Burying myself in Flex
I now have the Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook and the Flex Training from the Source book. I replaced the Mac OSX Beta of Flex Builder 2 with the 30 day limited trial on my Powerbook, and I am getting down to it. I plan on building myself a nice little FlexGrocery store (thats what the tutorials have you build over the course of the lessons), over the next week or two and really get this knocked out. By then I think I should be able to tackle my first Flex commercial projects.
Since AS2 and AS3 are a bit different, I’m learning Actionscript 3.0 and FlexBuilder simultaneously, so it’s a challenge, but fun. I have already gone through the tutorials shipped with the app, so I have a little bit of an idea of what I am getting into. I have also downloaded a few of Juan’s ScaleNine Themes and reskinned those original tutorial apps (so slick!), and a few of the components I have downloaded and messed around with from FlexBox… It was a snap. I think I’m totally hooked now.
I may have to lock myself in a door far away from the Wii and my friends. I will have to take some time out soon, as my wife is due any day with our second child. Who wants to work on RIAs when there is a new baby around?
As a sidenote away from Flex, I figure I have to get myelf up to speed with AS3 now, as when Flash 9/CS3 comes out, a huge majority of people will already have the player, and the design community is going to be all over those new features everyone is buzzing about. Add to that Apollo, my web design course I am teaching and a ton of products I have going on at work and things may just be getting a little crazy with my schedule in the next few weeks.
Wish me luck.
Posted on March 10, 2007
diamondtearz Mar 10
Good luck! One you get it you never want to go back. At least I didn’t. There are so many features that you wonder how you ever survived without-and even more that I’m sure we have no idea even exist! There’s so much to look forward to in the coming year.
Chad Mar 10
diamondtearz,
Having developed a number of RIAs in Flash and some other complex CDs etc that certainly could have benefited from the Flex archictecture, I certainly see the advantages… now, it’s just a matter of wrapping my head fully around OOP, as up until now, I have mainly just been a dabbler in that. Of course the MXML syntax is a bit new, too, but I know a good amount about HTML/XHTML/XML so I think I’ll be alright with it, especially since Flex Builder 2 holds your hand so well.
Thanks for the encouragement.
Chris Mar 13
Good Luck man. Thanks for the linked in connection, byt the way. Glad to see you are keeping busy and yes, the Wii is amazing. Of course, I say that and don’t even own one yet…give everyone at IONA my best.
Cary Laska Mar 6
Hi, I came across this blog article while looking for help with fixing Microsoft Silverlight. I have recently switched browsers from Opera to Microsoft IE 6. Just recently I seem to have a problem with loading websites that use Microsoft Silverlight. Everytime I go on a page that requires Microsoft Silverlight, my browser freezes and I get a “npctrl.dll” error. I can’t seem to find out how to fix it. Any help getting Microsoft Silverlight to work is greatly appreciated! Thanks