Silverlight Vs Flex - Good article from a developers point of view
I found a very interesting article today on a subject that is of particular interest to me at the moment. I am in the need of a good gantt chart component (for integration with www.teamworkpm.net) and after searching high and low, have come to the conclusion that it may be worth building one myself. The nature of the component means that AJAX is out (I want it to be extremely functional and fast)
My problem is that I am not very good at flash. I tried Flex Builder 3 but I have a whole load of experience with C# so I was considering silverlight. I find the IDE of Visual Studio amazing so Silverlight in C# would be a very attractive option. The Flex Builder app (Eclipse plugin/mod) just didnt do it for me....
This article though has put me in 2 minds. They make the very good point that Flex has been along for so long that there are so many resources available to developers. And of course there is the added bonus of being able to deploy as an AIR application.
After reading the article, I have decided to put the effort into Flex development. Can anybody point me in the direction of the best Flex for beginners articles, samples etc?
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I'll give you a few resources, first of all, I did a "hands on" presentation at the NY Flex user group a while back, if you go to http://www.nyflex.org/ and look up the archive, you can see the files I used (12/14/06). I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. I designed it to be practical, and take you to an intermediate level. I can also email you the modules, if you like, so you can look at it incrementally.
The Adobe site has some good "getting started" tutorials. For a while, Totaltraining.com was offering free 30-days of Flex training, but I can't find it on the site any more. You could follow up with Tim Buntel or Ben Forta @ adobe if you like - maybe they know more about it.
Some great references are:
http://www.cflex.net/
http://www.flexauthority.com/
http://www.flexdaddy.info/
http://www.everythingflex.com
and, of course, the Flex Coders Group on Yahoo.
You may find Charlie Areharts http://www.carehart.org/ugtv site of interest - there are some videos of user group preso's.
Let me know if you need more - I try to check the Adobe Flex message board if I have time to help out. There are some helpful folks there.
Cheers,
Davo
Thank you so much for the tips and links! I cant wait to get stuck in to them. Looks like I'll have a busy night ahead of me!
Dan.
http://visudemos.ilog.com/webdemos/humanresources/humanresources.html
or for the full info: http://www.ilog.com/products/elixir/
Regards,
David
Thanks for the link! I am guessing that is built on the Flex Grid Component. I saw some examples of that somewhere. I may look into doing it that way but will need to have milestones, dependancies (Everything linked and moving as a task duration is changed) etc
Dan.
Pace yourself!
Cheers,
Davo
simply the best flex evangelist
http://coenraets.org/
There is a lot of good info here, sort of cookbook style.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/
I also started a blog for all the tricks I learned along the way.
http://code.152.org
I'm working in both environments, meaning VS with C# and Flex. For Flex development you should really consider IntelliJ Idea (www.jetbrains.com/idea/).
If you know Resharper for VS it will bring you almost the same level of development to Flex. Flash and Flex Builder is not that good when it comes to professional development, usage of tools and so on.
Definitely get on top of Ant scripts as well as they will allow you to use the same approach as MSBuilds (for example automatic builds, deployments, email notifications and so on).
It's very easy to learn one if you know the another, the only thing is IDE. You may try to install Flex plugins to VS (like Amethyst or Ensemble Tofino) however I really recommend installing other IDE.
I hope it was helpful for you.
Best regards,
Wojciech