HemiGames.com – Developer Blog

I decided I wanted to dabble in Flash programming so wrote this little chat program as a learning exercise. I’ll post about my impressions of Flash later, but for now here’s the program. Feel free to give it a go…

After the previous Silverlight experiment I thought it might be interesting to try to use Flash as a client whilst accessing the same .Net web service, and it turns-out this is entirely possible using Flex.

The following Flash widget connects to the exact same web service as the Silverlight example (and so has access to the same sql server database). Although it simply checks for the availibility of user names, it could implement the same account creation process without any problems.

Like I said in the previous post, the biggest downside to using Silverlight is the relative obscurity of the plugin. Flash on the other hand is currently installed on more than 99% of Internet-enabled PCs in the mature markets and is just as capable as Silverlight for presentation and user interaction, so using a Flash front-end and .Net back end seems to be a very nice solution.