Flex and .Net: what should I be concerned about to make my life easier?

Question

I'm a Flash developer but have been slowly moving to developing my applications in Flex. The shift in paradigm has changed the way I work considerably.

I am now following a more structured approach to development that has changed the kind of applications I am building. Now I'm relying more on a database and middleware to provide the content. CRUD type applications with better usability.

So this has changed the media that I choose to interact with. Whether it a podcast or a webpage. I am taking in more .NET/Java developer centric type of news. I am hearing a lot regarding Maven, Hudson, 100% code coverage.

As a sole end to end developer making his own user interface and wiring it up to a hosted server/database (currently .NET 3.5 and MS SQL Server 2005).

What should I be concerned about to make my life easier?

I'm currently developing .NET with Visual Studio 2008 and Using the Flex Builder 3 plug in for Eclipse. Sometimes, I feel I am forcing it to work( using AMF, etc and ActionScript's crappy date object). Got to say I do like visual studio, and if it could get it's reference dialogue sorted out it'd be even nicer. But the Adobe side also has been getting slicker!

Anyway thoughts appreciated. Even stuff like move to Silverlight or use ColdFusion. My current strengths probably lie with ActionScript but it also has to be said that Visual Studio with ReSharper makes writing code very easy, especially like the way it will import stuff for you.

Answer 1

Flex + VS with ASP.NET is new RIA based development era and its going to be there for another 5-10 years, I think its better to stick to Flex/Silverlight + ASP.NET on VS, they are more structured and require less learning time then absolutely new words that are quite unknown to most of programmers.

Think of it is like an english, its a great common communication language, without it its impossible to do business in most of countries. Similarly being a developer, you need a group and mass audience to communicate with, share problems, discuss, develop and do everything in team work.

There is no need to live in dream of one developer doing work of 100s of others by using some great framework etc, such efforts even in past have been failed, IBM shut down its biggest research of making a program to write program, finally its human design/creativity and collaboration which makes projects successful.

Answer 2

I would look into WebORB for .NET. It has saved me a lot of time over the SOAP-based approach I was using with Flex & ASP.NET. It also is a more efficient way to transfer data between Flex & ASP.NET due to the way the data is serialized -vs- the heavy XML-based SOAP data.

Answer 3

If you have deep Flash experience then it makes sense to continue down the Flex path for UI development.

For the backend, if you're comfortable learning Java, I would recommend it over .NET. I feel like there's a lot more innovation going on in the open source Java community than .NET. Hibernate and Spring have been around for years and are very well-evolved in the Java world; their counterparts in the .NET side are primitive in comparison, as too are Microsoft's solutions to ORM (Entity Framework) and IoC (Unity). The advantage to the .NET side is that Microsoft tries to integrate everything for you (VS, IIS, SQL Server, etc) whereas on the Java side you usually need to stitch things together. It does give you more control.

If you're set on .NET, check out Fluorine FX for AMF remoting. It's completely open source and has better licensing than WebORB.