In LABS, the blog of the creative agency Big Spaceship, Jamie Kosoy tells all about his experiences building the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show site in Silverlight.

He started the project with no small amount of trepidation:

I walked in with the same sort of attitude that I believe is prevelant across the industry at the moment — Silverlight is an inferior platform, that we were working with a Flash wananbe and that this would be to the project’s detriment. Why use Silverlight when I can already know Flash so well? It does the same things as Flash anyway, right?

Now that the project has concluded and the site has been delivered, he has this to say:

So now that the project is launched, I’m feeling reflective. And I have to say: Silverlight is a worthy competitor to Flash. It is a lot of fun to build in. I recommend it. I think there are times when it’ll be faster to build certain things in Silverlight than Flash and vice versa, and it is a matter of learning where the strengths and weaknesses are for each.

There were some things that frustrated me, but overall I found Visual Studio to be a great environment to learn to code in, C# was an extremely easy language to learn and most importantly of all the Silverlight player to be really flexible to the stress we put it under. Our team noted several times that we especially like Silverlight’s animation capabilities — we felt like we had far more "control" over what was happening on the screen than in Flash.

He makes a list of his observations, a notable one of which is that he feels that Silverlight is a better videoplayer solution than Flash. There are more, both positive and negative, and they’re covered in the article, titled Thoughts on Silverlight.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

When I moved to my current position as Nerd Wrangler at b5media, I arrived to discover that the computer waiting for me was a Toshiba P200, a 17″ beast of a laptop that I’ve named “The Coffee Table”. This is the first time in about 5 years that I’ve worked with Windows as my primary operating system, and after a month in Vista, my feelings about operating systems are pretty much summarized by the picture below:

More on my experiences in a later post.

[Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.]

This side-by-side comparison of Java and Python shows why I prefer working in languages like Python and Ruby: the “yak shaving” that Java requires drives me crazy.