eWeek’s Darryl K. Taft’s article entitled “Microsoft’s Sparkle: Is It a Flash Killer?” missed the point — but that’s OK, I too had that same misconception of “Sparkle versus Flash.”
Of course, Mr. Taft could have done what I did – I simply asked Microsoft’s Unni Ravindranathan (of the Expression Team):
I posed this question to Unni: “I began developing flash "stuff" years ago because "it was there." I’ve tried but never cared for your company’s attempts like "Liquid Motion.” After winning many awards for our flash work, "changing" scares me. So I’m hoping that your blog will be able to dispel those fears.”
UNNI’S RESPONSE
Hi Blake,Thanks!There is a mis-perception regarding the nature of WinFX and its relationship to Flash. WinFX is a broad set of developer APIs which includes the .NET Framework programming model. Together with the Visual Studio and the Microsoft Expression tools, WinFX offers developers and designers a highly productive and powerful environment for building rich applications for both Windows and the Web.Applications built with WinFX can be deployed and run on Windows, either as a full trust client (eg: a Start Menu installed .exe application), or as a partial-trust application running within a browser. Hence, the major goal here is to provide our developers / ISVs (who have done amazing things in the past) with something exciting to create next-gen UX for their applications. So I would be greatly surprised to see the TechNet training you mention :).Looking forward to interacting with you, and more importantly, learning from your vast experience.-Unni
Sheesh Darryl — sometimes all you gotta do is ASK before you write an article!
The Road to Know Where 