I have been too busy coding to post a thorough review of the presentations that I watched but I will post it soon...

        

I'm at the airport waiting for the plane home from Flex|360 so this will be a quick post. I have been to other conferences before but this was my first time at a 360 Conference. Overall I'd say theres something for everyone no matter what level you are at in your career as a Flex Developer. This particular conference had a whole day of free online training sponsored by the folks at Lynda.com. Although I did not attend the training sessions from Lynda a few of my friends did and had nothing but great things to say about it.

Should you go to 360|Flex?......YES! Every day there were four classes going on at  the same time during the entire course of the day and they are all arranged by skill level. Not too mention everyone there is a Flex Developer so it's a great opportunity to meet wit h other developers and exchange ideas! I had a great time and learned a lot and will be posting the details in the next day or so once I catch up with my projects.

I almost forgot! Here are a couple of pictures of the ebay center which was just an awesome place to be!

        

A fellow developer that I know asked me for a list of Flex/AS3 books to get him started with Flex so I figured I'd post them here for others as well.


2 books that I like are
Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0
ActionScript 3 Design Patterns


There are also a lot of very good online resources and a lot of them are FREE! Here's a list of a few off the top of my head. I know there are many more than this so if anyone knows of any that are especially good please let me know by leaving a comment.

• The Flex Show has a great video series called 15 Minutes with Flex that is geared towards beginning Flex Developers.
• Adobe also has a series of videos that aim to teach you Flex in one week!
• Adobe's Flex 3 Developer's Guide 

Tip! - for those of you that are still parsing xml the old fashion way with all that firstChild.nextChild.yadaYadaYada you should check out e4x! The team at Adobe has really done a great job at making short work of parsing xml.
e4x makes it much easier to parse xml and thus reducing development time!

e4x is great and all but it's not the only way. My preferred method is to load the xml results into an array collection although both ways allow you to reference each xml node by it's name. Here's a sample...

var ws_resultHandler:WebServiceHandler = new WebServiceHandler(this, _WSDL, "handleResults", "ws_faultHandler");    ws_resultHandler.CallMethod("getStuff", null);      public function handleResults(event:ResultEvent):void   {        _resultArray = ArrayCollection(event.result);        var i:uint;        for (i=0; i < _resultArray.length; i++)        {             trace(_resultArray[i].itemName);             trace(_resultArray[i].itemDescription);             //etc,etc,etc        }   }

        

Since a few of you have asked...

I haven't had the time to post Flex tips as often as I had anticipated but I will get back to it soon. I have had a lot going on lately and thus have rescheduled the exam until things settle down. I'm anticipating being able to hit the books about a week after I return from 360|Flex.

On a side note I got some time to watch Jesse Warden's Being Independent & Making Money Using Flex which is a must watch for Developers that are considering becoming an Independent contractor. There is a TON of useful information covered and I am just want to thank Jesse taking time out of his busy day(s) in order to inform the Flex Community.  

        

I usually just pass the entire Event object to my event listeners however it is possible to pass an individual property to an event handler.


First you have to set up the handler something like this:

    private function handleThis(val:String):void {
        trace(val);
    }


Now since your handler is expecting a string you just pass it one like this: 

    <mx:Button id="submit" label="Submit" click="handleThis(event.currentTarget.id)"/>

In this case I'm passing the id of the button to the event handler but you can pass pretty much whatever property that Flex can access.

        

I am currently preparing myself to take The Flex Developer Exam. While making my way through tons of material and taking notes I figured it may be helpful to some (especially if your just starting out with Flex) to post things that I think may be useful. Thus I have created the Flex Tips category and will post anything I think is cool. I expect it to be updated several times a week up until I take the Exam which is scheduled for a little less than a month from now. I plan to post periodically after the exam but for now you can expect several new posts a week for the next month.

        

To be able to view the code you have to tell flex to keep it by right clicking on your Flex Project in Flex Builder and then go to Properties>Flex Compiler and add "-keep-generated-actionscript" into Additional Compiler Arguments.

        

Did you know that Flex is smart enough NOT to include imported classes that are not used in the SWF? This means you can that you can import an entire package (even if you don't use every class) without resulting in a HUGE SWF file.

        

I attended the OC Flex User Group tonight  where Iman Khabazian gave a presentation on  SCUGE.  SCUGE is an open source framework used to develop Flash/Flex games that will eventually become a game engine. It incorporates MVC and looks like a great framework for game development. I noticed that the presentation was being video taped so maybe it will be posted online in the future. Until then you can read more at www.scuge.com.

        

Where the heck have I been?

When I was assigned my first flash project and given a flash MX book to get me up to speed there was not much help to be found on the web. Sure there was a site here and there with a little actionscript but no real meat to chomp down on. I spent many hours researching the web when I would get stuck and there was absolutely no help to be found. As time passed my team increased from 1 to 4 when we were able to find and add one great developer after another. That was great because I finally had other knowledgeable developers to work with and wouldn't have to worry about that one bug and the fast approaching deadline that had seemed to always pop up.

About 3 months ago a new developer joined the company and was nice enough to introduce me to Flex Blogs by telling me about Doug McCune's flexlib, I never new that they even existed and I have found myself to be a manual web crawler as I try to cram the past year or so into my brain. I have listed a few below and will be adding more as I think of them. If there are any that you feel are valuable please feel free to post a link in the comments section.

Doug McCune - FlexLib, open source Flex components.
The Flex Show - podcasts about FLEX!
Ted on Flex - it's Ted on Flex.
David Tucker - Some great cairngorm tutorial videos.
OC Flex - Orange County's Flex User Group.