Channel 9 video review: Tyler Ballance - live from the SilverlightDevCamp in San Francisco
It looks like Microsoft has found a new victim in their continuing onslaught of consistently excellent, impromptu developer interviews. This time Adam Kinney puts the spotlight on Tyler Ballance, an employee of the picture slide show company, Slide (if you’ve read any number of MySpace profiles and bulletins, then you’ve definitely seen their logo). This young man, seemingly reluctant at first, but opening up once the technical questions started flowing, discusses the San Fransico SilverlightDevCamp and gives his opinion on how programming in Flash compares to Silverlight.
First, Tyler quickly ran through a comparison of one of Slide’s core products, a collage slideshow (big surprise), running in Flash and then in Silverlight. As expected, the Silverlight version ran smoother. He also mentioned that the Silverlight version took less time and fewer lines of code to build. Not a very scientific or even complete comparison, of course, but his explanation it gives the viewer a feel for the power and ease of the Silverlight programming model.
For the rest of the interview, Tyler sheds more light onto his experiences with both Flash and Silverlight. A few of his points definitely resonated with me:
#1) Sometimes, Flash is a real pain in the ass.
Dynamic MovieClip creation. Remote XML connection/processing. Performance. Just some of the historically nasty areas of Flash that Tyler mentions. Every ActionScript programmer must have their own MovieClip horror story. Originally, Flash’s ease of deployment and wealth of open source tools tempted me into using it for hobby video game programming. However, after long-term exposure to their MovieClip programming model, I had to pack it up and moved back to the safety and security of writing never-to-be-released web application frameworks. 
Of course, other people have gotten Flash games to work fine and run smoothly. But, its no question that many Flash application and game developers regularly stretch Flash past its original design scope. That Flash has adapted so well for so long is a testament to its flexibility, but I think many developers hunger for something more.
#2) Silverlight needs more documentation.
Tyler gives a detailed account of how he had to scour the silverlight.net forums to figure out why calling CreateFromXAML kept “exploding” on him. Now, Tyler sounds like a pretty smart guy. I’d imagine that if the documentation spelled out an answer to his problem (and the desperation of what sounds like a hardcore midnight programming session prompted him to actually READ documentation 
), then he would have found it. But, based on my own experiences, it probably did not. The fact that in most cases, Silverlight doesn’t bubble a .NET exception back up to JavaScript makes it that more crucial for Microsoft to provide adequate documentation, especially for the error cases. Let’s hope this gets better in the 1.1 time frame.
#3) We’re Not Gonna Take It
As Tyler says, by releasing Silverlight, Microsoft has given developers one of the greatest gifts: options. If Adobe decides to put out crap or rest on its heels, then developers can take their ball home and go play in someone else’s court. This will probably make Flash a better product because now it has to compete for developer mind share. And, since Tyler saw even old MFC guys like me at this SilverlightDevCamp, it looks like Silverlight won’t have a problem gaining the hearts and minds of developers.
Conclusion
Clocking in at 8:44, this interview represents one of Channel 9’s more off the cuff, shorter pieces, but still gives the viewer a good sense of how other developers have started to employ Silverlight. I hope to see more Silverlight content on Channel 9 soon.
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Great, I’m glad you liked the video. I am planning to do more like this in the future, the next one should be covering how Channel 9 created their Silverlight media player.