John C. Bland II

Last night I spoke at the AZFPUG and AZCFUG Flex 4 Release party. I am thoroughly happy I did!

What fun it is talking about something you’re passionate about and Flex 4 is definitely something I thoroughly enjoy working in and talking about. With that said, most of what I talked about was pulled directly from Flex 4 in Action. I had my fair share of plugs for the book throughout the meeting. Hey…it is a great book, biased or not.

Technically something always happens and, according to @nathanstrutz, I didn’t have enough dongles. I was missing my display connector(s) but thankfully @simpulton saved the day by bringing a couple and one worked. Big props to Ron Haberle for buying one. It wasn’t the right one but the effort must be awarded some kudos.

One example failed to work. It was about rotating an image around the center and the rotate not affecting the layout. Well…I ran the same exact code today…worked! BOGUS! To demonstrate, I put the code online for all to see how it works (view source is included). For simplicity, here is the mxml for the swf:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
               xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" viewSourceURL="srcview/index.html">
  <s:layout>
    <s:VerticalLayout paddingLeft="100" paddingTop="100" />
  </s:layout>
  <fx:Declarations>
    <s:Rotate id="effect" target="{image}" angleBy="45" 
              applyChangesPostLayout="true" autoCenterTransform="true" />
  </fx:Declarations>
  <s:BitmapImage id="image" source="@Embed('images/flex.jpg')" />
  <s:Button id="mybutton" label="Click Me!" click="effect.play()" />
</s:Application>

Other than that, everything was pretty smooth and I filled up 2 hours showing off Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 goodies. What’s crazy is I had even MORE to talk about. Flex 4 is a beefy upgrade and solves so many problems. It shines a light on the fact that more online tutorials, videos, etc are needed. Ahem…maybe I’ll get some done soon.

#azfpug and #azcfug, thanks for having me. Catching up with everyone was a true treat. Keep rockin’ guys and keep @simpulton out of the weight room. That dude is lookin’ buff!!! lol

UPDATE

Here are some tweets about the preso:
@lavonwoods – here
@simpulton – here
@bwohl – here and here
@nathanstrutz – here
@alanrother – here

If you have ever used FlashDevelop (http://www.flashdevelop.org; windows only), you are familiar with the GREAT code completion it provides. FB is lacking terribly, in comparison. So…let’s vote to build it up.

https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-18507
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Yesterday I was pinged on IM by John Farrar about an issue he was having connecting Flex to ColdFusion on his new system. He’d done this many times before but hit a bump so we jumped on Adobe Connect and looked into it.

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