Well, Remix07 Day 1 is in the bag and I’ve come away with a few good hours of Silverlight exposure… so what have I learned so far?

Let me start by saying that I was fortunate enough to meet and chat with some of the Microsoft Silverlight heavyweights - which was great - and the evening of free beer evolved into a series of funny moments. If you didn’t come then you should have!

I ventured in knowing very little about Silverlight, the ‘threat’ it posed to me as a Flash developer and how it was going to fit in to the scheme of things. During the course of the day, two magical secrets were revealed to me.

Revelation 1: It’s Microsoft.

OK - so we knew this already - this isn’t such a revelation… until you realise… they’re very committed, and they have lots of cash! Whichever way you look at it, this thing is going to get bigger and better until it’s ready to compete head-to-head with Flash.

As it stands, at the moment Silverlight is Flash’s crippled, short, fat and ugly cousin… but in the next few years you can guarantee that it will come of age. You may not need to be able to code and deploy Silverlight today, but you should be aware of it, where it’s up to and where its strengths and weaknesses reside - because if you’re in this industry sector, sooner or later you will need to get your hands dirty.

Revelation 2: Niche? What Niche?

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about being a Flash Dev is that the inherent visual side of things has created a nice buffer between me and the more orthodox coders. ‘Real’ programmers stereotypically don’t care how it looks, moreover, are quite happy to liberally apply healthy doses of Comic Sans Serif… need I say more?

The great thing here is that my understanding of design and visual architecture - that which initially attracted me to Flash as a medium - has really created some job security for me. As I continue to improve my coding skills, I’m finding that the Comic Sans Coders are more than happy to build applications that power the banks and traffic lights (and more power to them - you’ll agree that we need these guys) and they would rarely consider ActionScript development to be a serious and credible use of them as a resource. Rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, there is currently a great cultural divide between them and me and I’m totally fine with that.

BUT - here’s the kicker: with Silverlight, this is all going to change.

The aforementioned job security, which was purely based on the skills demand outweighing the supply, is under threat. Silverlight can be coded in ’serious’ languages such as VB and C# in the Visual Studio environment - which means - this little corner of our cosy little industry is going to get very crowded.

Combine this with the sophistication of ActionScript 3 and you’ll see that we’re witnessing the slow but sure death of the cut-and-paste coder. Those nice guys that earn a crust by patching together snippets from FlashKit and Kirupa are going to find that the going gets rough. Whilst both Adobe and Microsoft will no doubt do their best to make these fellas comfortable, the rich experiences of the future are going to require some rich code… and the marketplace for code-vendors like you and I, is going to get quite cramped. If you’re an AS2 developer (like I am) it’s time to take the plunge and up-skill… or this time, you will be left behind.

Where does this leave us?

So what can we take from this? The good news is that there’s time to acclimatise! This is not going to happen overnight - in fact, you’ve probably got the next 12 months to figure it all out. This may sound harsh, but in my opinion the Silverlight platform is still only half-baked and nowhere near ready for prime-time and, in this regard, it’s quite a pity that they’ve launched it already. I understand that it’s a necessary evil as they need the support of developers in this alpha/beta stage to build compelling content that will seed interest for the second wave of applications… but c’mon… there’s not even a basic suite of visual controls yet. How much work can a checkbox component be? Admittedly, Silverlight 1.1 provides a more appealing proposition - albeit still in Alpha. This is where I’ll be joining the fray.

Feel free to share your take on the situation. I’m off to make a late start on Day 2 of the conference… WPF sessions today.