Calling all Silverlight developers.

If you are a .NET developer today your skills and much of your code will move forward. If you are Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy.

I am shit-hot excited about Windows Mobile 7 Series. I think it looks great, and I love the design elements from the latest Zune software (something I also really like). And I think what seems to be their developer strategy is awesome. Take expressive platforms like Silverlight and XNA and bake them right into the DNA of the phone. The result is going to be some really slick looking applications.

I also used to talk a bit about a divergence in the strategies for Flash and Silverlight. Obviously they’re still competitors, but if the Silverlight experience on WinMo 7 is application based, I think it does represent a big difference in how Silverlight and Flash are approaching the mobile space. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong, just different strategies based on the two companies strengths. But in the end, I have a lot of faith that the Silverlight designers and developers I know are going to help build an ecosystem around Windows Mobile 7 Series that will look next-gen.

Plus, with guys like Anand Iyer shifting focus to WinMo, it’s clear it’s a very important part of the strategy for Microsoft.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

HTML and Flash working together to find each other.

Geolocation is a good example. HTML5 is going to get a geolocation API that works just beautifully even on devices with no GPS. Flash based applications will (currently) only get access to geolocation APIs when targeting the AIR runtime on mobile. Some browsers (I only know of Firefox 3.5 on Mac and the WebKit browser on the Nexus One) already support the HTML5 geolocation API… So why not use that to get geo information into your Flash based application?

There are few things I love more than geography and by extension, geolocation. It’s the digital overlay of the world. How can that not be cool? And this particular example is nice because it’s an area where HTML5 is ahead of Flash Player. Just like HTML can use Flash to implement ideas it hasn’t nailed down yet, Flash can use HTML to implement ideas that it hasn’t got yet. Bliss.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Mihai is doing a webinar on debugging Flex and PHP.

Join Mihai Corlan while he goes through the basics of debugging a Flex and PHP application.See how to work with:

• Flash Builder 4
• Xdebug
• Eclipse PDT

to ensure a bug free project. The presentation will take about 45 minutes, leaving 15 minutes to answer any questions you might have on this subject.

Xdebug looks like a cool project and I know Mihai has been finding it very useful as part of the client-server debugging workflow.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Interesting writeup over on PHPArchitect.

That is the most important thing that Flex brings to Flash: professional grade tooling. The Flex framework, which Adobe has open sourced, makes application development quick and painless for programmers familiar with event driven programming.

One of the things that fascinates me about the Flash Platform is the number of different types of web professionals it attracts. Those web professionals have very different goals so we largely try to stay out of the way an let them create what they want. But to make them productive we create tools and sell them. But trying to have one tool that does everything isn’t practical. Flex was always intended to be a developer-centric way to create Flash applications and I think Flash Builder 4 is going to show that off better than the previous versions.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog