getting and setting  scott evans :: adobe flash builder

I’m speaking at Adobe MAX next month. My talk is “Flash Builder 4 Advanced Tips and Tricks”. It should be a hoot. I think my talks are Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon. Here’s the description:

Dive in to the depths of coding features of Flash Builder 4 with Scott Evans, one of the product’s lead developers. Learn keyboard shortcuts you’ll use every day, how to keep your code beautiful, cool new debugger tricks, hidden commands, and ways to extend Flash Builder. Plus, Evans promises to leave ten minutes for the audience to yell feature requests at him!

I’ve been meaning to post most of my talk content here on the blog, but unfortunately I haven’t had time — too much heads-down coding. So come to MAX and yell at me!

If you’re doing the twitter thing, I’m at @gseadobe.

I forgot to mention, we have a beta forum, and we discuss things there. Feel free to join!

This is week-old news, but I’ve had my head down coding… Flash Builder 4 beta is out! I hope you enjoy it. This has been a tough release as we’ve worked to keep up with the changes in SDK 4, but we’ve still added a number of nice features, and we’re adding more still.

The not-quite-complete Correct Indentation feature is mine, and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a feature I can’t live without and the implementation is pretty tight. Plus, it lays the groundwork for a lot of other improvements that I’ve been plotting.

If you use the beta (or even if you don’t), please use the bugbase! Create yourself an account, log bugs or enhancement requests like crazy, vote on bugs, tell your friends to vote for bugs.

Now that the Fx component prefix is on its way out (here’s a more nuanced explanation), good code hinting gets a little trickier. Most of the common Spark components will have same-named Halo cousins that skin differently (for instance, spark.components.Button and mx.controls.Button), and simply hinting both of them is bound to cause confusion.

Here are some aspects we’ve considered while discussing this:

• New Flex developers (and really, even a lot of seasoned vets) won’t know what “Halo” and “Spark” mean. So while it’s helpful to include Spark/Halo in the hint (via the package name, one of the things that got improved in the big rename), that only helps if you understand the implication of those terms or package names.
• For most new SDK4 projects, the expectation is that Spark components will 100% supercede their Halo cousins. So hopefully, for a fresh project you won’t need mx:Button.
• The ActionScript editor should probably hint every possible class, but select Spark classes as the default when there are overlaps; for MXML, a “preferred components only” hint list is preferable.
• Hey, what should the Components panel show?

I think we have pretty good ideas that address the above list and still provide preferences for devs whose needs are different.

I’m curious though — for those of you who have been using Gumbo beta SDKs, do your expectations match the above? For new projects, how much do you expect to use Halo components that have Spark equivalents? Are you planning to port your legacy apps to include Spark namespaces and components, and if so what classes/components would you want to show up in code hints?

Hey folks, I’m alive. :)  For various reasons I’ve been away from my blog, but I’m going to try and get some more content and discussion going here shortly.

In the meantime, can you take 15 minutes to fill out this Flex user survey? We actually pay attention to the results from these things, so it’s a good way for users to help steer the product(s). Thanks!

What better way to kick off this blog than with its namesake? And some tasty minutia?

One of the first Flex Builder 4 feature specs I’m working on is Generate Getters/Setters. I considered this feature a nice, but small, enhancement. But Tim’s $100 Feature Test shows that in fact this is a feature lots of people are waiting for. Nice!

To help validate our spec, I’d like to hear how and when accessors are used in the wild:

• Do you typically create accessors when you create member variables, or later as you need them?
• Would you want to batch-create accessors for more than one variable at once, or do you usually only do it for one variable at a time?
• How do you name your variables that don’t have accessors? Do you prefix them? (i.e. m_color, m_flavor)

(The typical Java pattern is to put every member variable behind accessor methods, but that’s not appropriate in AS. Still, I have a feeling that some developers do it out of habit.)

Your feedback will help me be sure we’re getting this right. Comment away!

(Disclaimer: Like the disclaimer page says, this post — and all future posts — should not to be taken as a promise of any feature’s inclusion in any Adobe product. But you knew that, right?)