Flex vs Silverligth Overview

[Jacob]

I have been working around on Flex for sometime. I discovered that tying with .net in Flex is not a very straight job. The simple job becomes complicated here. The one simple reason I will put for using Silverlight that you can tie into .net architecture. There are some third party tools also which add ups some more help. I want to know what is the difference between both. On what basis can I compare Silverlight and Flex. The above one reason is not enough. Any suggestions really appreciated.

[MindSpace]

Although there is not a great difference between both the applications. Flash works as fine as silverlight do. You can either of any one of it for your use. They both do exactly the same. Search on internet for some specific examples of Flex and Some examples of silverlight. You will not see any difference between them. Both are designed to provide high content for a website.

[Modifier]

Flex is a library of components. These components are used to develop applications using Adobe Flash Runtime. The users gets a broader scope to develop safe and durable applications. The development in Flex is done by MXML and Actionscript 3 which is located in the Flex builder tool. Flex supports multiple platforms. It is an open source tools. One of the best feature of Flex I like is that it supports AMF - a highly compressed birnary format which is used for data transport. On the other hand let us see Silverlight. Silverlight is an step of Microsoft on Flash field with a .net backdrop. It is a subset of wpf. This means that any .net developer can adap and make a silverlight application very easily. For silverlight you need tools such as Visual Studio 2008. Now you can identify the key difference between both tools. According to me Flex is more developer friendly. It can do all the actions which can be done in silverlight.

[Praetor]

I will list you some very common and important difference between both the tools. First of all you know that Flex is a Adobe product and Silverlight belongs to Microsoft. In case of Flex is easily available because all users have Flash player. So any thing made in Flex is easily viewable. But in case of Silverlight a user need to download the plugin. Flex has a rich control library which is ready for use. While Silverlight has many missing controls. Flex supports all the image formats while Silverlight does not support .gif file. You can use Flex on Linux but not Silverlight. Styling has done more easy in Flex by implementing CSS to the style component. In Silverlight you will have to rely on XAML resources. Here debugging is painful in Flex but easy in silverlight via visual studio. In Flex animation is time based while in Silverlight it is in frame based.