Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Microsoft Silverlight shall go to the ball after all

analysis
Jun 17, 20091 min

Martin admits he might have been a little harsh when he compared Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash adoptions

In response to my Test Center article, “First look: Microsoft Silverlight 3 challenges Adobe AIR,” one of Microsoft’s PR people sent me a nice note reminding me about some of the more recent Silverlight design wins, including:

[ Find out what Martin thinks of Microsoft Silverlight 3 in the InfoWorld Test Center review | Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld’s Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

These are not insignificant, by any means, but I can’t say that any of them had the impact on me of the Silverlight-based Beijing Olympics coverage. I got a lot out of the on-demand content for less-popular sports such as judo. Perhaps I was a little harsh when I said that I’ve been hearing rather less from Microsoft about Silverlight adoptions than I have from Adobe about Flash adoptions.

In fact, the Silverlight-to-Flash switch most on my mind when I wrote that story was MLB.com. If someone close to that wanted to tell me what really happened, I’d be happy to pass it on to my readers.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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