I'm new to Flex, but realizing the benefits of using a framework in a team environment I decided to give Cairngorm a try for my first real Flex project. I had heard some not-so-good things about Cairngorm from a lot of developers I know and respect, but I figured I had to see for myself. At first I didn't really see much wrong with the micro-architecture. Sure there was a lot of repetitive boilerplate, but I was using a code generator so it wasn't that bad. Things were going along pretty well, that is until I got about half-way through the project and began to work on the administrative interface for this application, which happened to be a separate Flex application. Well, it turns out the administrative application could have reused a lot of the main application's views, that is if they didn't have hard coded references to the ModelLocator all over the place. Most of the script blocks in my views started out with statements like:

[More]

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how I was using implicit getters in my model for calculated properties. This works great, but if you are calculating these values based on ArrayCollections you have to do a little extra coding to make sure changes to your ArrayCollection update your calculated value bindings.

[More]

Yesterday Joe Rinehart blogged about using the ternary operator in Flex data binding. I was glad to see this post as I'm in the middle of my first Flex project and I find my self using this technique quite a bit. Here is just one example, which changes a text input's background color to red if it has a negative value.

[More]

After about two years of threatening to learn Flex I'm finally doing it. I started by completing the "Adobe Flex 2 Rich Internet Applications" DVD-ROM course from Total Training. I won this a while ago at a CFUG meeting and have been meaning to get to it ever since. I have to admit, I wasn't sure how I'd like the format given that I usually learn by reading a book on a particular topic then experimenting, but I liked the course. And I know what your thinking, "Flex 2?," but from what I can tell the basics of Flex haven't changed much from Flex 2 to Flex 3, so I found the course very helpful. I'd even recommend it to someone looking to learn the basics of Flex in a hurry.

[More]

I just got home from the on AIR Bus Tour and I have to say that Adobe has done a great job with this tour. The venue was awesome (The Franklin Institute here in Philly), the beer was cold, and the presentations were informative, at least for an AIR newbie like me. I'll admit that haven't had time to look into AIR so I wasn't really getting the hype. However, after tonight's presentations I'm pretty excited about the possibilities... Plus I won a copy of Flex Builder 2 with Charting, so I guess I have no more excuses for not learning Flex.

Last night I attended the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group meeting on Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications, presented by Arpit Mathur, Lead Software Engineer of Comcast Interactive Media. Phil Duba already did an extensive writeup on the meeting so I won't do that here. I will say I left the meeting wanting to do some Flash development!

At one point in my career I was deep into Flash and AS2 development, building a Breeze like presentation application on top of Flash Communication Server. In fact it was my work with ActionScript that really got me interested in OO development. (Robert Penner's Programming Macromedia Flash MX definitely had a big influenced on me at the time.) Hearing all the talk about AS3 got me thinking about how much fun Flash development can be. I'm hoping I get a chance to play with ActionScript again sometime in near future. Who knows, if I ever try to pick up Flex as I've been threatening to do for the past several months, it may happen.

Nice hotel, great sessions, even better people... I'm definitely going to try to make it back next year.

Since I've seen detailed post for most of the sessions I attended I won't try to do that here. I am going to list out the sessions I attended and try to pull out the key fact or impression I took away from each.

[More]