Differences between Silverlight and Flash/Flex

Silverlight Flash Silverlight Limitations: Now, we got moonlight for Linux user This limitation doesn’t exist with Flash. Silverlight will (naturally) be using the WMV and Silverlight will add to the use of the WMV file format. Using the WMV video format essentially makes Silverlight useless for the vast majority of video websites such as YouTube. It cannot play .avi and .mov file. Flash Video turned Flash into a mechanism for delivering media with far more potential than any other solution that is .flv, no doubt Flash has also limitation to play other video file. For that Flash required codex for that player installed on Client machine. Now, we are able to read the data from web services (including RESTful service), XML from URL. Silverlight 2 supports Socket communication too. Even flash is also lacking this area. Flash can read data source in terms of XML or text from some URL and can use it. Same thing silverlight also can read. The standard controls are included in Silverlight 2 beta1. Flash has rich set of control library. Once the accessibility features are provided with Silverlight versions, any existing test tools that support driving UI through Accessibility will be fully enabled to automate Silverlight applications Edit: I'm not sure about this but I don't think that we can't automate the UI. I think Windows Hooking will do. Flash test tools are already in place. Silverlight 1.0 does not support GIF-file format. Even it doesn’t support BMP and other file format. It supports only JPG and PNG file format. Support all image formats. Can’t do sound processing. With some media file sound processing can possible. Silverlight 2 supports Socket communication too. Flash allows creating XML Socket object. Per pixel bitmap editing, bitmap filters (convolution, color matrix, etc), bitmap effects (drop shadow, blur, glow) cannot be done. Can do that. Webcam and Microphone support it not there. Flash supports it. Built in file upload/download support is not available. Inbuilt Upload/download support is there. The performance of Silverlight and Flash will be nearly the same. While Silverlight is using XAML as description language in a non-compressed format size of Silverlight component is large.In practical implementation of similar component in Flash and Silverlight it has found that size of Silverlight component is approximately 10-20 times larger than Flash component. Size of flash component is smaller. We got .xa