Following my post the other day on reasons to use Flex for RIA development, I stumbled upon an excellent post by InfoQ regarding Top 10 Adobe Flex Misconceptions, as well as an excellent blog comment regarding why to use Flex (as opposed to certain supposed \*ahem\* competitors).

A colleague of mine recently emailed me asking if I knew of what amounts to an authorative Flex adoption whitepaper for RIA development for a client of his. My reply to him was: They can check out the Adobe Flex Product Page, but I guess one authoritative text could be this O’Reilly booklet by Effective UI, even though it is a little dated: Flex Early Evaluation: Assessing Flex and Your Project Needs, which the benefits of RIA development in Flex in a formal, documented fashion.

A few days ago I participated in an interesting discussion on Paul Ortchanian’s blog about approaches to SWF development as a way of categorizing the-dude-who-builds-SWFs, and it made me think of all those conversations I’ve had with designers, developers, project managers, recruiters and HR people looking to get a handle on this.

I saw a brilliant tongue-in-cheek quote the other day about Cairngorm: Do not try to understand Cairngorm; that’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth: There is no framework. Then you’ll see, that it is not Cairngorm that bends, it is only yourself. If you don’t get the joke, clearly you’ve never used Cairngorm (or seen The Matrix). ROTFL!!

If you’re like me and still do manual versioning of files during a project (I do for spiking or prototyping), … and a bunch of the legacy versions of the file in your open project still give you annoying warnings or errors and you don’t want them to appear in the Problems view, you don’t have to close the project or move any files. Just remove them from the Flex Applications list under [project] > Properties > Flex Applications, and Clean your project.

I’m very excited. I have just been handed the lead authorship role on the upcoming Professional Flex 3 title by Wrox/Wiley Publishing. No release date has been set, but it’s estimated to be out in the summer of 2008. We are in the process of getting together a “dream team” of experienced Flex writer/developers for this project, and I just wanted to open up the process to anyone out there who may want to help write an important Flex 3 reference title.

Actually it isn’t. But some people think it is. I’ve heard the argument a few times, mostly by developers who have a chip on their shoulder about designers, as demonstrated by this fictionalized conversation with a developer about Thermo. (I gather the names have been changed to protect the guilty ) Normally I don’t bother commenting on fictionalized arguments, it reeks a little too much of he-said she-said flamewars one sees so often.

Since early 2006 I’ve been authoring articles as a staff writer for Community MX, an online magazine and tutorial resource. It is a wonderful journey of discovery, which I came to define whist I was teaching at Humber College: that you only truly know what you know until you teach it, or in this case, write about it. In each article, in each tutorial I write, I discover something new about what I do, programming with Adobe Flash Platform technologies.

One of the questions that I get asked occasionally from other developers learning Flex is, “How do I make the code completion work with an external project?” What you may be trying to do is linking to an external folder, by way of Navigator view > [Project Folder] > right-click > New > Folder > Advanced > Link to folder in the file system > [folder path].

This past September, a good friend and trusted colleague of mine David Stiller came to me with a puzzling debug message: the dreaded Error #2044. At the time I didn’t have much to tell him, until I encountered it myself a few weeks later. Now I just had to find an answer. Unfortunately the Adobe LiveDocs runtime error listings are not particularly helpful in this regard.