In the previous article in this series you saw how the Arrow part of the CycleSelectButton was created. In this article we'll write the CycleSelectButton from scratch by extending UIComponent. Watch how similar this component's construction is to the V2 and Arrows components. Start by creating a new ActionScript class and call it CycleSelectButtonV3 .

In the previous article you saw how to create a component in ActionScript  and how that mimics a component written in MXML: MXML ActionScript Root tag class extends Metadata tag [Metadata above class definition] Child component tags override createChildren(), using new operator and addChild() function.

On August 8 (I know, I'm late with this), the Adobe Flex Developer Center has new content: Video: Developers speak about Flex Camp Attendees of Flex Camp in San Francisco talk about what they got most out of the community event. Graduating from hack to architected development – Part 1: Identifying code hacks Tom Ortega II shows you which aspects of a contact manager sample application need to be reworked for scalability and best coding practices. Flex cookbook: Loading ActionScript 2.

We're pleased to announce ColdFusion 8! Since May 2007, more than 14,000 developers have actively participated in the ColdFusion 8 public beta. Thanks to everyone who participated to make this release the best it can be. You can read more about ColdFusion 8 from the Adobe Press Room. Experience ColdFusion 8 for yourself on the Adobe ColdFusion Product Page. For Flex developers, ColdFusion 8 is compatible with Flex 2.0.

MAX 2007 isn't that far away! Have you registered? MAX is a great opportunity to meet fellow Adobe customers and to share ideas and get inspiration.

Adobe has released FrameMaker 8! FrameMaker 8 Home Page I could put here all of the marketing info and excerpts from the site, but instead, I'll tell you about my experience with FrameMaker. Back in the late 1980s I was working for a start-up company that developed molecular modeling tools and scientific publication software. To document what we were doing we used FrameMaker. At the time, FrameMaker came from a company called Frame Technologies which Adobe later acquired.

We've posted new articles on the Flex Developer web site. The articles cover topic of interest to the .NET audience, the improved designer/developer workflow in Flex Component Kit for CS3, and the human factors aspects of designing applications. An interoperability guide to using Flex and .NET data types Map objects in ActionScript to their server-side counterparts in .NET, bridging client/server domains in your Flex RIAs. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/net_interop.

... that with Adobe AIR you can easily exchange data between the desktop and AIR applications? For example, you can drag cells of a spreadsheet and drop them onto a DataGrid or drag a chart to the desktop. If you have Flex 3 Beta, check the help documentation for the flash.desktop package and read up on the ClipboardManager, the DragManager, and more. See Christophe Coenraet's blog for an example of dragging images and data from an AIR application to the desktop.

This article is an update of my previous article about a music player I built using the Apollo Alpha 1 release. Now that Apollo has become AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and the beta is available on Adobe Labs, I thought I should update the Music Player for the new AIR release. Click the above image to download and install the AIR Music Player. Note that your system may interpret the .air file as a .zip. If this happens, pick "Save As" instead of "Open", rename the file to "MusicPlayer.air".

The first public beta release of Flex™ 3 is now available on Adobe labs. This major functional release adds rich new UI capabilities, enhanced developer productivity, desktop deployment and enterprise testing and performance profiling tools. The Flex 3 public beta also marks the first major deliverable for the open source Flex project, beginning the availability of nightly builds, a public bug base and roadmap. Beta 1 is an early preview of the Flex 3 release.