Just got word of this.
http://www.flashforwardconference.com/press_release/23
I guess Lynda is committing her time to Lynda.com and the training materials there.
It will be interesting to see where this goes. I’ve posted some criticism of FlashForward over the last year or so, mostly due to their high cost of admission, and spending so much money on food and fancy parties, rather than keeping the price lower and concentrating on the content. However, the Boston event this year was very well attended, sold out I heard, and got pretty good reviews.
On the other hand, I’m kind of puzzled why Beau would purchase a Flash conference. It’s my understanding that he’s moved over to mostly a Silverlight shop, and has been a speaker at the last two MIX events. I’m curious to see if FlashForward will continue to be completely Flash-oriented, or will start to be a Silverlight/Flash conference. I’m not attempting to start any rumors or bash Silverlight or MS. Just curious to see how the next conference shapes up, which is already scheduled for August in San Francisco.
Of course, you can both me a Silverlight/WPF and Flash shop. I have worked with WPF and it is quite reasonable.
Keith,
As a friend of Beau and a developer who has been working for Beau/Metaliq for the last year as a Senior Engineer, I promise you that Metaliq is not solely a “Silverlight Shop”. Indeed, we can and will knock out a kick ass Silverlight project if that meets the needs of our clients and/or peeks our interest, but we still love Flash/Flex/AIR.
As developers who remains on the cutting edge of RIA tech, we at Metaliq must maintain a balanced, agnostic evaluation and application of technology. In other words, if we can build with it, we will… we’re not limited to any single tool. It’s worth noting that we (Metaliq) built the component set for Flash 9 (see http://www.metaliq.com/pdfs/adobecomps.pdf).
IMHO, the fact of the matter is that Silverlight is here to stay. The WPF and C# community is huge, and there is soooo much code out there that will run in Silverlight w/ virtually no code modifications. There are established sites like codeproject.com that have seemingly endless .Net resources. Most notably, there is a clearly defined and widely adopted approach to development and coding conventions.
One thing that makes Flash difficult for companies to adopt is the way that you can achieve the same result in several different ways. Very few Flash developers design/code/think the same. The benefit of this is that anyone can do any thing any way, the detriment is also that anyone can do any thing any way. There are very few rules to Flash development, and they seem to change on the fly from project to project, developer to developer, company to company. I’m cool w/ that, but it makes traditional programmers uncomfortable.
Many, if not most, Flash “engineers” are not exactly trained in traditional programming. This too is a good and a bad thing, as it has obviously contributed to the creative nature of the platform, but it has also contributed to it’s reputation as a sloppy, childish solution that is not ready for prime-time. I have been fighting the uphill battle of trying to get big companies to use Flash for years (and I have had some success at places like Yahoo! and LVMH), but Adobe is going to have a serious challenge selling Flash as a superior enterprise platform when compared to Silverlight. For now, I think Flash still has the upper hand, but Silverlight is gaining serious momentum.
For the record, I want to say that I love the Flash platform dearly, and I hope it’s here forever… but I will use new tools as they come out.
Peace.
Well as I said, I’m not trying to bash Silverlight or Microsoft. I’m just more curious how this will affect the content of the conference. While Metaliq may not be solely a Silverlight shop, there is an undeniable connection there. You don’t get to speak at a MIX keynote for nothing. I’m not opposed to a conference having a mix of technologies, but FlashForward has always been first and foremost about Flash. If it starts getting inundated with non-Flash stuff, in particular Silverlight stuff, it could be seen by the Flash community as a kind of subversive move – “MS backed company buys Flash conference, uses it to promote Silverlight” kind of stuff. I’m not saying that’s what’s going on. I have no clue. But I have to admit, that’s the first thing that my imagination came up with when I heard the news.