Flex Solutions: Essential Techniques for Flex 2 and 3 Developers

Today Midnight Coders and SapphireSteel Software announce a technology partnership to provide a uniquely powerful solution to integrate the Adobe Flash Platform with Microsoft .NET. When it comes to building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for the .NET environment, developers prefer to use the Visual Studio IDE. Up until now, Visual Studio was easier for pure Microsoft environments (such as for Silverlight client to .NET services), but Silverlight doesn’t have nearly the installed base that Flash has (99% of all Internet-enabled desktops). marco casario

Yesterday SapphirSteel Software has released the final version of Amethyst, the Flex development plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. For the first time, Visual Studio users have access to a full suite of integrated development tools for the Adobe Flash Platform,” says Huw Collingbourne, Director of Technology at SapphireSteel Software, “Amethyst gives Microsoft developers the ability to design, code and debug Flash and Flex applications without being forced to use an unfamiliar IDE. marco casario

Recently I happened to have to implement a textarea to highlight the research done inside a textarea. For this I found an excellent library that was just in my case: Flex Text Highlighter Class. But if you turn wordwrap on... Liviu Stoica http://blog.comtaste.com

I've read a comment on a solution of mine published on the Adobe Cookbook (as part of O'Reilly's Flex 4 Cookbook): Adding a drop shadow to a custom chrome window I've updated the example and tested it against Flash Builder 4 and AIR 2.0 SDK. marco casario

The Flex Addon for Spring Roo aims to raise the bar for developer productivity in building Spring-based RIAs with a Flex client by meeting the following goals: Provide the fastest way to get a Spring project configured to use Spring BlazeDS Integration set up and running. Eliminate the need to manually perform repetitive tasks such as keeping ActionScript and Java domain objects in sync. Automate round-tripping code-generation of Flex artifacts with a focus on letting developers do what they do best - write code. marco casario

I've read a comment on a solution of mine published on the Adobe Cookbook (as part of O'Reilly's Flex 4 Cookbook): Adding a drop shadow to a custom chrome window I've updated the example and tested it against Flash Builder 4 and AIR 2.0 SDK. marco casario

In my last post I introduced the Alchemy Project and I explained how to install/set up the Alchemy environment on a Window machine to compile a very simple "c" file in a swc. Today I'll go deeper and talk about... Luca Galati http://www.comtaste.com

When a J2EE developer starts the design of a Google App Engine application he has to face some problems and adapts some of the well-established design patterns in web application development. Let's start with a bit of introduction to explain... Emanuele Tatti http://www.comtaste.com

In a previous post I explained how to list available operations provided by a WebService, parsing the WSDL document using some undocumented classes of the Flex 3 and 4 SDKs. This time I want to give you some suggestions about... Francesco Rapanà http://www.comtaste.com

Adobe has released an update to Flex 4 SDK as well as to the Flash Builder 4. These are the list of bug fixed in Flex SDk 4.1 by the Flex team and Flash Builder 4 Update. It has been added minor enhancements to the SDK such as the Flex mirroring and bidirectional text. You can download the Flex 4.1 SDK manually or you can use the update system of Flash Builder 4 to update the IDE and the SDK automatically marco casario

One of the most important problem in Application development is the Security of Data Transfer from\to Client to\from Server. The Flash Player environment has a lot of security rules and controls to safeguard data in the Web, but sometimes it's... Luca Florido http://www.comtaste.com

UiBinder helps developers to build GWT widgets in a few simple steps, exploiting the flexibility and maintainability of XML. This allows developer without a strong background in java to be competitive in the GWT code production. Thus we see UiBinder... Michele del Prete http://www.comtaste.com

We got two great announcements from Adobe today: Flash Player 10.1 AIR 2 Flash Player 10.1 closes its beta phase and it is finally available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux! Here are some of the new features in Flash Player 10.1 marco casario

Since Flex 2, the Adobe Flex sdk's contain a class named BindingManager, unfortunately it's not documented in the released ASDoc, but this class it's really helpful to us to manage and debug all kind of binding inside our applications. BindingManager.debugBinding:... Liviu Stoica http://blog.comtaste.com

In my last post I briefly introduced Swiz framework and uncovered part of its great potential. This post will be about Swiz's custom metadata processor, a powerful tool available with the 1.0 release. The metadata processors were available in previous... Constantin Moldovanu http://www.comtaste.com

Flex editable combobox can be really useful if you need to let the user select either one of the predefined values or a custom input. The same result can be achieved using a TextInput for custom text and a button... Francesco Rapanà http://www.comtaste.com

I've just received this email from O'Reilly. It's a great deal and I thought to share it. You can buy our latest Flex 4 Cookbook at 9.99 USD : http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805623/ It's a one Day Only offer (5/21/2010). Only $9.99. Choose any O'Reilly ebook from our list of over 2,000 titles. marco casario

Kevin Lynch has just announced the availability of a new HTML5 Pack for Dreamweaver CS5 at the Google I/O Day 1 Keynote. CTO of Adobe has also showed a CSS 3 Animator tool, how to export a SVG file from a vector graphic created with Adobe Illustrator and the roundtrip with Dreamweaver that supports HTML 5. marco casario

Kevin Lynch has just said that the Flash Player will embed the new open source VP8 coded at the Google I/O Day 1 Keynote. CTO of Adobe has also showed a CSS 3 Animator tool, how to export a SVG file from a vector graphic created with Adobe Illustrator and the roundtrip with Dreamweaver that supports HTML 5. Isn't that cool ? Can't image what he's gonna show at the MAX 2010 ! marco casario

It has been announced right now the open source video codec project WebM: The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors. WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web. WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container. For more information about WebM, see the FAQ. marco casario