On the evening of Tuesday, July 22, 2008, Ovi Roatis presented a comparison of Adobe's Flash and Flex technologies with Microsoft's emerging Silverlight initiative. He built the same simple application on each platform and concluded that both work well, that the Adobe technology has a huge lead because it is a mature and stable offering, that Microsoft is a powerful marketing force who could catch up quickly, and that the winners of this contest are us, the developer community, benefitting from the competition between the technology behemouths.

The links below will lead you to Ovi's presentation and the resources he used to put the demonstration together.

Please note that when you click on the Silverlight application link, you will be stopped at a page with a small graphic saying "Install Microsoft Silverlight". (This is comparable to the experience you have if you arrive at a site with Flash content and you do not have the Flash Player installed.) Click the installation badge, download the file Silverlight.2.0.exe (perhaps to your desktop), then double-click on the file to complete the installation process. It's not quite as smooth a process as installing / updating the Flash Player, but it's not bad, either.