O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward.

Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge. Behold the SortableList component.

I am thrilled that there is some built-in code formatting in Flash Builder (the next, renamed version of Flex Builder) even if it is only code indenting. Especially because some of my coworkers and I disagree on correct indentation,...

Same gang, new application. In this episode Leif Wells and Zach Stepek joined me to take a closer look at the Flash Builder Beta. We discuss some of the lesser known features and its integration with Flash CS4 and Flash Catalyst.

Summary: Adobe should address developers with a marketing program that is separate from their designer marketing program, and offer products aimed at hard-core developer interests. The goal would be to leverage the influential developer community to drive sales of products...

Connecting to data with Flex 4 and Flash Builder is now easier than ever. In this post, we'll walk through a simple scenario that will connect a Flex application to a web service, and we will barely write any code.

Flash Builder 4 & Flash Catalyst are now officially available to the masses. Yes, the public beta has begun at http://labs.adobe.com/. Want to learn more about these new products? Check out our new features published today: Overview of Flex 4...

We don’t need to be jealous of Java developers anymore. The new version of FlexUnit 4 just got closer in similarity to the JUnit (http://www.junit.org/) project and supports many of the features JUnit has, and more! FlexUnit4 combines features from...

In this screencast I show how to import an FXP from Flash Catalyst into Flex Builder Gumbo. I also discuss the Flex Builder name change and show off some cool new features in the Gumbo Framework and the Builder itself.