Program With .NET - Is Blend's Cost Prohibitive to Silverlight Adoption?

Friday, March 13, 2009

Is Blend's Cost Prohibitive to Silverlight Adoption?

I was reading Shawn Wildermuth and John Papa's blog posts about all of the tools that they use for Silverlight development, and it finally pushed me to put a thought that's been rattling around in my brain into words.

Last weekend I was at the Art & Code conference at CMU in Pittsburg presenting, along with Tim Hibner, an introduction to Silverlight. Being in that environment reminded me of what it was like when I was a student and was looking at various programming languages. One of the things I was interested in doing back then was developing video games. I remember looking into Flash programming and was turned off by the cost of the development environment. To be honest, that was a while ago and I don't remember what the costs were, but I do remember the feeling that I couldn't bother with the hassle of learning the platform.

Developing video games like today's casual Flash games is a huge opportunity for an entry point to learning Silverlight. Just look at all of the Flash game sites out there. There are actually some Silverlight specific game sites getting started now like Silver Arcade and Silverlight Club. In fact, there is currently a Silverlight game development contest with a grand prize of $5000, which should definitely get people interested.

The first place people interested to start with Silverlight are pointed to is the Get Started page on the official Silverlight web site. This page starts out by linking to the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, which in turn requires you to already have Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Web Developer Express installed with Service Pack 1. Assuming the user downloads the Visual Web Developer Express, they have a joy filled hour+ of baby sitting installs. Then, the second step is to download and install the Expression Blend 2 trial, and download and install the Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 on top of that. Gah! It goes on from there.

I'm seriously wondering how many people make it that far, or have given up at this point. I think the final straw for me would have been the fact that Blend is only a 30 day trial. What do I do after that? Pay $499 for Expression Blend or $999 for Expression Studio? No way! Even as a professional developer today I wouldn't pay that. And, sure, there's DreamSpark, but that's an extra hassle, and the get started page doesn't even mention it.

I love Silverlight, but its been easy for me since I've been developing on the Microsoft platform for over 10 years and I have access to MSDN downloads. Thank goodness for the fact that Blend is available through that, or else no one would bother with it.

Microsoft has done a great job with making free versions of its tools available lately, but for all the weight they're putting behind Silverlight I don't understand why they don't, at the very least, have an Express version of Blend. I would even suggest that there should be a free version of the entire Expression Suite, although a name like Expression Suite Express is kinda silly. :-)

Friday, March 13, 2009 7:09:13 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [10] -
silverlight | tools

Friday, March 13, 2009 7:38:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Well the next version of Visual Studio will have a built in editor. But for any business who is serious about software development, $500 for Blend is a drop in the bucket. If I can pay my developer $5-8k a month I can afford the $500.

For home use though... yes the price definitely stinks.

Matt Watson

Friday, March 13, 2009 9:52:05 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Flash has a higher entry point from just getting started ($245). PhotShop/Illustrator are pretty expensive as well; add Dreamweaver if you want to do the HTML part too. With Visual Studio Express/Web Developer you get the HTML/ASPX/Silverlight integration. However, the Expression part is where it is extra. I think that is fair though, because if you want to do a simple ball and animate it you can quickly do that in VS. If you want to create a full control with states, easing and gradients well then yes you need the full studio.

If you are a professional and getting into Silverlight, you might want to buy the Expression Studio Professional MSDN subscription and you get: SQL Server, VS 2008 and Expression Blend/Design/Encoder.

Bart Czernicki

Saturday, March 14, 2009 4:09:02 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Matt,

So agreed! For *many* developers outside of the MVP loop, the issue with Blend is price. Personally, I cannot justify the expense of Blend. Instead, I'll figure out the Xaml on paper - which is climate friendly, but not a very productive. I would love to create a cubic-Bezier path by dragging the mouse! And with SL3 due out sometime soon, I'd hate to have to upgrade my copy Blend!

For Blend Evangelists, for whom I suspect will have gotten their Blend either free or at least, as a right-off business expense, I can see the reason for their enthusiasm. Blend is productive. Blend is good. Blend is cool. Blend is a fragment of their annual incomes. But for those without allowable expenses, predictable revenues or, for those in IT departments with contracting budgets and head counts, students, coders in developing nations, Flash freaks and the like, the cost price of Blend is very much the dark cloud in the silverlight lining.

*** Companies are Flash loyal ***

The realisation that Silverlight is a one-stop web application engine is still not appreciated by opinion leaders who deride SL as a 'not Flash' browser plugin. Companies will have already invested in Flash tools, they will have trained their staff in Flash tools, they will have recruited from Flash tool literate CV's and, no thanks to the global credit crunch, be sticking with Flash tools - on Mac machines. Meanwhile, the web design press, publishes hundreds of articles on Flash tools, including gaming. So is a 30-Day free trial really long enough for developers to become Silverlight loyal?

*** Blend is the wrong price ***

For what it is, I would pitch Blend at around $150 USD. This is about the same as classic FrontPage which, is what Blend should be replacing on our desktops, right? As for a 'Blend Express', I can hear the anti-trust lawyers already forming a disorderly queue!

Stay in the light.

Andy B (London)

Andy B

Saturday, March 14, 2009 6:33:57 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I totally agree this is delaying mass adoption and i mentioned this a couple of years back http://wpf-e.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2B248D261D0E0035!113.entry. There should at least be some hobbyist or student option.

slyi

Saturday, March 14, 2009 6:10:07 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

We were also just discussing this - some coding friends were saying how they were interested, but not being Microsoft developers, the cost of trying it out (for real, with VS and Blend, not any Express or trials) is prohibitive.

Coffee

Saturday, March 14, 2009 6:25:39 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I'm not a poor person or anything, but I still can't justify paying the price they've set on Expression Blend. I'm not sure how much trouble the tool would really save me, and I can't tell without first paying, which I'm not going to do. Microsoft offers a 30-day trial, but I went and started my trial period way back when I was first learning XAML and Silverlight programming. So, my 30 days went by before I really got more than a chance just to fire it up once or twice.

Everything you see on my my website (www.dclarklab.com) is done with just Visual Studio, XAML, and C# codebehind. Admittedly, the stuff there isn't particularly artsy-fartsy stuff, so-to-speak, and no doubt comes off as being very programmer-esque. But I was able to do it all without Expression Blend. As it turns out, a great many of the animations I use there are so programmatically-driven that I'm not really sure how easily it would be to have used Blend on them anyway.

On the "experiments" page of my site however, you can see where I started trying out some comic-style animations, and that's been slow work because I was really getting into some detailed keyframing and drawing smoothly-joined beziers. Would Expression Blend have helped there? Maybe. But I'm crippled by knowing math. Yeah, knowing a bit of math allows me to do work out programmed solutions to things that are probably better left to GUI tools like Expression Blend... but I've already paid for the math education.

However--the price of (and therefore my lack of) Expression Blend is definitely not changing my choice of what I use for my RIA technology--it's going to be Silverlight and I don't plan to learn Flash. I have a substantial career in professional game development and I know there's a huge effort in the programming logic underneath the art in most any game. For that, I just plain like the power and ease of C# and the .NET libraries.

--D.Clark

dclark@dclarklab.com

www.dclarklab.com

D.Clark

Monday, March 16, 2009 2:29:29 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I can follow what you are all saying...
...however, there are some other points to be made. Andy, rightfully said that companies are flash loyal. He also stated that they work on Mac's, which makes sence. To be able to use Blend, they would have to migrate to Windows, which, imo is probably a much bigger issue then the $500 for Blend. Buying a decent PC and Windows and rebuilding a complete network infrastructure, including fileserver, versionmanagement, etc. is much more costly.

Also Microsoft tends to have, at least here in the Netherlands, a strategy where they encourage students to use their tools, by providing (very) cheap editions of their software trough schools. A tool like Blend probably goes out for about 50 euro (about $70).

Another change in Microsoft strategy is not to get everyone on their tools right now, but to expand business from existing customers, which is why they needed SL2 in the first place.

So would lowering the Blend price help SL2 adoption? Off course it would! But would it also help Microsofts business model? I doubt it.

Greets,
Jonathan

Jonathan van de Veen

Monday, March 23, 2009 8:04:56 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I didn't give Microsoft's Dream Spark and Biz Spark programs enough mention.

DreamSpark - http://www.dreamspark.com - lets college and high school students use Microsoft software for free.
BizSpark - http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark - lets start up businesses use Microsoft software for free in their first 3 years, with limitations.

With these programs, its a lot easier for people to get Blend for free, but the freelance developer or guy wanting to just play with it is stuck using the trial.

With that said, there's also a beta version of Expression Blend 3 available for download now, which has a much wider trial window.

Matt Casto

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