I've been spending some time at Brightcove trying to figure out ways to speed up Flex Builder for some of the larger applications we're developing here. I have a few things I'm working on myself, but I wanted to hear what others have done to improve the compile times in Flex Builder.

Brightcove has announced a major upgrade to its features, and now I can show a few screenshots of the Flex applications. Or rather I can link to some leaked screenshots on TechCrunch. It's a bit confusing if you just look at the page for the screenshots, as it includes both the old Brightcove and the new Brightcove. But once you know that, it's easy to tell which ones are new. The home page is HTML, but the rest of the new screenshots show Flex 3 applications.

I'm not a composer myself, but I've had a lot of fun playing with Joe Berkovitz's new application Noteflight. It's a pretty amazing Flex app, even if you can't write anything more complicated than Mary Has a Little Lamb. You can read more about it on Joe's blog or flex888.

Reading through the subversion commits, I've seen a number of interesting changes for Flex 4. Carol Frampton added inline support for two-way binding. Using the syntax of "@{expr}", you can now more simply support two-way binding. Paul Reilly has submitted a number of compiler performance improvements, including one which results in significant improvements in Flex Builder. Gaurav Jain added support for ASDoc comments in MXML files.

I've been playing with the Flex Builder plug-in for enterprise development, a new add-on to Flex Builder which has some very useful features for the average developer. I'll share below the good and bad of what I've seen. The good: There's a huge number of features, a lot of things that I want to use right away: Enhanced AS3, MXML and Cairngorm wizards Cairngorm Explorer Flex Code Metrics Explorer FlexUnit test and test suite generators Flex Package Explorer It's been stable for me.

I wanted to give an update on Using Flex SWCs within Flash CS3?, the post I wrote last week about using framework-less Flex 3 SWCs within Flash CS3. The coworker diving into the problem, Crystal West, has solved the issue, and you'll be able to use the SWC yourself (in time) to build advertising products for Brightcove. So what had to change in order to use the SWC in Flash Authoring? 1. In the compiler arguments, set compute-digest to false. 2.

Can you use framework-less Flex 3 SWCs within Flash CS3? I assumed that you could do this if the compatibility-version flag was used and you didn't use any of the Flex framework. I haven't been able to get this to work, however, so I'm hoping someone else has had some luck with this. I've also asked about this on flexcoders, so I'll update this post with any information I learn there. There's little information out there on this subject.