Facing new challenges everyday

Last weekend I spent few hours trying to create only the interface of a timesheet application, I made two versions, one using silverlight and other using flex. For Flex I used Flexbuilder as a tool and for Silverlight I used Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio Web Developer Express 2008.

In many aspects Flexbuilder is much more better than Silverlight Tools, one of then is your design time editor, Flexbuilder has a good design editor, you can easily create your application interface by just drag and drop components inside application container, in other hand, silverlight tools doensn’t have the same facility, you must drag and drop directly in xaml code, horrible! But, but, you can solve it easily if you buy the xaml specific editor called Expression Blend. Now you have two tools to work on one technology.

Another big issue on silverlight tools is related with the code pane and preview pane, this two panes takes half of screen each, well, there’s a way to collapse, anyway, when you type something on code pane your editor freezes for few seconds before preview pane is updated, if you don’t want it just collapse preview pane.

Both tools lacks the same feature, a kind of context sensitive menu for each component, one of these context sensitive menus could be applied on a component like Flex grid and could be used to help on merge of cells or rows on a grid.

Click here to load Silverlight version of Timesheet.

Click here to load Flex version of Timesheet.