A year or so back, I wrote a component for Jeff Tapper called the QuadDividedBox. It works as if an HDividedBox and VDividedBox had a baby. For the most part, it is just an intense modification of the DividedBox code, but you get four quadrants and can rescale the view area to give each a specific amount of screen real estate. It support liveDragging, respects things like the minHeight and minWidth of each child, supports maximizing a quadrant and even allows skinning of the drag icon.

Next Sunday, Jeff Tapper and I are going to be handling the Flex 101 at 360 Flex Atlanta. While we have worked together for quite some time, it will be the first time Jeff and I actually teach together. We have drastically different styles but immense respect for each other's knowledge, so this should be a hell of a lot of fun. So come join us and we'll pick up lunch. Then on Tuesday, I get to present 'Dense and Hot' my hour-long introduction to the first milliseconds of your Flex Application.

On Wednesday the 23rd, I filled in remotely for Kevin Hoyt during Flex Camp Omaha. While I wasn't able to meet any of you in person, I hope the remote presentation at least conveyed some of the excitement I feel about BlazeDS. You can find the slides below or download them here.

Flex Camp Chicago On Friday the 18th, I had the honor of presenting to a great group of folks at Flex Camp Chicago about component creation in the Flex world. There were some great questions both in session and afterwards and we managed to cover a lot of ground. For those interested, the slides from that presentation are available here.

Today InsideRIA, a new community effort by the good folks at O'Reilly and Adobe, began its ascension to a pillar of the RIA community. It intends to bring together blogs, articles and media from those of us working around the globe in RIA technologies. Given the talented individuals already onboard, it looks like a winner. I am excited to see how its future unfolds.

First, Flex Camp Chicago is coming up on January 18th. There are a handful of seats left so if you want to come learn some flex, eat food and geek out with us then sign up fast. Second, Adobe Evangelists will be crisscrossing the world showing off new features and demos while giving away schwag and raffling off Flex Builder 3 and CS3 versions. If you are using Flex now or plan to in the near future, don't miss these events.

Testing is a good thing. The problem is that there isn't enough of it going on in the Flex community. It is still the exception to find a client who is considering writing tests early in the process. One day while I was trying to figure out how to convince a client that they need to write tests right now, I realized I am a hypocrite. After all, the majority of my own projects, internal tools, and even components had minimal automated testing.

Do you want to work with a company that can send the Flex team into cardiac arrest? How about a company building applications that scare the Flex 3 profiler into submission? If you're smart, coherent enough to work on-site at a client, and know object-oriented programming better than anyone else -- because what's a programmer without at least a little arrogance? -- you should contact us. E-mail cover letters and resumes to slund AT digitalprimates DOT net.

The "Rough Cuts" of Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source by Jeff Tapper, our own Michael Labriola, Matt Boles, and James Talbot are online now. Click here to purchase electronic access (which allows you unlimited views and PDF downloads of each revision), pre-purchase the print book, or get access electronically now while you wait for the book to ship in February. Go quickly, before your Flex Builder 3 trial runs out.

Here is the carousel component that goes along with 'Creating New Flex Components' (RA208W), my Max 2007 presentation. This is a sample component designed to show how the major component lifecycle methods work and interact. This version makes some bad assumptions: the scale of all included items will be 100% and that items will not be added dynamically, to name a couple. If this were a production level component some additional work should be done to address these issues.