For any who asked for my slides, they are included below. Thanks so much for the great feedback and being a wonderful audience. I really enjoy doing these deep-dive style talks and so long as 360|Flex keeps inviting me back and all of you keep attending, I promise to try to keep them fresh and interesting.

P.S. If you didn’t get a chance, check out my featured opening over at http://www.weheartdoug.org for Nate’s masterful prank.

Cheers,
Labriola

First up in the 360|Flex Conference in San Jose on March 7th-10th. Here I am delivering a talk about the Flex Framework and its relationship to the component development in the Flex 4 methodology. There will actually be quite a few Flex 4 talks (and even component talks) available at 360|Flex this year; however, I think this will come across differently. I intend on tearing apart the framework again along the lines of my Dense and Hot presentation a few years back. The intent of this presentation is less about what and more about why. I want you to know things like the order that nested components have their commitProperties called versus their measure when you leave. More importantly though, I want you to walk away knowing that it’s because of priority queues and nest-levels. I want you to feel comfortable explaining it to that poor guy back at the office that couldn’t make it to San Jose for the conference. That guys deserves some love to. You want to help him, right? I digress.

In either case, I hope you can make it out to 360|Flex. It is always a good event. It is chocked full of great content and I don’t know that there is a better value in the Flex conference space. If you want to be extra-nice to me, you can register with this link. Apparently if enough people register that way, John Wilker is going to carry me from place to place in some type of litter. All said though, try to make it if you can. Even if I wasn’t speaking, I would still be there learning from a great community willing to spread a lot of knowledge.

Right on the heels of 360 is the WorldWare conference in Santa Clara on March 16th-18th. WorldWare is a conference dedicated to those developing applications for an international market. I will be doing a pre-conference workshop on the benefits of using the Flex Framework, with all of its UI swapping, layout object goodness, to the benefit of those wishing to write an i18n application in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable expectation of maintaining it (without sleeping at the office for the rest of their lives). This year’s theme at WorldWare is the ROI of Software Internationalization and I am honored to even be considered near the profound list of speakers. If your application or company is targeting the international world this is the place to be in March.

Hope to see you at one (or both )of these events,
Cheers,
Labriola

So, if you are planning to head to Max, and you are interested in TDD, try to attend. I think it will be well worth the effort.

That said, there will also be two sessions at the 360|Flex Max unconference where we will be reviewing the FlexUnit 4 framework from the inside out. The goal here is to provide initial context for those interested in becoming committers on the project. FlexUnit 4 is a highly functional testing framework, but it is also complex. Until we have the chance to document every corner, this might be your best chance to learn the ins and outs of it.

Finally, working on this session has given me the opportunity to work with the FlexUnit plugin in Flash Builder. I must say I am very pleased with how this is evolving. Nonetheless, there are a few enhancements I would still like. If you are of a like mind, read through the bugs and cast your vote.

• Auto Refresh of the flex unit compiler application when deleting a test case or (minimally) re-running the wizard
  Right now deleting a test case causes a manualy compilation error that needs resolution. I think this could be more elegant.
• Uncheck Create Constructor by default in FU4 test case
  Just a minor inconvenience. You generally don’t need constructors in FU4 test cases, so you uncheck a checkbox… often
• Generate Before/After in place of setup/teardown for FU4 testcases
  Right now the wizards don’t know how to generate the FU4 equivalent of setUp() and tearDown(). Not a big deal, but I think it’s low-hanging fruit.
• Remember Last Selected Type when creating test cases from the wizard
  Just a minor inconvenience. You always need to re-select the radio button when using the wizard with FU4.

If you have tried either of these and want to discuss, or if you haven’t had the time and want to learn more first, please come and support one of the following great events where I will be presenting.

September 5th, Rimini, Italy at Flash Camp on the Beach

Testing with Flex and Flash Builder

5th – Test Driven Development with Flash Builder
5th – Creating Custom Components in Flex 4
5th – Book Signing and Meet the Authors Event

6th – Creating Custom Components in Flex 4
6th – Battle of the Flex Frameworks Panel

7th – Creating Custom Components in Flex 4- Twice

Also, in the next couple of days we will be announcing the details of a special event on the 6th and 7th in coordination with the 360|Max unconference for individuals interested in becoming contributors to the FlexUnit 4 project.

15th – From Concept to Concrete: Programming a Designer’s Vision
16th – Reanimating Dead Data with Flex

Next Generation Testing

I hope you have the opportunity to participate and engage with the Flex community at some of these community events.

Cheers,
Mike

1. The timing method I am using only has millisecond resolution. So, the difference between 0 and 1 millisecond could change in subsequent calls. I would pay more attention to the difference between 1 and 100, which is what we really care about.
2. Right not the default number of items being created in each structure is set to 5000. You can change this and the insert/delete numbers by changing the constants in the main MXML file
3. Playing with the aforementioned numbers will really help you get a sense of how these things work. For instance, it is really interesting to see the difference between sorting the ArrayCollection up front or later as the array size grows.
4. There are (n) more variations of each of these.. using push() instead of direct addressing. Telling the vectors to be fixed size instead of dynamic. I kept this open enough that you should be able to add those cases and explore as you see fit, but I didn’t cover every permutation in this code
5. I added some filters on the main page so that you can easily lose/add tests or datapoints to get a better view of the data
6. I didn’t include the LinkedListCollection code in this package. I will get that out soon, but I want to clean it up and comment it. It is confusing to me right now and I wrote it

Okay, so, that’s it. Have fun and play. In the end, this is all about finding the best tool for any particular job.

Cheers,
Labriola Download

In the next few weeks these will be released as part of a larger project, but I thought I would take the opportunity to throw these early versions online as I have found them extremely useful over the last month. In addition to the ‘normal’ stuff you would expect in introspection, these also take care of a few gotchas that you might run into if you are used to Java and now play in the AS sandbox.

First, the default describeType method of the flash.utils package doesn’t actually know how to get constructor parameters from the metadata until the class has been constructed, in some capacity, once. This is really frustrating but can be handled by doing a behind the scenes instantiation and capture. Not gorgeous, but it works and gets me the parameters I wanted.

Second, DescribeTypeCache has a few issues regarding when a description is cached. If you cache it for the first time before the first instance is built, you will forever get that version back. This means that the cached record may look different dependent upon the order you called it… so not cool.

Third, pre-flash player 10, you can’t specify that an array will contain a given type of data. Flex has a metadata tag called ArrayElementType, which MXML will respect (in some cases) but overall it is mostly useless. This library will actually look at that ArrayElementType at runtime and at least tell you what data you expected to go into the array. This is actually quite useful in a number of situations ( however, you need to ensure you instruct your project to keep the ArrayElementType metadata.

Fourth, you can fake out having a constructor.apply() at least for a limited set of arguments.

Fifth, actually, I’m not sure what’s fifth, so just grab these classes and give them a whirl if you are interested. I promise they will be documented and have some asdocs by the time they are released, but these are a start.

Also, in the next month I will be presenting at both 360|Flex Indianapolis and webDU (within a few days of each other). These are two of my favorite conferences. They both have a unique message and a great crew behind them. I hope to post more about these soon, but if you can make either of these conferences, I would love to sit down and explain the bigger picture of where these classes come from, and, hopefully, get you playing with some very interesting new code.

Cheers,
Labriola Download

The AIR session was originally Jeff Tapper’s to do, but he selflessly agreed to hang back when a client emergency kept him working during conference hours. I did my best to fill in for him and hopefully the audience gained some tips and tricks when moving between these technologies.

The data binding session is one I have been looking forward to for quite some time. It is another of my ‘Flex from the Inside Out’ style presentations where I attack a narrow topic and try to bring light to the darkness. It seemed well received and the crowd seemed to very interested, which makes it worth the effort.

The slides for both of these presentations can be found at SlideShare. The download URLs for these presentations are as follows:

• Unraveling the hassle of Drag and Drop in AIR
• Diving in the Data Binding Waters

Please send any feedback you have so I can make these better for the next time around.

Thanks,
Labriola

This is a huge deal. Flex teams and developers are growing and evolving but many of the conferences and books (including my own) only focus on beginners. So how does a developer get to the next level in Flex knowledge? That is the most common question I am asked during consulting and mentoring gigs these days. My answer: Start by registering for this 360|Flex San Jose 2008. You will absorb an amazing amount of content, meet some really great people and learn a lot for a really reasonable price.

My topic specifically is about data binding. You know, those stupid little curly brackets that make all of the magic happen. Well, we are going to reveal the magician’s tricks, break it all down and learn it from the inside out. I promise you will leave the session with knowledge that will scare your peers and allow you to do horrible things that the Flex framework engineers never intended. Which is pretty much the goal of most of my sessions…

I hope I have the chance to see you there, so register and don’t delay. They will sell out and then you will be sad.