Robin has a hilarious post on the upcoming beta 2 of Xamlon Flash. I started looking into flash a few weeks back for a couple of things I'm working on. I took a quick look at what it takes to build flash movies, but quickly realized I didn't have the personal bandwidth to learn it. However, Xamlon looks like it will give me the ability to work with familiar tools. Robin sums it up this way:
"Flash users are finally going to have access to good tools. Anyone who tells you Actionscript and Flash are better tools for programming than C# and Visual Studio is on crack"
I asked Robin on email a few weeks ago if they saw Xamlon Flash as a way to bring .NET developers to Flash or if they say Flash as just another way to deploy Xaml based apps. In beta 1, it was firmly on the former as you had to write a bunch of flash specific stuff to make anything work. But it sounds like they've almost solved that:
We were programming at the swf level...Then another sample came out that was using the early version of our component set. Suddenly the layout is all coming from markup (well not 100% yet, but very close), as are the graphics. And this markup is Xaml (and in fact could easily be changed to XUL or whatever). Because of this, the code isn't dependant on anything in swf, so hey, it could actually be run on Avalon. The beautiful thing about the markup is it abstracts away the most system dependant things, making it pretty easy to deploy to swf OR the native OS. Maybe this is the icing, but that might well be the biggest deal in the end.
For me, the being able to code to Flash from VS is the critical feature. But it's nice to know that moving to Avalon in the future may been simple or even simply a recompile.
BTW, check out this pretty cool photo demo.