Adobe AIR vs Visual Studio IDE

• Smooth transition from Flash/Actionscript 3, and ability to port older Flash projects to AIR with little to no code changes.
• Ability to integrate custom and third party native extensions (ANE files) provides access to hardware and other APIs otherwise only exposed via native java/obj-c/swift.
• Ability to code and test within a single IDE (Flash / Flash Builder / Flash Develop) makes it extremely easy to set up a project and development environment. The ability to use the Flash timeline is a huge advantage when doing animation.
• The abundance of AS3/Flash examples and tutorials online provide a vast resource compared to other hybrid solutions.

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• Ability to add plug-ins that support non-Microsoft solutions (such as PHP and Python).
• Power to organize and support even large enterprise applications.
• Well-structured. The built-in organization of VS makes it easy to keep track of complex projects.
• Intuitive. The controls in VS are easy to find and use.

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• Adobe Air applications are taxing on a user's CPU, especially considering how simple a lot of the apps are.
• Updating and installing Air based applications is very user unfriendly, often asks for updates that are aggressively pushed to the front of the user.
• As HTML 5 has gotten more and more sophisticated, for basic things a lot of times browser-based apps make a lot more sense.

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• The updates are breaking sometimes VS permissions. I have set VS to run as administrator, but sometimes after an update, I need to go to executable file and set it again.
• VS 2017 does not work well sometimes with the MVC 4 applications. It is showing (underlining) errors in code viewer where the errors do not exist. The VS team was not able to fix this.
• There is no good plugin for SASS compilation and Workbench (available only up to version 2015) does not work very well.
• VS could be faster, especially when building applications.

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• Disney Interactive ended up ultimately having to pivot drastically to switch entirely over to Unity for our tech stack due to lack of support for Air. During this transition, we lost a huge amount of good talent, and were forced to shutter many projects.
• Prior to the switch to Unity, Air allowed us to quickly port several web games to mobile after overhauling the graphics to be bitmap rather than vector based.
• Air allowed a small number of our developers to be able to transition to mobile before the elimination of all web flash positions.

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• Very flexible pricing schemas for licensing allows us to focus on solution development instead of development cost.
• The integration of tools in a single IDE is better for estimating the budget because it is not necessary to have other licenses.
• Improves the speed of the development process so the ROI can be faster.

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