So it’s amazing how much dust gets kicked up after we ship a product. As soon as Flex Builder 3 went out the door, we immediately started working on Flex 4…new states syntax, improved components…a small project called Thermo:). And somewhere in there, we started scheming about what IDE features we could throw into the next version of Flex Builder…and it’s a *very* long list.

One of the new developers on the Builder team, Scott Evans, has just started blogging about IDE features and between the two of us, there might be a post every few weeks about the direction of the language intelligence/coding features that we’re working on for FB4. And Tim Buntel has posted a great entry about IDE maturity as well…I suggest taking a look and figuring out what to spend your $1oo on.

And what am I working on? I’ve had some time to implement a few pet features…if you look closely at the screen shot, maybe you’ll see something new…

After the lack of art on the 2.0 release, this is a great change

Buried under a few links on adobe.com are a collection of videos talking about the new features in Flex Builder 3.  If you’re looking for an overview of features, this is the best place to start looking.  Happy viewing…and be sure to watch the refactoring video

AS3 is getting there (PaperVision comes to mind, among others) and I was very happy to stumble across another AS3 library in a place I wasn’t expecting.   Turns out, that with the new release of ANTLR, it’s possible to generate parser code targeted to different languages.  And one of the languages (in addition to Java, C++, C#, etc) is ActionScript 3.  In case you’ve never seen/heard of it, ANTLR is a parser/lexer generator that now supports LL(*) parsing.  If you’re thinking of building a parser in AS3, stop what you’re doing and try out ANTLR.  You’ll thank me because, honestly, who wants to write a parser by hand these days?

Alright, back to grammars…

curves

Originally uploaded by sfdavidz

It’s been quite a year, and everyone on the Flex team is taking a much needed vacation (myself included). I’m up in Tahoe snowboarding this week, then off to much sunnier locals for the first week of the new year. Then, it’s back to work…lots of Flex Builder 4 planning to keep my busy.

Anyway, enjoy the holidays and the new year!

Anyway, there’s an interface called IOccurrence that I wrote to represent an occurrence of an identifier found in source code. It’s returned back from the core refactoring engine, and I use it everywhere. One problem: everywhere I used it, and even in the interface name itself, I wrote “occurence.” Yep…occurrence has two r’s.

In my head, here’s how the conversation with management should have gone when they assigned me refactoring many many months ago:
Management: “David, we’d like you to implement refactoring…”
Me: “Woohoo! Finally!”
Management: “Can you do it for the Moxie release?”
Me: “Not a problem.”
Management: “Alright…can you make sure to spell all your interface names correctly?”
Me: “Umm, no. I’m sorry, I just can’t do that.”

As my co-worker Mike said: “David: he’ll come through with rocket science, just don’t ask him to spell anything.”

Anyway, back to the trenches

Meet the Flex Team!

Originally uploaded by sfdavidz
Flex Builder’s manager, Heidi, surprised us all with Moxie t-shirts. Do we look as tired as we feel? The shirts are *awesome* though!

> Presentation

> Advanced Class Browser Demo

Thanks to everyone who attended, I appreciate you guys not walking out until the very end And thanks to everyone who attended MAX and talked my ear off. It’s great to hear responses from users, and it’s even better to get to you know you guys and put more faces to the names. Next year in San Francisco…

1. Building the Flex framework in Flex Builder
2. Refactoring and advanced code editing tricks using the framework as an example
3. Code Model API overview for Search APIs

I’ll also be bringing cookies, so come out and at least get fed.