I spoke at the last 360|Flex in San Jose, but I’m already more excited for the DC conference, and here’s why.

1. I’m speaking about the most exciting part of the Flash Platform, AIR2
2. Jesse vs. Jesse ( Flash vs Flex throwdown )
3. It’s in Washington DC
4. My band The Compilers will be giving a lunch talk, as well as playing live at one of the parties
5. There is talk of Duanne Nickull’s band 22nd Century playing ( hopefully Sean ‘the flex guy’ too )
6. Doug McCune is giving the opening Keynote speech on Monday
7. I get to hang out with the Flex community

If you haven’t been to a 360 Flex conference yet I highly recommend it.  If you still need help deciding, here are a few conference questions for you.

1. Do you currently work with or have any interest in Adobe Flex?
2. Have you attended a 360 Flex conference yet?
3. Do you want to meet the community loudmouths you’re already following on Twitter?
4. Have you seen who is speaking at 360 Flex DC?
5. Have you ever heard The Compilers play live?
6. Are you still reading this blog post?

The last 360 Flex I spoke at was in San Jose and it rocked.  The city of San Jose bored me to tears, but I felt like I was living inside my twitter feed for three days.  My presentation was on the final day of 360 Flex, so I spent most of the conference preparing, and sitting in a few sessions here and there.  I spent almost half of my time in San Jose working and still met 10-15 of my twitter buddies, not to mention all the new contacts I met.  In a nutshell, if you attend a 360 Flex conference, you will meet the community.  In fact, you’d have to try pretty hard to not meet the Flex community.

If this sounds up your alley, go ahead and register to take advantage of the early adopter ticket price of $450.  I’m not sure when the ticket price will go up to $599, but I know it will so act fast.  If you make it to DC, be sure to find me and introduce yourself.  I promise it will be a good time.

Early adopter price $450	360|Flex Information ABOUT SCHEDULE SPEAKERS REGISTER

Below is a recap of our setlist, and notes about the technology we presented on. When you see mentions of a Flash movie, these are not run as standalone SWF files. They are actually played by our Flex based Compilers Live Player. This application runs on our guitarist Jun Heider’s laptop, and the entire app is controlled over MIDI, via a Behringer FCB1010 Foot Controller, MMJ, and MERAPI.

Intro Song

For the first song of our set we decided to use a funny and informative Flash movie to give the audience a hint at what they’re about to see. For the June RMAUG show, this movie was updated to include spoken thank you slides for the companies that make our technology, and special shout outs to all the people who help us put on a great show.

Watch Flash Intro Movie

I want an iPhone

Watch Flash iPhone Movie

Tweet Jam v2

James vs. Rick

The Flash Platform Rocks!

The Compilers Next Show

First here is a look at the sample MXML app I put together.

Same object bound two different ways

Click here to run this demo in a new window.

In the first grid the DataGrid gets a column per object property.

var dp_horizontal:Array = ArrayUtil.toArray( myCustomObj );
grid_1.dataProvider = dp_horizontal.valueOf();

In the second grid, I run my custom object through a helper function to create an ArrayCollection containing NAME, VALUE pairs for each object property.

/**
 * Convert a class object into an ArrayCollection to be used
 * as a DataProvider
 */
private function objectToDataProvider( obj:Object ):ArrayCollection
{
	// our DataProvider
	var dp:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection();
	// get object class info
	var info:Object = mx.utils.ObjectUtil.getClassInfo( obj );
	// split the class property list into Array
	var propsA:Array = String( info.properties ).split(',');
	// loop over class properties grabbing value and filling up dp
	for( var xx:int = 0; xx <= propsA.length-1; xx++)
	{
		dp.addItem( { name : propsA[ xx ], value : obj[ propsA[ xx ] ] } );
	}

	return dp;
}

I’m currently using this helper function to bind the result of WebORB.NET data calls to a DataGrid for testing.  This code could really be used by any type of object though.

Hope this helps somebody else.

Jun Heider and myself will be talking to the 360|Flex guys tomorrow about our session.  It’s actually going to be a back-to-back mega session comparing the latest and greatest on both the Flash Platform and the Silverlight Platform.

Come check it out and feel free to ask questions…although for the good stuff you’ll have to wait until our talks. 

Here’s the full details: http://www.360flex.com/blog/2010/02/360flex-speaker-chat-eric-fickes-and-jun-heider/

I hope to see you online tomorrow or at 360 Flex in March.

I'm speaking at 360 Flex 2010

The lesson here is since the focus remains with my RadioButtonGroup, you can continue to change the values all you want via keyboard.
In my situation, I kept receiving Alert.show()s, instead of one.

Try it for yourself.
First click on a RadioButton below, and notice that the Alert.show() keeps you from clicking on the RadioButtonGroup until you OK the prompt.

Now try the same thing again using your keyboard. If you do it enough times, the prompts will cover up the stage completely.

	[compc] Error: Java heap space
	[compc] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space	

This error was a real pain in the arse. I found a lot of people having similar issues and they all fixed this problem by setting ANT_OPTS as an environment variable to increase the memory size. This didn’t work for me. I set ANT_OPTS in my .profile, as well as in .MacOSX/environment.plist.  No luck.  I never figured out why the environment variable route didn’t work, but I was able to fix this error within Eclipse.

If you run into this error while running Ant build scripts, try the following steps.

1. Run Menu > External Tools > Open External Tools Dialog…
2. Select your Ant build file on the left
3. Click the JRE tab on the right
4. Enter “-Xmx640m” in the VM arguments field ( without quotes )
5. Click Apply, then Run

Flex JRE preferences

Hopefully this will get you going.