First, I am a .Net developer and absolutely love it. If I had a choice about it I’d never touch another platform. Also, Visual Studio IMO is the best IDE ever created… for developers.

Having said that I do agree with many of the points that you presented, Serge. However, one truly great thing about Microsoft is that they listen to their consumers. I’m sure the SL experience will be made easier on designers who don’t know how to use the Expression tools. I’m sure someone will create plugins or addins for the more popular design tools.

I do think that Visual Studio has a long way to go to make it easy on developers to create SL apps….

Finally, there was a comment about Microsoft making its living by copying the ideas of someone else.
That is done in every aspect of business. It’s the nature of business and economy as it stands today.

You see a flat screen tv created by company X. A few months / years later you see something similar from company Y. It’s competition. That’s why we have patents. That’s what drives capitalism today.

More often than not, Microsoft “copies” ideas because it’s what their consumers are demanding.

Anyhow, great article. Thought provoking (obviously). I’m excited to see what improvements are made to SL 3.0.

Mike

Well I won’t fault you on this opinion as a Dev since most people who don’t design are under this assumption. In fact everyone thinks they can do it and back in the day many a CEO of some little internet start up set out to do just that and the results were almost always hilarious. It is false and if ever you really had to try and do this professionally I think you might not only be surprised at how much work it can be and how hard it can be to pull off without the right background, but at the same time you’d find that you have every marketing exec , developer, and VP of whatever looking at the final result and saying yeah , but I could totally have done that. Good designing is just one of those things that looks easy when someone does a good job.

Like writing a novel , you read one and go I could have sat down and written that! Just seems so obvious when you see the end result. Kind of like how game programmers used to snicker at the idea of their development shop hiring a writer. Pfft I could do that they said , yet you got another g-string clad, pistol wielding main character yelling “You will never get your hands on the secret formula” and “Time to die , take that!”
Then companies started licensing game engines and spending more money hiring all these artists , designers and writers to do all that unimportant easy stuff that just compliments the programmers awesome code.

Just to be clear I don’t like it when others disregard good development either and say oh design it and then we will just contract somebody to throw some code together and make it function. Same thing results, a disaster.

Yes you could copy a design but then you’re not really designing your just like the guy looking at your code or copy pasting snippets with his fingers crossed. What works for one company conveying information and interacting with a certain target audience doesn’t necessarily work for another. How important to Apples brand and to their business model is the look and feel of their site ? They could have saved a lot of money if they just copied Dells design or had had one of their developers throw something up there. I bet he could have done it in weekend between his back end coding. Also clients aren’t too happy to look generically like one of their competitors or for public facing sites to have a dated, cheap , or immature look and feel that gives a poor first impression or doesn’t convey their brand and accommodate the information design, while being unique, visually pleasing and intuitive.

For an in house, functional web app though you may be right after all you don’t need a writer and graphic artist for your companies employee handbook either but it doesn’t mean their jobs are easy. They are just very different things requiring different skills from different backgrounds. Get a designer who plays with a little a scripting and programming, to code anything but the most basic functionality and it’s not professional and probably not even passable, get most coders to design same thing.

Silverlight will probably “eat” (I mean have the bigger market) Flex as office eat wordperfect, as windows eat Mac os, as IE eat netscape, etc
That’s why Adobe fan(atic?) feel fear and react as you by trolling instead of objective citism…