I remember when first seeing Flex, that it was the ultimate, best thing out there. With its advanced binding abilities, MXML, and those cool sleek visuals – what more can a dev ask?. Then came AIR, adobe was determined to rule RIA. And MS had no answer.
I myself researched alternatives, openlazlo, etc. There was only Winforms to compare to, but that was oranges and apples, really.
Then came Silverlight. This was actually the quiet before the storm, Silverlight had no builtin effects, no controls, and exposed raw interface and unknown idioms. People started comparing Silverlight vs Flex, and the general opinion was the Flex was much superior. I spent a day googling for such comparisons, and saw some conversations between an Adobe dev and Silverlight fans over the Silverlight forums.
But then the storm came. Microsoft rose up all guns machine guns, rockets, and turrets blazing, with the release of VS2008, .NET 3.0, 3.5 the VAST documentation, blogs saturated with information, and now even upcoming MVC.NET and framework source code(!).
Only with these all bits and pieces out there, everything starts falling into place. suddenly using Expression Blend feels “right” and making my own Silverlight controls is a second nature. Visual Studio is so great that it makes me want to leave it open 24/7, and WPF is so much fun I don’t want to do anything else!
Currently I guess Adobe is deep in developing the Flex 3 IDE, and from the Beta2 state of things, its hella buggy. So, I think it is inevitable to declare Flex as dead.
