After a very worth while presentation by Joey Lott last night on Test-Driven Development using AsUnit I was sold.

Up until this morning I was doing unit testing on a very minor scale. I would make these empty FLAs and write some code to test all of the methods in class I wrote. While this method worked well, the testing FLAs weren’t very organized or consistent and have certainly cluttered my folders. My problem was I was lacking a formal approach.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been developing with C# and Asp.Net since its beta version and enjoy using it as a development platform. When I started learning Flex, I was often reminded of my Dot Net developing experiences and often translated concepts in my mind to help me learn. This article runs through a very basic C# Web Form and translates the code to an ActionScript 3.0/MXML Flex application. This article assumes that you are already familiar with developing with either C#.Net or Flex 2 and wish to learn the other.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve rewritten my LiquidGUI tutorial for use on Adobe’s developer center. The new tutorial was revamped using ActionScript 3.0 and Flex Builder 2.0. The original tutorial I wrote using ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8 can still be found on my site.

Alessandro Crugnola posted another sweet Firefox extension on his
blog. The plugin installs a small icon to your browser’s status bar. Clicking the icon opens a menu where you can choose different Flash Player versions. After selecting one, your browser now acts as if it had that player installed. I tested it out with a handful of pages/player choices and it seems to work as expected. It’s a very cool plugin. Alessando also wrote the Flash Tracer extension as well.

In trying to create a read-only property for your class, you declare a private variable with a public getter. By omitting the public setter, you feel confident that you’ve just created a read-only property. However, not all variable types are created equal. In this entry I’ll examine a case where a property mistaken for being read-only is actually modified outside it’s class and how to avoid this gotcha.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the new features included with ActionScript 3.0 is the Timer class. The new Timer class is essentially an encapsulated setInterval command with an intuitive stopwatch-like interface. Creating a new Timer object requires two parameters: delay and repeat count. Once instantiated, you assign one or more listeners to the Timer which listen for events. After assigning listeners, you use the Timer object by calling it’s start(), reset() and stop() methods.

My first thought when I saw the Timer class was “Sweet, I wish this was available in AS2.” Well, it didn’t take long for me to start thinking about how I could recreate this class in AS2. A short while later I had something similiar.

Read the rest of this entry »

With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This is part three of the tutorial about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

Read the rest of this entry »

With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This is part two of the tutorial about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

Read the rest of this entry »

With user experience expectations on the rise, developers more and more are looking for ways to bring the rich experience of a desktop application to the web. This tutorial is about developing dynamic graphical user interfaces (GUI) that intelligently mold themselves to an end-user’s expectation.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just got back from Pearson VUE where I took the Certified Flash Professional 8 Exam (9A0-311). To take the test I was placed at a private workstation in an empty room after having my cell phone confiscated. The same room coincidentally, that I took the Macromedia Certified Web Developer Exam in just a few years back.

Read the rest of this entry »