I spent the summer and fall in the Silverlight world and it became apparent to me that the designer and developer worlds are converging. With the emergence of Expression Blend 3 designers visually create  XAML using Blend’s States and Properties panels. This XAML can be VERY long and verbose but the results when applied to [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

The HTTPService makes an HTTP request to a URL, and either a fault or result event is dispatched depending on the outcome. What you cannot know ahead of time is how large is the HTTP response and while it is being retrieved, how far along are we? If you make a HTTPService request for the [...]

In Flex if you add a Box to the display list that has both its height and width properties set to 96, you will get just that: a rectangular Box 96 pixels square. In Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) you are not drawing in pixels but rather in what is dubbed “device independent units”. They are [...]

In the cold world of the Internet, cross-site scripters don’t discern between rival RIA platforms. If you are a Flash or Flex developer, you are familiar with the crossdomain.xml policy file that needs to be placed in the root of any domain that wants to allow requests from other domains. The idea being that the [...]

Recently, the need arose to take advantage of the flash player’s ability to display a “context menu” (wonder how they thought of that name?) in a Flex application. The menu is displayed by right-clicking (Windows) or Control-clicking (Macintosh). Every top-level interactive object has a context menu property. Just assign a context menu to that property [...]

If you use the Flex Skin Design Extensions & Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 to create graphical skins for use in flex you may find times when you only want to use only certain states of components that support states, not all of them. For instance you may want to use only the “over” [...]

This post is a follow up to yesterday’s post demonstrating how to use the SWFLoader class to load an external SWF at runtime and then set public properties of that external SWF. It got me to thinking about something the Flex documentation pointed up: SWFLoader docs ===> The SWFLoader control loads and displays a specified [...]

I believe a valid strategy for  independent developer would be to specialize in porting flash applications from earlier versions of actionscript to v 3.0. The shift is a big one, enough to warrant a totally new flash player 9. The business case for porting a flash application to AS3 is spelled out perfectly with this [...]