Thanks for your comment – I agree that MS is always a player to watch out for. They do suffer (rightly or wrongly) from lack of “web2 coverage” – but I think it’s fair to say that social web applications built in .Net (for example) are few and far between. Whether this says more about the language or more about the politics remains to be seen.

What I do know, and I’m repeating myself here, is that the AIR applications I’ve seen have not only been beautiful to look at, they’ve also been data-rich and easy to install. And to answer Joe’s question – yes, I’ve started playing with AIR and as a traditional ASP’er (eek) and “understander of web technologies but not hardcore coder”, I’ve managed to build some stuff which is halfway decent. And this is important, I think – not just for me because I’m learning new stuff – but because there is likely to be more creativity and volume when technologies start to become this accessible.

I agree that AIR is a desktop framework. Another important note is that AIR is really a virtual machine (like Flash Player) that allows a developer to access desktop services (embedded database, access to the HD, on/offline connectivity, etc). These are services that are not appropriate for a browser to use due to security concerns (anyone remember ActiveX). At Lectronimo, we used AIR to build a kiosk application that was very visual and contained a database to collect info for our client. We could have done this with other tools, but they would have been much more painful to get the same result.

As for Microsoft, I don’t think you can ever ignore the 800lb gorilla. I really think Adobe has a jump on the technology, but MS has an incredible developer base that will go where they lead it.

Ignoring measures such as the ‘column inches’, I think AIR has got off the ground faster because there’s a larger creative & development base, and the design & development methods for Flash transfer much easier into highly visual desktop applications.

.Net, and the other Silverlight development tools have a smaller powerbase of those that work with the visual side of things, IMO.

I would ignore the artificial boundaries you’ve set up in the title and most of the post, and look at your last paragraph and the last bit of your comment above – the lightweight stuff *is* winning, because it’s delivering apps to users, but here I think there are too many players to draw any conclusions but it’s certain that AIR has a guaranteed set of mindshare given the existing number of customers they have across their product lines.

I’m sure there are a couple of lines to insert here about the unbelievably bad user interfaces of most AIR (and other ‘lightweight’ desktop framework) applications

From Frankies comment I agree browsers themselves will play a major part and offer some good extension points but I still think ‘one broswer to rule them all’ will never happen (as much as any of the vendors wnat it) .. so while things like XUL and Prism are great they are only available in one browser.

Moving on to Phils comments .. having used all 4 technologies (AiR, Flex, WPF, Silverlight) I can see where Mike is coming from as using AIR is a very pleasent frictionless experience compared with deploying a WPF (or Silverlight) app. With AIR (simplest example) point at a web page on your HD and its becomes a dekstop app, updating is handled exceptionally well too.

I suppsoe AIR is more directly comparible to WPF / XBAP but microsoft dont seem to be doing themselves many favours in the clarification of what should be used where.

Microsoft are working hard and with silverlight2 beta2 many of the controls in siverlight are directly comparible with their WPF equivilents so you can see a future where you can use the same XAML between either framework (up to a certain point).

Some of this also comes down to the fact that microsoft target programmers and adobe target designers, so adobes demos will always look a tonne better than any microsoft ones even if programattically they dont do anything exciting, but its what the kidz want huh ?

The bigger point is not about the tech but about the users (remember them?) and how they are beginning to interact with the tools that are being presented to them; ditto about how we as developers can begin to build functionality which is build once/run many. The fact that once again a lightweight approach is the one gaining traction on the desktop is a pertinent one, I think.