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.

Rob Caron has the scoop…as usual. MS is building a game specific version of VSTS called XNA Studio. From the press release, sounds like a bunch of additional features primarily around digital asset management. I wonder if such tools will be available to mere non-game-coding mortals?

Another option besides ActiveSWF is the recently announced Xamlon Pro Flash Edition. Xamlon is essentially an implementation of XAML the current version of Visual Studio. There’s a version for Windows Forms, for Compact Framework and now for Flash. So basically, you can write your flash app with XAML and C#. Apparently, you can also code directly to the Flash format, bypassing the XAML layer entirely. I like the idea of using a managed component like Xamlon better than a COM based component.

My big issue with using Flash is that it’s a totally seperate programming environment from the browser. Using VML in IE, you can manipulate the vector objects with javascript. In Flash, you may be doing one thing in the browser and something completely different in the flash movie. That’s a pain in the behind.

Larry O’Brien clued me into the fact that the new DevHawk theme didn’t render correctly in FireFox. When I redid my theme, I tried to be good and use all div and span tags, but apparently building a three column layout with a dynamically sized middle column that works on IE and FireFox is beyond my CSS skills. So I went back to using tables. Maybe the folks at CSS Zen Garden would freak out, but the table works just fine.

Larry also pointed me to ActiveSWF, a server side COM component for generating dynamic flash movies. You munge up an XML file describing the movie, hand it to ActiveSWF and it does the rest. Sweet. Only thing missing is a .NET version (I realize I can interop to COM, but that’s a pain to deploy).

Thanks Larry!

I guess there’s no real good story for vector graphics in the browser. I know IE supports VML natively, but no other browser does. SVG is the standard, but you need a plugin to make that work in IE and FireFox. Adobe makes an SVG plugin, but who has that installed? Everyone has Flash installed, but that seems like overkill to render a few vector graphics. Avalon would be perfect, except that it isn’t shipping yet.

Does that mean that if I want to build a wide reach website that creates relatively simple data driven graphics (bsaically filled boxes) that I still have to use images?