Silverlight is Argentum in a Flash
Doh! Silverlight! After the Silverlight podcast I kept asking myself, why are all the DLLs and Javascripts called things like aghost and agcore? Because Ag is the symbol for Silver. Silver in Latin is argentum. Thanks Alexey!
Download Silverlight for Windows here and Silverlight for Mac here. It's only a meg and is harmless.
Be sure to check out Alexy's blog post (via Mike Harsh where I stole the Silverlight Logo) with his WPF/e (Silverlight) 3D demo based on his Bubblemark 2D Benchmark that includes:
- Silverlight
- XBAP (XAML Browser Application)
- DHTML
- Flash/Flex
- Apollo Flex and Apollo HTML (requires Adobe Apollo)
I got over under each demo. Things slowed down with 128 balls, but I greatly suspect that it's a JavaScript problem at that point, and not an animation engine problem.
ASIDE: On an unrelated note, if you ever wanted to get Windows Media working in FireFox, download the WMP Plugin for FireFox and you'll be on your merry way.
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Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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I wish the XBAP version had a ball selector -- I'd like to compare and see if that was more performant.
Flex (Cached) in Firefox - 64 balls: 39 fps / 60% avg cpu
Flex in Firefox - 64 balls: 16 fps / 75% avg cpu
DHTML in Firefox - 64 balls: 15 fps / 80% avg cpu
Silverlight in Firefox - 64 balls: 12 fps / 90% avg cpu
Flex (cached) in IE 6.0- 64 balls: 43 fps / 50% avg cpu
Flex in IE 6.0- 64 balls: 14 fps / 75% avg cpu
DHTML in IE 6.0- 64 balls: 14 fps / 80% avg cpu
Silverlight in IE 6.0 - 64 balls: 19 fps / 90% avg cpu
But the best framerate which was the Apollo Flex based version - although I couldn't seem to change to the number of balls. The performance was 127 fps / 77% avg cpu
The performance of the Apollo DHTML version was 64 fps / 45% avg cpu (16 balls only).
cheers
Stu
A note about WM Plugin for Firefox, though: you may want to inform your readers that the installer barfs on 2003 Server, which I run as my desktop OS for development. I'm getting pretty fed up with apps refusing to install on a Server OS just because of bad (or in some cases intentional?) version checking. All developers know that the Windows Server OS (2003/Longhorn) is built from the exact same code-base as the associated Workstation (XP/Vista) OS, so why prevent certain apps from installing on Server?
After jumping through many hoops I got WMP 11 working on 2003 Server, but why should this be hard? As a result, IE shows WM videos just fine but Firefox doesn't, and when I try to install the WM plugin for Firefox its installer says "Server OS not supported" - WHY?!?!
Grrr. Just had to vent a bit - you can probably tell this isn't the first time I've come across this totally pointless restriction. Thankfully we developers have Orca at our disposal (no, not the next version of Visual Studio, the excellent MSI editing tool that's in the Windows SDK - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255905 ), and after a little tweak of the MSI file's version check values most of these silly apps can be installed on 2003 with no negative side-effects. What a pain, though!
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