Tom Arah gets to grips with Microsoft’s new Expression Studio and Silverlight platforms and wonders how they will fare against Adobe’s Flash.

Recently I looked at how Adobe is reworking Flash in preparation for the coming battle with Microsoft over the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space and, with it, the likely future of computer-based design...

In this article we finally get to see just what forces Microsoft has assembled – and its three staged launches at the MIX 07 conference in Las Vegas effectively amounted to a declaration of all-out war.

Expression Studio

First up was the official launch of Microsoft’s entirely new Expression Studio suite of design applications (see separate reviews) built around Expression Web for web page authoring and Expression Blend for application development. Blend 1.0 is particularly significant - and impressive – thanks to its use of XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language). XAML is Microsoft’s new markup language for describing the presentational surface of an application based on its new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology. When brought together with the separately handled .NET based logic, the result is a compiled desktop EXE that can offer all of those rich design features that we have come to associate with Flash – vectors, bitmaps, audio, video, user interface (UI) components, live server-based data, interactivity and animation – along with some entirely new design capabilities that are all its own – 3D graphics, high-level formatting including video projections, and intelligent layouts that adapt to the screen space available to them.

Expression Blend’s WPF-based desktop applications push the envelope of rich

With Expression Blend 1.0’s extraordinary design capabilities Microsoft seizes the Rich Application high ground - but what about the “I” in RIA: the Internet? To truly compete with Flash in the RIA space, Microsoft needs to move beyond the desktop and into the browser. This is possible with Expression Blend 1.0 thanks to the ability to produce sandboxed browser-hosted XBAPs (XAML Browser Applications) as well as fully-installed standalone desktop EXEs. Simply type or click through to your XBAP’s URL and the design-rich, WPF-based XBAP application automatically loads into the browser window.
Crucially however, each XBAP remains a self-contained, full-blown executable rather than an integrated component of its hosting page. Even more significantly, each XBAP remains fully tied to WPF so can only be viewed under Vista or under XP systems with the .NET 3.0 runtime installed. As such, XBAPs represent a useful instant deployment option for managed organizations but they go against the two foundations on which the Web is built: the HTML-based web page and universal access. By contrast it is Flash’s lightweight integration into the web page and truly cross-platform playback that are the real secrets of its success. In particular it’s the simple integrated Flash Video (FLV) playback, as seen in YouTube’s pages, that has driven the spread of the Flash player and so provided the necessary platform on which more advanced RIAs can operate.

Flash’s lightweight and integrated web page components are the secret of its success

As such it was noticeable that, with the launch of Expression Studio, Microsoft was attempting to redefine the term RIA to mean “Rich Interactive Application”, and the reason is clear. With its WPF-based capabilities and its more comprehensive event model, Microsoft can certainly declare itself the winner in terms of design and interactive richness. Ultimately however the real battle is for territory; while “rich” is important, “reach” is paramount and here the standalone nature of XBAPs and their tie-in to WPF prevent Microsoft from moving far beyond its Windows desktop application stronghold. By contrast Flash’s true cross-platform, cross-browser web page integration has enabled its player to seize almost 99% of the vast web space. It looks as if the RIA war might be over before it’s even begun.