Feb 22 2008

Silverlight 2: Looks good!

Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:47 PM
2 comments
- Categories: RIA Platforms | Flex

Odd for me to say something positive about Silverlight. I tried 1.0, and sort of gave up. After reading Scott Guthrie's blog entry about Silverlight 2.0, I might have to give it another shot - I like C#, but just can't stand ASP.NET.

What I really like about the Silverlight 2.0 screenshots shown is the the darn thing looks good. Frankly, out of the box Flex looks pretty lousy next to it. It's got clean scroll bars, good-looking buttons, and I don't see anything that's the weird-shade-of-blue-green-not-found-in-nature that's all over default skinned Flex apps.

Odd to see a Microsoft product that's graphically more pleasing than something from Adobe. Maybe Flex 4 (or a 3.01) could bring about a real skin update that makes our default applications look halfway decent?

Comments

Rachel

Rachel wrote on 02/22/08 2:30 PM

Hehe I do agree, Flex's built in UI looked hot when it came out, now it's getting a little dated and stale - and I have wondered how they ended up with that default grayish greenish blue. I'm sure it would not be too hard to create a flex skin that looks like the Silverlight one, but I would feel so wrong doing it :)

But as an alternative, Yahoo released their own skin for Flex that is a little cleaner and modern looking...you may like that a little better.

http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/articles/yahoo-flex-skin.html
Robert

Robert wrote on 02/22/08 3:57 PM

I also loathe Asp.net but WPF is all good.
I've dismissed Silverlight after seeing v1.0 and 1.1, but now it's really starting to shape up!
You can tell that no designers were involved in Scotts app though. The thing looked horrible
in its completeness, though individual parts (the button) looked good in stock settings.

By the way, whats up with forcing me to leave an email just to post a comment?

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