If you use use the 360Flex ad on the left to register for 360Flex in DC then you will automatically be registered in a drawing to get a full refund for your ticket. During the keynote on the first day of the conference I will randomly pick a name from those who registered via the ad and give that person a check for $599.

How it works
I get $50 for each person who signs up using the ad. So I only need to get 12 people to register in order to break even. So your incentive would be to use the link but not tell anyone. Because the more people who sign up the less your chances of winning. However, my hope is that I’ll make enough money to start a scholarship fund for the next 360Flex conference. I would like to be able to pay for a young person, who is just getting into the software development, to attend 360Flex. You know, someone less fortunate than ourselves. Like maybe an HTML5 developer – I kid. :)

Seriously, let everyone know about this contest and help me introduce someone to the Flex community at the 360Flex conference after DC. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll work this out – because I don’t know what my budget will be – but I’m not looking to make money with this contest. I promise I will find some way to give it back to the community. And I’ll report back here exactly what is done with all the money.

Join the list below
I would like to list the people who have registered so send me an email if you would like me to include your name below – after you register please. And yes, I will double check with John Wilker on the registrations. :)

Jeremy Saenz – the Flex Gangsta – rang me up the other day and told me that he was kicking off a new podcast and wanted me to be a member of his posse. I tend to not say “no” when a gangster makes me an offer so I graciously accepted.

You can listen to the first episode at FlexGangsta.com.

Joining me and Flex Gangsta are Nate – stalker of stars – Beck, Matt – MultitouchUp – Legrand, and Aaron – HTML5 ate my brain – Boushley.

Later on we’ll have Simeon Bateman joining us when he’s not out getting hammered with his friends.

The first podcast went for about 2 hours. The conversation meandered between subjects quit well. The conversation goes from highly technical – mostly Nates stuff – to blithering – mostly my stuff. I hope you enjoy.

After updating to Flash Builder 4.1 and Flash Player 10.1 I found that I could no longer debug with Google Chrome – my preferred debugging browser. A quick search yielded this fix buried in the comments. I’m reposing here to help more people find the solution that Anand Gaurav found.

Here is how you can install debug Flash Player on Chrome:

1. Type about:plugins in the address bar

2. Disable the Adobe Flash Player (Shockwave player) plugin.

3. Install the debug version of Flash Player manually.

In case you already installed debug Flash player, it should have been listed already in the plugins and you are ready to go.

That worked perfectly for me. You can see my  about:plugins page in Chrome below:

You can see that Shockwave Flash is listed twice but in two different locations. The one in the Windows\Sys\ folder is the one that I want to use. The other one that I disabled is the regular old Flash Player.

I use Google Chrome to debug because it loads faster than any other browser and FireFox is my primary browser and I don’t want my tab bar filled up with testing crap. You can read more about making Google Chrome your default Eclipse Debugging browser here.

There is also a caching issue that you might run into while using Chrome – or any browser – for debugging. In that case here’s a great fix to make sure that your debugging browser never runs cached SWFs.

Oftentimes while working on a Flex project I find myself needing to build something that the Flex framework doesn’t seem to support. I say, “doesn’t seem to support” because it’s not uncommon for me to discover, sometimes months later, that Flex does in fact support exactly what I needed only I couldn’t find the documentation on it. It is a very big framework. Not everything is named what you would expect or located in an obvious location.

Here is an example of a situation: In a Flex 4 app I created an ItemRenderer to use in a DataGroup. The ItemRenderer was pretty simple – see below. I wanted to keep the ItemRenderer’s height fairly short and then provide a button that the user could press that would expand the ItemRenderer so that the user see all of the text. Here are screenshots of what I’m talking about:

Closed

Open

It was simple to add the states and transitions to get the ItemRenderer to open and close. However, if a user opened an ItemRenderer and then moved their mouse outside of it the ItemRenderer would automatically switch states and close up – not what I wanted.

I dug around and around in the code trying to figure out first what was happening and then how to stop it. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Although I did learn to not set the currentState inside of an StateChange handler because it produces an infinite loop – Duh!

This is where I came to a fork in the road. My choices were: A – keep looking around and figure out how to get Flex to do what I wanted or, B – hack it.

In this situation I had a pretty good idea how I could hack a solution. If I went that route I would be done in just 10-15 minutes. On the other hand I could keep looking around in the framework for hours and not find what I was looking for and then end up coming back to my hack idea. Then again I might find a property that I could set that solved my problem in just 10 seconds.

This brings me to an interesting article I read years ago. Researchers were studying how people make decisions under pressure. They chose to study fire chiefs and how they choose to fight a fire. Obviously the pressure is on. Seconds count and wrong decisions can cost lives.

The researchers hypothesized that a fire chief would probably wait until they had come up with 2-3 suitable plans, then quickly weigh one against the other before picking one of them. But when they interviewed fire chiefs about their process they discovered that they were entirely wrong. What fire chiefs tend to do is wait until they have a plan of attack that doesn’t have any obvious pitfalls. They then go with that plan.

That’s sort of how I write code. I usually go with the first obvious solution that comes to mind. If it’s a hack then I add a short comment so I’ll remember later what it’s all about.

The biggest pitfall to this approach is that if I were to dig harder into the Flex framework more often I would learn more about it and therefor know better what is supported and what isn’t.

What about you? How would you approach a problem like this?

Fullscreen isn’t just an on/off setting. You also need to take into consideration the StageAlign and StageScaleMode. The explorer below will let you play with the various combinations that you can use.

It’s a little odd that there isn’t a CENTER state for the StageAlign. That seems to me to be the most common need – to center your app.Thanks to a comment from Arno – below – I discovered that setting StageAlign to an empty String will center the app horizontally and vertically.

StageWidth/Height != Monitor size
This drove me nuts in an application I’m working on. When going fullscreen I would try and align the app in the center of the screen but I couldn’t because the app kept reporting the stageWidth and stageHeight incorrectly. I thought for sure it was some bug in the Flash Player but it turns out that the FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication.stage.width and height does not necessarily report the size of the monitor. I reports the extent of the visual elements of your application. In my case I had some visual elements extended outside the bounds of the monitor and that was causing my problem with getting the app centered.

My solution was to save the element, a <s:Group>, as a local variable, then remove it, get the stage size – which will now be the monitor size – and then place the Group back on the stage and then center it.