Develop an online multitouch scrumboard | Flex or Silverlight?

Question

My company want to develop an online multitouch scrumboard for our scrumteams. We are still in doubt between flex and silverlight as platform for the application. (don't want to fire a hole new flex vs. silverlight discussion again) Installation rate & platform independence are not critical to us, because it's just for teammembers and only windows 7 enables multitouch events in flash or silverlight.

We would like some pros/cons specifically for this project (multitouch, rich user interface, integration with backends).

Our first pros/cons overview:

Pros Silverlight

• More experience with silverlight / .net in our company
• Multi-theading
• One Integrated Visual Studio for All Development
• Expression Blend
• Easy unit testing
• more intuitive and powerful xaml

Cons Silverlight

• less platforms
• less controls

Pros Flash

• Balance the experience or products in our company (.net/silverlight & flex)
• independent platform
• lots of default controls / easy customizing controls
• better template & css support

Cons Flash

• can't combine default gestures at the same time
• no other languages
• no multi-threading
• expensive tools

Thanks for any advise!

Answer 1

It really sounds like you have done your research, and I certainly dont want to start a flame war here either, but ALL of the pros for flash are also pros for Silverlight. There really are plenty of controls available out there for Silverlight.

One thing to think about too, is the Multitouch support in Windows 7, I dont know about Flex but Silverlight 4.0 has the full API support for it, which makes life very easy when developing multitouch apps. There is the Surface pack for Windows 7 which has extra API's around multitouch development, and its very nice.

Im obviously a Silverligh guy, but no multi-threading in Flash sounds like a big deal breaker to me, how do you access data and do background processing in Flash without locking up the UI thread?

The whole TDD approach is also a big one for me, the tooling around testing and the like is a big benefit (which you did mention)...

Answer 2

Assuming either could do the job, the decision on what technology to choose will more likely depend on either your company's in-house skills or if you intend to contract it out.

If you are an existing Flex shop you will probably develop it in Flex to leverage the existing skills, unless you find one of the missing features is a show-stopper (multi-touch?).

IMHO: if you have any Silverlight skills in-house, or intend to outsource it (and you want serious back-end integration), the Microsoft stack will make life very easy. Although there is a learning curve for Silverlight, RIA services alone is worth the effort for client/server apps.