Yesterday I gave a session at Flash on the Beach 2008 in Brighton, England on Flex 4 and Thermo. Overall, it went really well and generated some positive mentions, such as this one from the Yahoo Developer Network Blog and this from David Arno. David’s review was really enthusiastic and he concludes by saying “All in all, the session was amazing. To say I’m now excited by Flex 4 is probably the understatement of the year.� What made this so satisfying to me is that he is a hardcore C#/.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but it’s not because I haven’t had anything new to write about. We’ve been working hard on Thermo and I had the pleasure of showing off a recent build at Flashbelt in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. One of the challenges I’ve had with blogging is that many of my projects can’t be talked about while they’re under development. Fortunately, these things don’t stay hidden forever!

I, along with other members of the Thermo team went on a customer visit in downtown San Francisco yesterday to get feedback on new features. After each of these meetings we get together at a coffee shop to debrief and record what we learned. Immediately after we came out of "Massimo", where I had a nice Cappuccino, Steve Heintz and I ran into Robert Scoble, who did a quick video interview with me about Thermo. We also talked a little about Silverlight, competition with Microsoft and a few other things.

Well, the cat is out of the bag, so to speak... People are blogging about Thermo and Ted Patrick just posted a note about it being in the keynote at MAX. This is all according to plan. Or almost... I haven't been blogging at all for the past few months and the reason is that I've been hard at work leading the team building Thermo. I am REALLY excited about it!

The first public beta release of Flex 3, AIR, and Flash Player 9 update 3 is now available on Adobe labs. This provides an early look at what will be a very important release. I'm sure there will be lots of coverage about this, but here are some of the things that I think are really important. You can get more info and the software itself at the following URLs: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/ http://labs.adobe.

Today Adobe has announced that it will be open sourcing Flex by making the source code for the Flex SDK available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes everything needed to build Flex applications, including the source to the ActionScript libraries in the SDK, the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, and the ActionScript debugger.

Charles Arthur wrote a great piece on Flash, Flex and Apollo in today's tech section of The Guardian, based on an interview I did with him when I visited the UK a little while ago. Overall, I was really happy with the contents and tone of the story. He really hit on the key points I was trying to get across about how Flash has evolved, how we are moving it forward with Flex and Apollo, and how it is enabling people to do new things on the web.

...or like ColdFusion, PHP, JSP, etc. Tonight, one hour from now, at 7:00 PM PST we're releasing a new web tier compiler on Adobe labs. This allows you to simply copy the Flex files into a directory visible to your server and your app will be compiled automatically when you request the main application file using your web browser. The resulting model feels very similar to working with ASP.NET. Who would be interested in this?

I gave the keynote at Flex 360 this morning and overall it went well. I showed a number of cool examples, including some that hadn't been seen before, that I think help illustrate what makes Flex magical. The first example I showed was something I wrote, which is a partial implementation of SVG as a set of Flex components. The way it works is different from actual SVG implementations, in that there is no interpretation of XML.