Flash or Silverlight?

Then I thought about Flash and I guess that’s what you would use for a little game like that. But I don’t have it, I don’t want to buy it (is there a free version?) and I don’t have the time to learn it; although I think it’s pretty cool.

But… wait a moment? What about Silverlight? Isn’t it similar to Flash? I checked it out and I tell you: No, it’s not. Or nor yet. I downloaded the SDK, played a bit, read some pages. But… it’s just not the way you want it to be. Works only with java-script, isn’t easy, needs a lot of learning, doesn’t give you any moments of success. It’s just no fun.

Here comes GOA

So I complained in a chat with Benjamin. "Do I have to write a .NET-to-Flash-converter first?" He said: "There is one." – "WHAT?" – "Yes, I heard about something like that." and a minute later he produced a link to a product called "Goa Winforms". I could hardly believe my eyes. They claim to have an engine to compile .NET-Winform-Code to Flash (.swf) applications.

The basic version is free and comes as a 3MB installer, which integrates the tool smoothly into VS2005. After installing VS comes up with new project-types.

I choose the GOA Application and VS prepares a solution with a new project and a file that looks like a regular C#-file (the extension is .ccs by the way). Okay, let’s start it… Wow! A real Flash-application comes up. So far it’s just an empty form with one button – but it runs. It runs!!!

I think they implemented most of the common gui-components for flash and engineered a compiler that somehow converts C#-Code into an flash-interpretable format. Cool achievement!

Now, let’s design a fancy gui… but… were is the designer? In brief: There is none. You can’t design the gui as you usually would. Ouch. Okay, there is a solution to this ‘issue’, but it hurts and can’t be more than an temporary workaround: Add a Windows-application project to your solution, design your gui and copy the generated code to the GOA-application file.

Done? No. When you try to compile it, you get a bunch of errors and you have to manually delete any usages of properties that have been generated but are not supported by the GOA-version of the corresponding controls.

Now it works and you can continue to write your logic… but that takes us to another annoying point: The integration to Visual Studio could be improved a lot. Syntax-highlighting and intellisense work, but that’s it. Auto-re-indentation doesn’t work, errors and warnings do not all occur in the "Error-List"-Window, and my loved ReSharper didn’t recognize the code; but maybe that’s just because of the extension .css – is there a way to make ReSharper recognize those files as regular C#-files? Please let me know.

That’s was a lot of bleating, but lord don’t let me be misunderstood: It’s works and you get a lot for your effort; I had the fun application for Rob done in three hours (including learning, fighting, reading) and I am happy with it.

There is a lot more to play around with – like dymanic creation of controls – but it should be fine for the most purposes.

GOA vs. Silverlight

As soon as the GOA guys can get rid of the drawbacks, I think this approach has great potential. As long as Silverlight is ugly, "GOA Winforms" is something to really keep an eye on. And Silverlight 2.0 hasn’t proven yet that it can beat Flash. So, let’s see if Microsoft will take
the challenge.

Bonustrack

By the way.. here is the "application". It’s in German and doesn’t do much… but blame Rob for that