Adobe reveals plans for a free Flex 2 compiler and a reasonably priced IDE and yet I'm terribly worried. Why?

I was on the phone today with a good friend who is also a prolific writer and we got to talking about the latest e-learning project he's working on for a company. They're not using Flex for it because – wait for it – of the price (I bet you've never heard that one before.) So, of course, I tell him all about Flex 2 and how wonderful it is and how it's going to be priced at a much lower price point and I ask him if he's taken a look at it. His response: "No, we're looking at Sparkle."

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Sam Shrefler just announced on the OSFlash mailing list that he has released a Contact Manager sample application showing how to use Arp and Tartan together.

Arp is a pattern-based framework for the Flash Platform, written by yours truly and Tartan is a similar framework for the server-side written in Coldfusion by the OpenXCF. Their command-driven architectures and use of Value Objects makes the two frameworks a perfect fit. Tartan, furthermore, overcomes the below-par Flash Remoting support in the current release version of CF. If you want to see what I'm talking about, take a look at the base tartan.vo.ValueObject class (CFC) to see the workarounds necessary to enable the passing of custom value objects -- something we take for granted in OpenAMF, for example.

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Last week, I created a couple of YubNub commands for searching the Flex Alpha 1 LiveDocs. I must've rubbed somebody at Adobe the wrong way, because it appears that the Flex 1 Alpha LiveDocs pages were taken down and thus my poor commands are now broken :) Why? Whhhyyyy? What did they ever do to you? They were just simple little commands... they never hurt anyone...

Of course, as with anything else Alpha, things can (and do) change frequently. I'll update the commands once the LiveDocs are back up again.

Today is the last day for the early bird discount for the Hot Shots courses! Sign up today to lock in the early-bird price of £145/course :)

Update: So, how chronologically challenged can one person be? Seeing as how January has *31* days (hey... I knew that, ok!) And seeing as today is the 30th... well... *tomorrow* is the last day for the discount.

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Recently, while using Flex 2 Alpha 1, I found that I could not comment out a section of MXML that itself contained comments. As a developer, I'm used to quickly commenting out bits of code while debugging and Flex Builder even provides a handy shortcut for this: Source -> Block Comment.

Unfortunately, this feature currently has two shortcomings that make it a less-than-ideal solution.

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