true, but if you are doing WPF/E that’s not much of a concern because your development environment extends to other “web technologies”, unlike flash which is alone in embedding unless you are doing “flash remoting”.
The advantage of WPF/E is that it is designed to be used with other web technologies that is already there, like javascript, and asp.net databinding. So really it doesn’t need to be present in the XAML.
In the case of xaml right down to “click” events, you can use javascript or javascript with AJAX. Javascript already nicely integrates with ASP.NET databinding on both the client and server model. So in the context of everything you can create a connection to XML data or to a sql server database the way you normally do with an ASP.NET application and pass it the data. Now it’s maybe a little more complicated but even if you were using adobe’s own Dreamweaver product it’s almost a point and click operation to create a database application then to pass data..
So if databinding does show up on WPF/E (which I am betting it will be). It will be extra easy to use.
There is a great site already giving instructions on WPF/E in both databinding and XML data that’s already doing this kinda thing and giving developers “HOW-TO” videos.
Check out:
http://www.xmlforasp.net
and check out this walk-thru:
http://www.xmlforasp.net/CodeSection.aspx?csID=129
It’s a really cool sample that integrates and shows you how to use the following technologies..
WPF/E and XAML
JavaScript
ASP.NET AJAX
Web Services
If you are already doing ASP.NET data connections or even XML it’s not a big deal to open a database connection then pass the dataset to the client javascript engine.. The example above goes further to include web services and shows off some “WPF/E PSEUDO 3D”..
It sounds to me like Adobe is worried about WPF/E with Flash 9, and not the other way around after you mentioned the declarative markup. When people see how easy this data connectivity really is, then people won’t be too worried about this stuff and probably consider it a myth. The databinding thing is one good reason that WPF/E apps aren’t connected to the CLR as of yet..
March 6th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
“The advantage of WPF/E is that it is designed to be used with other web technologies that is already there, like javascript, and asp.net databinding.”
You may not be aware that SWF applets have been communicating with JavaScript, JScript and VBScript for about a decade now, although it’s true that only the recent generation of browsers offer reasonable no-hassle capability here.
Why don’t more people use the hosting browser to process their core logic? Because you still have to do some single-casing of the JavaScript, and because JavaScript engines are still not very high-performance (think about Tamarin for a moment), and because every call between the browser and the applet imposes a slight performance hit, varying across browsers.
(iow, yes, it’s “been there, done that, and i’ve already got too many t-shirts in the closet, thanks.”
ASP.NET applications are a subset of .ASP serverside applications, and even that larger set is still a subset of the various server processing architectures that people use today.
I enjoy contrary arguments, but they’re more fun when they’re not just reruns of things already addressed in the public record.
jd/adobe
March 6th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
I agree with you, but WPF/E isn’t even a release product (not even a 1.0) and yes people have been doing this for a while but certainly weren’t doing this with the futuresplash player.
While I would say Flash is great, I am worried that it might become more than it needs to be. Runtimes need to stay small and programmers don’t need every me too! feature. that’s my only point about WPF/E. We are not talking about a 9.0 revision of a product. WPF/E doesn’t need features it’s already got elsewhere. That’s my point which the guy quoted seems to be inferring.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
“I think he must mean Flex, but I’m not 100% sure”
Personally Ryan I’m thinking that he’s thinking Flex, but that’s an assumption…
March 7th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
For some reason, I ended up here… there’s Jay Garrick, then Barry Allen, then….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(comics)
jd
March 8th, 2007 at 9:54 am
As a long time MS developer I looked at expression etc. and thought it was worth a try since we are a MS shop.
As a long time MSDN Subscriber paying 10K+ per year I was more than offended when they told me to pay “Extra” for the newer web tools.
MS is getting cocky and trying to nickle and dime their 3rd party developers to death, and it’s being noticed in the Dev community and some threads have been getting ugly.
If Adobe can respond quickly it can grab some long time MS developers and convert them to their camp, but it’s a limited time frame opportunity.
July 8th, 2007 at 10:36 am
[...] Apollo’s out and I can finally release source code from the ByteArray101 session I gave at 360Flex. This session really showed the power of Flex and Apollo and was very well received. Here’s a write up of the session from Dan Wilson and a favorable mention from Ryan Stewart. In the session I gave an overview of binary data and how to manipulate it using the ByteArray class in Flex. More importantly I walked attendees through some real world code that actually pulls the cover art image out of an mp3 file (yep, cover art images are normally in there). Now you can download the Apollo code yourself and get more comfortable with the new found file access you have in Apollo. I’ve also included the slides from my presentation. Please note that while the sample code given will work with most mp3 files, it’s not robust enough for a production application. A library for that is on its way soon. [...]
October 15th, 2007 at 9:06 am
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