As always the best part of a conference is what happens outside the sessions. Not to disparage the speakers at all. There were some great sessions, more about that later, and some good sessions. And think this might be the first conference I’ve been to where none of the sessions I attended were bad.

John Wilker and Tom Ortega did a fabulous job. I guess the best compliment I can pay them is that I plan to be going to the next 360Flex conference that’s on the West coast.

There were lots of great sessions. If I had to pick my favorite I’d go with Doug McCune’s Building Custom Components. His message was that we need to keep an eye on existing open source projects that we can use to wrap into our projects when ever possible. His tileUI is mosly open source code that he mashed together.

I thought it was brilliant that his session itself was sort of open source. He got things started and then mediated a discussion from various members of the audience. Deepa Subramaniam from Adobe, Adam Flater from effectiveUI, David Coletta from Buzzword, and a few others that I didn’t know made significant contributions to the discussion. And on many occasions Doug himself asked questions of the audience like, “this is what I do. What do you do?”

I think a lot of presenters would be afraid of letting go of control over the session but Doug handled it well. Others should consider a similar approach.

Bugs

I think Adobe should hand out buttons or something that say, “Submit a bug.” I heard that phrase countless times. So, if you find something you think is a bug in Flex then go to bugs.adobe.com/flex/ and do a search to see if anyone else has submitted a bug on what you’ve found. If they have then vote for it. The more votes a bug gets the more likely it is to get fixed. If there isn’t already a bug report then submit one.

The most common bug you’ll find are properties/methods that are private should should be public. So if you find something in the framework that you want public submit a bug. Deepa also offered that these are the easiest bugs to fix and they do have a quota. So don’t be shy.

I personally don’t know what the problem is. I just did a search and replace across all the entire flex framework on my system and make everything public. Problem solved. Okay, I’m kidding. But that would solve the problem. :-)

Tid-bits

The good news: Flex 3 will ship as open source.

The bad news: Flex 3 won’t ship until early ’08. I think we were all hoping for a ship date around MAX07. Bummer.

AIR 1.0 will ship with Flex 3.

Flex 3 will have much better text support with kernaling, font height, etc.

Blogs to read

Here are a few blogs to read that you may not have seen before.

Alex’s Flex Closet ( http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/ )

Flexophile: fount of Flex factoids ( http://blogs.adobe.com/gosmith/ )

Deepa said that she was going to start blogging before MAX07. If she doesn’t I’m going to file a bug. :-)

Coldfusion 8 hosting

I talked to Ted Patrick about who was offering shared hosting of a Coldfusion 8 with LiveCycle setup. He said that they were working hard to get that option out in hosting community for us. I’m sure that as soon as someone has that available then someone at Adobe will make it known to the community.

Video

The video encoder that comes with Flash is good. But if you want the best results look for On2Flix or Sorenson’s encoders. They do two pass encoding which the Adobe encoder doesn’t do.

Nity-gritty

If you use setStyle in your Flex apps do it on initialization not creationComplete. That will help speed up your apps rendering time.

Debugging

It never occurred to me that those ugly exceptions warnings that pop up in Flex apps only work in the debug version of the player that we Flex developers have. That’s a relief.

In Flex 3 you will get the option in the code editor to right-click and select watch variable/property during your debugging sessions.

You can make Eclipse preview in a browser other than your default by going to: Window -> General -> Web Browser.

Nested functions are not a member of any class. So there is really no telling what this is.

Custom Components

Metadata is for code hinting purposes. They don’t actually serve any purpose in code execution.

If you have a custom event you use clone to keep those custom properties attached as the event bubbles. Otherwise the event bubbles but loses your custom property.

Have your heard of the tag [Mixin]. You should check it out at AdamFlater’s blog.

List of speakers

This is a good page to keep handy if you want to go back and find a presenter’s website/blog someday.

http://www.360conferences.com/360flex/2007/05/speaker-to-session-list.html