I've been persevering with Flex & AIR for some time and while I have enjoyed using most of the Flex, AIR, Actionscript facilities - I have now come to the conclusion that AIR (which I would require for my commecial applications) is not ready for LOB (Line of Business) use!
The sandboxing imposed because of the emphatic insistance of cross-platform use means that solutions we know our customers would ask for are simply not possible at the moment. Printing is still not resolved, database access is ok if you want to access corporate data - but create a simple CRUD for an Access database or interact wiht Excel you've got headaches!
As previously stated I have used Microsoft Visual Studio since it was born - In fact I got back to Visual Basic 1.0 (but that shows my age ;-) With the frustration of AIR I thought I would pay Visual Studio a visit - I was astounded at how much progress MS have made with WPF.
It has the following benefits :-
The sandboxing imposed because of the emphatic insistance of cross-platform use means that solutions we know our customers would ask for are simply not possible at the moment. Printing is still not resolved, database access is ok if you want to access corporate data - but create a simple CRUD for an Access database or interact wiht Excel you've got headaches!
As previously stated I have used Microsoft Visual Studio since it was born - In fact I got back to Visual Basic 1.0 (but that shows my age ;-) With the frustration of AIR I thought I would pay Visual Studio a visit - I was astounded at how much progress MS have made with WPF.
It has the following benefits :-
- You can access anything a Windows Forms application could
- Printing is fully supported
- It is not tied to Flash as the timeline of the application (Multi-Threading is a breeze)
- All tools are skinless - this is something Adobe plans for Flex 4 !!
- The XAML Markup language is better than Actionsript IMO
- WPF 'IS' suitable for a massive range of applications from LOB Accounts apps to some wonderful 3D rendering graphics apps.
- I've also found that the attitude of the MS developers has changed they are much keener to engage the development community and not so elitist as they were before.
- I could go on......
I have been re-writing an old booking system - I've put about three weeks work into it and in another couple of weeks I hope to have it to a commercial stage - That's Fast! and that's including learning WPF from scratch!
Here's an early screenshot...
2 comments:
I think it depends on the LOB. if being windows only is key, then I'd say sure WPF would make a lot of sense. As more Macs find their way into the enterprise cross platform becomes important, unfortunately there's trade offs. Unless I'm mistaken, short of SL, MS dev is windows only, right?
I think it'd be nice of there was a way for developers to work with the sandboxes and get out of them with trusted certs, or some other check/balance system.
Thanks for the reply John, that's right Silverlight is the only part of MS Dev that you can download a runtime for Windows or Mac at the moment. I would obviously prefer to be cross-platform, I'm a Beta tester for Adobe and I commend them for what they have done to date but I'm sure they could build into the AIR runtime end user options to allow installed applications out of the sandbox. The fact that we can't even get to the installed printers is a show stopper for me!
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