Peter Fisk on Microsoft’s Shortcomings

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Peter Fisk is one of my favorite guys to read. He’s converting a Smalltalk application from .NET to Flash/Flex and blogging about the process. He’s one of the few who can talk authoritatively on the two subjects and he has some good quotes about why he’s choosing Flash now:

Flex can do all the “experience” things that WPF can do like, scaling, rotations, animations, and 3D – what else is there? And it can run in almost any browser. And (with Apollo), it can run on almost any desktop. With Adobe, you get the “universal web application pattern” *and* the “experience first pattern” both together in *one big happy pattern*. Microsoft needs to make two patterns because they don’t have a clue as to where they are going.

Adobe has *one* library for *everything* (desktop, browsers, all platforms) and *one* language for *everything*. Why, it’s so simple, that I actually have time to write code.

It’s really cool to see people come to the understanding of how powerful Flash is. As I’ve said many times, Flex has put that power in the hands of developers. When those developers are people like Peter, good things happen. Web applications just aren’t that good. They’re functional enough, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Flash enables better applications across a lot of platforms using the same development model.

Update: John Dowdell also covered this, but in the comments Jesse Warden makes some pretty good points about how singing the praises of the unified platform makes a lot of sense in Flex, but when you start talking about Flash, the story changes. I’m not a Flash guy, so I’ll defer to Jesse on this.

[tags]Peter Fisk, Microsoft, Flash, WPF[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Talking About Flex’s Shortcomings
  • Marlon Smith

    Peter’s post seems more of a rant, than serious balanced comparative analysis. He also names these “patterns” of the evil empire that are meant confuse and lead the masses to the Microsoft money pit. It’s hard to take Peter seriously, he sounds a lot like some of the bean (java) and Unix heads I talk to, Microsoft is out to get us!

    To say that Microsoft created two UI frameworks for the sake of greed is venomous, idiotic and does not looking at the historical aspect of the .Net platform.

    “Flex can do all the “experience” things that WPF can do like, scaling, rotations, animations, and 3D – what else is there?”

    He seems to undervalue the huge benefits of the .Net Framework, development tools and community, a UI framework is nothing without the libraries supporting it to do something meaningful. This is where I think the WPF/.Net platform shine, especially in building business applications. WPF/e has some ways to go and has not even been released yet, so I can’t be fair to it.

    I’m not a Flex/Apollo developer but I am sure there are some issues or shortcomings somewhere, but he seems to forget what they are or he is just not being honest with himself or his readers.

    Given that Microsoft in the past, has made some mistakes in strategy and had almost no sense of community, yet from my experience of the last few years shows that this certainly not the case now.

    Maybe I’m taking Peter too seriously.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    I don’t think you’re taking him to seriously, but maybe reading into it too much. Sure, there are plusses and minuses with both development environments, and .NET has a lot of things going for it.

    But Peter is one developer who was looking for the best solution for his problem. He wasn’t paid by Adobe, he just decided to try out Flex. I don’t think his post should be taken as the ultimate comparison between Adobe’s way and Microsoft’s way, but rather as a snapshot into the thinking of a developer looking to solve a specific problem.

    How valuable is that? Debatable, but Peter seems like good people, and I thought it would start a valuable discussion.

  • Phillip Kerman

    He’s wrong about 3D–Flex doesn’t have this. Also, he doesn’t mention the text flow stuff. Those two things are the only things that might attract me to WPF. Having said this, and perhaps after acknowledging a few more little gripes about Flash, I can’t see what WPF has going for it.

    Also, I’d get very nervous delivering an app that relies on the particular framework (and version) installed on the user’s machine. At least with Flash/Flex, you compile and it’s locked to whatever framework you had on your dev machine. Naturally, you’re relying on a new Flash player not breaking existing content–but that’s super rare. I could be totally missing this aspect of WPF (that is, can you lock in the framework on which you’re relying or is that handled at runtime?)

    Anyway, I still enjoy this debate. Most people will just choose what they see as more familiar to them… I am hopeful the competition will mean better tools and maybe even more work opportunities for everyone.

  • http://vistascript.net Peter Fisk

    A few points:
    1) Check out PaperVision3D for Flash
    http://osflash.org/papervision3d

    From the 3D samples that I have seen in .Net and PaperVision3D for Flash, I can’t say that one is better than the other.

    2) .Net does have much more extensive capabilities for text formatting. Something like the NYT reader could probably not be done in Flash.

    3) My post was somewhat of a rant, because of my built-up frustration over the endless delays.

    I’ve been using .Net since November 2000 and I’ve used Microsoft products since July 1977.

    I have generally liked Microsoft products and the company itself for the past 30 years.

    But they have gotten way off track with this entire .Net initiative – and the late release of Vista was just a symptom.

    The aim of the post was to show that this kind of technology can be brought to market in a much simpler and faster way.

    The tone of the post was sarcastic, but that was my visceral reaction to Ray Ozzies comments at the time I wrote it.

    My blog is really about where the technology is going and how we get there. I’ll try to keep the partisanship to a minimum in the future.

  • Phillip Kerman

    Papervision is awesome–no doubt about that. But it’s not hardware accelerated “true” 3D. The stuff I’ve seen in WPF is. Otherwise, I think I hear you loud and clear.

  • http://www.brandonellis.org/ Brandon Ellis

    Wow, Reading the comments @ Peter’s blog was like Friday Night Girl Fight on a Sunday. ;) .

    Here’s the good news for us developers – If WPF takes a dump and isn’t adopted we all get to say ‘I told you so’. We all drink the Adobe KoolAid and everyone is happy. If WPF comes out and kicks ass, We have two platforms to choose from depending on the needs of our projects. MS and Adobe continue to out do each other by giving us richer and richer tool sets.

    Fine with me.

  • http://blog.donburnett.com Don Burnett

    I won’t let myself get drawn into this fantasy argument, but to say that Flex has all the API’s and all of the functionality of a complete OS like Windows and can do everything that Windows can is a little shortsighted.

    The reality is when you write a full WPF windows application it is just that a full application, it could be as complex as one of those office applications or as simple as you want it to be. The scalability just isn’t the same thing, Flex and even Apollo is just a framework that sits on top of an OS (whether it be MacOSX or Windows). It cannot run by itself and relies on the HOST OS..

    The point I’d just make here is that Without Windows or MacOS to sit on top of it these Adobe products would not function on their own. We should not forget that in the approach to giving them “God-Like” status because they make us able to do things a lot easier.

    I also wouldn’t say that Adobe has “one library” if you actually program for it you know better, Flash, Flex, and the Apollo runtime are three separate products tha integrate together…

    I read that blog entry and I just consider it one person’s justification to ignore something they don’t want to address. I wish him profitability, but I think in a few years when the realization of yet another wave of market changes we will be looking back and wondering why we even thought this way.