Labs

A quick introduction: My name is Tyson, I am an Art Director. I had the pleasure of working with my esteemed colleague, Jamie Kosoy, on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show project recently. My design team (Chris Petrillo and Caroline Caine) and I also dove headfirst into Silverlight and I'd like to share some of our observations and insights.

Expression Blend

Our initial thoughts on the Blend interface were fairly positive. It reminded us somewhat of After Effects and it wasn't a difficult program to pick up if you already are familiar with Flash or After Effects. We did begin to run into some technical issues with it, however. Jamie discovered that it is a pretty "leaky" program pertaining to memory, and this seemed to be causing issues with certain files crashing on machines other than the one they were created on. One of our biggest issues with building in Blend was...

I had the pleasure of diving headfirst into Silverlight in building the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment -- Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project's detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right?

So now that the project is launched, I'm feeling reflective. And I have to say: Silverlight is a worthy competitor to Flash. It is a lot of fun to build in. I recommend it. I think there are times when it'll be faster to build certain things in Silverlight than Flash and vice versa, and it is a matter of learning where the strengths and weaknesses are for each.

There were some things that frustrated me, but overall I found Visual Studio to be a great environment to learn to code in, C# was an extremely easy language to learn and most importantly of all the Silverlight player to be really flexible to the stress we put it under. Our team noted several times that we especially like Silverlight's animation capabilities -- we felt like we had far more "control" over what was happening on the screen than in Flash.