For those not watching the sessions via AMP (and you really should), here's the video we created for the latest conference. Enjoy!

I'm very glad that Jeff and John have been able to keep this podcast going strong. Episode 49 is a conversation with yours truly about Flex futures, trademarks and legal issues, etc.

In a discussion with some Adobe Community Experts it came up that we expect you to have a reasonable amount of prerequisite knowledge to use Flex. You are better off if you have some familiarity with web development already, especially in areas such as exposing data as services, OO programming, CSS syntax, XML, etc. But not everyone who decides to learn Flex has all of that experience.

One of the things we've been working on over the last few months is a series of training materials designed to get you up and running with Flex in 5 days. We have a series of videos along with exercises that go through the fundamentals of Flex, meant to be covered in a simple week. Check them out here and please give us feedback here.

So 360Flex San Jose is coming up and I will be speaking about the Open Source Flex SDK Project. My plan is to quickly show the resources that are available such as the wiki, bugbase, and source control, and then go through some of the SDK itself and talk about its underlying architecture. This is going to be useful if you'd like to get in there and make edits to the SDK itself, but may also be useful as a Flex end-user. If you have specifc things that you'd like to see covered, please let me know!

Normally you think of high-end marketing sites being done in pure AS3 and Flash, but the Bombay Sapphire experience was a combination of fantastic Flash design and great Flex architecture. The folks at Gugga did the development and Shift Global did the design. The folks at Gugga are working on putting together an article describing some of the process and key Flex elements which we'll hopefully have out in a month or two.

I saw a demo of this a few months ago, but the next beta is now out. Floorplanner is an online tool for creating, you guessed it, floor plans! Something I know I wish I had used when setting up my house a few years ago, or when helping my parents design theirs. If you go to the main site you'll see today's version, and if you want to see a ton of examples go to floorplanner.tv.

We are slowly getting more information for the next versions of Flex out on the Open Source Flex site, but sometimes it's better to get a ton of info in person. A few sessions that might be appealing for those looking ahead: * Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex: Ely Greenfield * Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex (Builder): Tim Buntel * Creating New Components in Flex 3 and Beyond Learn more about MAX and register here.

In my role as a PM I see lots of feature requests and suggestions that we should do "X" as part of Flex. Unfortunately we can't do everything, and in fact don't necessarily have the expertise in-house to do many of these features. But we do have a great community of passionate folks who sometimes do know about related technologies and are interested in making a difference.

A few months ago Paul Reilly, one of the engineers on the Flex team undertook the overwhelming task of going through the MXML compiler in detail to document its design for others who might end up working on it. I've now posted that document to the open source site, you can view it here. So now you have a starting point for all the cool compiler extensions you might want to contribute!