Well, this is came a little late but I think anticipated. Though not from Microsoft itself, but seems developers on Visual studio are also feeling it. After all the noise regarding the new front ends from all around; AJAX, SilverLight, JAVAFX etc, SWF seems to be on top. Here are two more IDEs for SWF development and that to on Flex Framework and on top of Visual Studio. Amethyst and Tofino.
Amethyst comes in 2 flavors Personal and Professional. Personal Edition is Free as well. According to its makers, SapphireSteel Software, The personal edition will be completely free and may optionally be installed into the free Visual Studio ‘shell’ edition. Amethyst Personal (beta) will be available from Amethyst site in the 2nd week of December 2008. Amethyst Professional will be released in beta in the first quarter of 2009 and the final version is expected to ship in the 2nd quarter.
Tofino is from the company named Ensemble . Its ready to be downloaded from their site and as per the company, Ensemble Tofino is available for free.
Happy Flashing 
December 15, 2008 at 12:11 am |
IMHO … fail … because of a fundamental problem.
if Adobe are really interested in tapping into, say, ASP.NET and C# developers for Flex development then they should be putting their money where their mouth is, not leaving it up to a couple of small companies to do this.
we use both EntitySpaces and Resharper as third party tools around here, but we don’t kid ourselves that either company will have the guaranteed longevity that we get from buying into the .NET platform in the first place.
these Flex offerings for VS won’t be taken seriously, I’m afraid to say. Why should they? are they released with the backing of a large company to give confidence that the versions will keep pace with both the Flex SDK (eg Flex4) and future versions of Visual Studio? Can I get that in writing?
what would have been much more serious is Adobe commissioning either company to make them an Adobe rebadged version. At least it’s on Adobe’s head to support it
then again, Adobe have completely missed golden opportunities dealing with the Microsoft space. Leaving the door wide open for Midnight Coders while Adobe concentrated on Java was just silly.
December 15, 2008 at 1:06 am |
just to really illustrate the point I’m trying to make, here’s Microsoft taking Silverlight to Java (and Flexbuilder) people in a more serious way than what Adobe are (not) doing with Amethyst and Tofino.
http://www.sdtimes.com/MICROSOFT_CO_SPONSORS_ECLIPSE_PROJECT_FOR_SILVERLIGHT/About_OPENSOURCE_and_SILVERLIGHT_and_ECLIPSE_and_MICROSOFT_and_SOYATEC/32968
sure it’s still not an official “Microsoft” project, but with the backing is the confidence that Microsoft is not leaving it up just to the community or small businesses to “go it alone” in such a strategic area.