Ouch! Right on the heals of April 15th (tax day in the U.S.) come big product releases from both Adobe and Microsoft. Long ago the term “Redmond Tax” was coined referring to the constant cost to stay current with Microsoft products but there’s an equal San Jose Adobe tax as well. If I were a [...]

I noticed a few things with respect to RadioButtonGroup with Flex 4. It inherits directly from EventDispatcher and is thus “non-visual” as stated in the docs: Notice that the RadioButtonGroup component is a subclass of EventDispatcher, not UIComponent, and implements the IMXMLObject interface. All other Flex visual components implement the IVisualElement interface. The RadioButtonGroup component [...]

Stuck for time? Go here to see how Peter Blois uses Pixel Shaders to give Silverlight Nine Scale functionality In the Flex world, there are two ways to “skin” your controls: Programmatic and graphical. The nine yard explaination can be found here but essentially, you either roll up your sleeves and write Actionscript class files [...]

After getting my extension serial number (available here) for Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta I had a run through the new wizard functionality available for connecting to Data Services. It’s available from the ‘Data” menu option and gives you the ability to connect to six different types of data sources: All you need to know [...]

News today that Flex 4 has been pushed back from “4th quarter 09″ to “early 2010″. See Rachael and Tom’s Site for details. The Agile principle of “delivering working software frequently” really can’t be applied to products of the scale and importance of the likes of Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst. You must get it [...]

Its fun to watch the two leading RIA platforms evolve. Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flex are similar in the general but different in the particular. Its easy for the zealots of one camp or the other to accuse each of “stealing” ideas from the other but I feel that similarities are just the product of [...]

I’m not blaming anybody but one of my machines got all sorts of wacky after I installed the Flash Builder Beta. It took me hours to find the fix so this post is being written only to hopefully help out the next person with the same issue and so the search bots can find it. [...]

[updated 7/12/09 to Silverlight 3 RTW] If you come to Silverlight with a Flex background, the first time you use a StackPanel you will be disappointed to find that there are no horizontalGap or verticalGap (depending on the Orientation) properties as in the Flex counterparts: VBox and HBox. In Flex these two properties are super [...]

In a recent post I wondered why MVVM, which is so popular in WPF (and now Silverlight as well), did not seem to be used in the Flex world. I searched around and came up mostly empty. When I changed my search params to look for MVP (Model-View-Presenter is the forerunner technology for MVVM) I [...]

Hey Flexers and Flashers, I want to give a heads up to a great learning event happening in Denver on June 22nd. You can read all about it and get the pertinent links from David Hassoun’s blog , or just head to the Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp site to learn more and register. The speaker [...]