One of my weakest areas of development is the use of regular expressions. I know generally how they work and what they are intended for, do but every time I need to write one, I struggle. Regular Expressions are use for pattern matching within strings. You define your pattern (a regular expressions), and check to see if your string matches that pattern. I've been working on a project, where I want to check if a string is equal to any values from a list.

I have been doing work with Encrypting something in ColdFusion and decrypting it in ColdFusion. I've wrote about these experiments before. I've been trying to figure out the best way to create a key. In ColdFusion I could easily use the GenerateSecretKey function. However, if I do that, how would I pass that key to Flex? It would have to be hard coded in some manner into the Flex Component that needed the encryption algorithm. What I wanted was a way to generate the key on the fly.

I'm pleased to announce that I am now on board as editor in chief of Flex Authority. Flex Authority will be a quarterly print journal aimed at teaching programmers about Flex. The first issue is being planned, and we are looking for authors. Contact me for more information. I'm sure that there will be an official press release soon from the House of Fusion folks. Since I hear that milk shake analogies are all the rage, here is my attempt at a 30OnAIR video.

Will the Adobe Open Screen Project bring the Flash player to game consoles? Will I be able to create a Flash game and deploy it via Wiiware? The open screen project removes some licensing restrictions on delivering the Flash Player and also documents a porting layer for the API, making it easier to get the Flash Player working on your device.

This is the third part of a series about dragging and dropping between lists. You can read part 1, where I spoke about properties related to dragging and dropping. In part 2, I covered events. In this one, I'm going to ditch with the theory and show you some code. There are 3 properties that need to be set to enable dragging and dropping. dragEnabled specifies whether an item can be copied from one list to another.

Lets say you want to open an MS Word file from your web page. You can just link to it using a normal HREF. Browser settings and the operating system will take care of the rest. If it's a PDF, Reader will open. Word will launch for a .doc file. Excel for an excel sheet. ( Or perhaps your browser independent equivalents ). How do you give the same functionality to an AIR Application?

Yesterday, someone posted to Apollo Coders to ask if they can find out the user's screen resolution in an AIR application. The answer is yes, you can. You can find this information out using the flash.system.Capabilities class. You need to look at the screenResolutionX and screenResolutionY properties. These are static properties on the Capabilities class, so you do not need to create an instance. The poster also asked if he could find the height and width of the current window.

Sean was having some trouble with the number of children in the dataProvider of a DataGrid. Here was his question: I'm using a DataGrid component for a list of data. I have a timer that is set to auto-rotate through the elements in the DataGrid, one at a time every 5 seconds. However, the problem I am running into is that the numChildren property of the DataGrid does not appear to return the actual number of children in the list.

Just a self indulgent reminder that the DotComIt Focus Group survey closes today. You can enter here. We'll be contacting participants for follow up early next week. To refresh, DotComIt is working on a line of commercial Flex Components, and we are having the focus groups conducted to get feedback. This will be your chance to have a say. And we'll pay you for the opportunity to pick your brain.

Coming from ColdFusion, it can take a while to get your head around the different variable modifiers in Flex and what you use them for. I thought I'd devote some time to explaining them in relation to CFCs. Here are the most common ones that you use: Public: A public variable, or method is one that can be accessed by any class using this one. In a CFC, this would be equivalent to the 'this' scope. For CFC methods, public is the default setting.