Seems like Microsoft would somehow stand to benefit from a closer partnership with Novell, but for the time being AIR looks a bit more appealing.

Silverlight -> IE, Firefox, Safari on Mac and Windows and Moonlight (Novell)
Flash -> IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, everything?! (Adobe)

Again, simplification of deployment. Microsoft solutions can be deployed to other platforms but your then dealing with two vendors. If I had a commercial product I would need (or at least I would do this) support from Microsoft and Novell should I care to deploy to Linux, Windows and Mac. With Adobe it’s alot easier to manage, one company.

Wonder how hard it would be to add ActionScript as one of the languages the DLR understands. Write your Silverlight apps in AS, would increase the usefulness of AS even further, or at the very least get more people used to the idea of AS then is already the case now.

@Joshua – I don’t think I am losing site of the forest. Yes, .NET does allow you to build desktop applications, yes, AIR does allow you to build desktop applications. But that is pretty much where the similarities end.

AIR is targetted at developers who are looking to take web based applications and use that code and those skills to bring them to the desktop. In the web world, there are a few things that are of value, one of them being that when you write your app for the browser it runs on any platform. AIR is also cross platform and will run on Mac OS X, Windows, and in an update soon after release, Linux. This is a huge differentiator from things like .NET.

So.. Adobe & Microsoft both say “It does not compete”..

-
Scott Barnes
RIA Evangelist
Microsoft.

Well, they have .NET. It’s not officially cross platform (there’s Mono, of course), but AIR and .NET are in competition with each other.

Sometimes we technologists lose site of the forest for the trees. While .NET is not a cross platform runtime (no official version for anything but Windows), if someone wanted to write a desktop app, they could write a .NET app, or they could write an AIR app. They can be used to provides the same types of solutions (which is the definition of competition), with the advantage to AIR being that it allows you to write once and “run anywhere.”

Competition does not mean products that do the same thing — it means products that can be used to address the same problem. AIR and .NET can clearly be used to address the same problem, therefore, they compete.

Same goes with Silverlight being a competitor to Flash and/or Flex. True, Flex code is compiled to Flash bytecode, but the truth is, Silverlight and Flex can be used to address the same problem, therefore, Silverlight and Flex are in competition.

-Josh

maybe we will see some plugin for Flex that compiles same MXML to SWF for Flash as well as XAML for Silverlight.

AIR is a fantastic platform. and i’m whishing if AIR can also host Silverlight applications within it. as Silverlight runs on OSX’s WebKit based Safari, i think there wont be a problem making Silverlight work on AIR.

i think this will put AIR far ahead from MS, if they’re thinking to make thier own AIR competitor.

// chall3ng3r //

“As I have been reading in many blog posts lately, I felt that I needed to make one point perfectly clear. Silverlight is not Microsoft’s answer to Adobe AIR, it is Microsoft’s competitor to the Flash Player. This means they……

There are still some reporters who lump together “new things” like Silverlight, AIR, and the JavaFX initiative though. More work to do, but the overall trend is in the right direction, I think.

jd/adobe