Silverlight v Flash - why The Register is Wrong!

Visual Studio does Flash too

by Huw Collingbourne

Monday 11 May 2009.

I admit to being a little irritated by an article in The Register today which argues that Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 has a major advantage over Adobe’s Flash Platform due, in large part, to the fact that "Visual Studio 2008, the primary IDE for Silverlight, blows Adobe’s Flash IDE out of the water."

That doesn’t mean that Visual Studio users are obliged to reject the Flash Platform in favour of Silverlight.

Amethyst is a Flash Platform environment for Visual Studio. Even the current beta has a first rate drill-down debugger, comprehensive user-configurable code formatting, powerful IntelliSense and a ton of other good stuff. Later we will have a free edition (including a free Visual Studio if you need it) and a commercial edition with extensive refactoring and a powerful drag and drop visual designer for Flex and AIR. Amethyst isn’t just some kind of lightweight plugin. It’s the whole kit and caboodle - just as deeply integrated into Visual Studio as Microsoft’s own development tools.

So what exactly does Visual Studio provide for Silverlight that Amethyst doesn’t provide for the Flash Platform? If anyone knows of anything they have but we don’t, please tell us.

If, on the other hand, you agree with us that Amethyst provides VS with a first rate IDE for the Flash Platform, then maybe you could point this out to the good folks at The Register.... ;-)

Amethyst - the way to develop for Flash inside Visual Studio!

The Register article is here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/08/silverlight_3_beta_review/
Overview of Amethyst

Keywords: Flex opinion

Silverlight v Flash - why The Register is Wrong!
11 May 2009

I think we are comparing apples and oranges. VS is for much more than what flash ide or flex ide are meant for.

I am also getting sick already of the flash vs SL wars. It’s just like back in the browser wars