flex vs silverlight - arcgis server 9.3

I think for me ... after working with ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server and other Web GIS products ... my bias is always based on speed, interaction, appeal, informative and well animated web GIS applications. All these years we had Coldfusion, JSP, ASP, JavaScript, Java Applets, AJAX and others ... trying hard to make this 'rich experience' happen. Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server came into play only recently and we can blame ESRI for not releasing both APIs same time. I believe ESRI created unnecessary anxiety (sorry guys, its true ...) in the web GIS community.

Most Web GIS developers in this region (Asia) are moving in the Flex dev direction. Some of the ESRI developer offices (i.e. ESRI Australia) focus a lot on Flex. From a design, animation and UI standpoint ... Microsoft doesn't have good tools (unlike Adobe) to design skins, animation, buttons, frames, layouts and charting. Silverlight's biggest drawback is web visual design tools, CSS support and IDE for these. I've been prototyping small apps in Flex and find its handling of events, listeners, navigation and states very innovative ... I dare any developer not to find this cool.

If we are looking from enterprise coding standpoint, Silverlight wins... no doubt. The power of Silverlight is the .NET framework. Coding C# or VB.NET is so much better and efficient with the .NET Framework. Adobe will never have the power of programming like .NET. I suppose familiarity with Visual Studio and .NET style of coding makes us lean towards Silverlight more. ActionScript is a steep learning curve for any developer.

Tough choice ... esp for GIS developers ... we are not really mainstream web developers to decide on which platform..