in a rush

I have a pet peeve, although I’ll admit it’s one of many. The pet peeve is this. When starting a Flex application that requires authentication, I have to use tabbing or, heaven forbid, my mouse to set focus to the “user name” field on the login screen. Why!! We have been doing this for years [...]

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Creating FlashPaper documents on the fly is simple and easy once you have the right tools. The right tool is the FlashPaperConnect .dll. I found a version in Contribute. Read more to see how I used ColdFusion to generate FlashPaper documents on the fly.

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Being a developer is a tough job. We”re constantly under pressure to get some piece of code working as soon as possible. When we”re in a pinch, we often come up with some wacky workaround (aka refactor candidates).

While working on a recent Flex project I found a code sample that someone created because they were having trouble getting the useHandCursor to work.

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“When you create a SharedObject, Macromedia Flash Player creates a new directory for the application and domain, and creates an empty *.sol file that stores the SharedObject data. The default location of this file is in a subdirectory of the user’’s home directory; for example: c:/Documents and Settings/username/Application Data/Macromedia/Flash Player/web_domain/lso.mxml.swf/. While usually predictable, the location [...]

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One limitation of the Model tag is that if you supply one instance of a child tag in an <mx:Model> tag, there is no way for Flex to know if you intend it to be an array or a single property instance. You can work around this limitation by using an <mx:Object> tag instead of an <mx:Model> tag and declaring an <mx:Array> tag inside the <mx:Object> tag. As an added benefit, you can then dynamically add to the object creating an array of objects.

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Macromedia Flex is composed of two distinct pieces; a set of pre-built components known as the client-side framework, and a set of runtime services that allow Flex applications to integrate with back-end systems. The client-side framework is a series of ActionScript class that you utilize in MXML or ActionScript. Did you know that you can create your own ActionScript classes and reference them the same way?

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There are many reasons why you might want to add components to containers dynamically. The most common reasons are for performance or flexibility. Either way, having a good understanding of how it works is essential.
First a little background information about what these methods are from
The addChild and addChildAt methods come from the DisplayObjectContainer class. The [...]

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You will find this on a couple blogs, but since I”ve given presentations on ColdFusion performance since the Allaire days, I thought I should share.
My friends at webapper discovered an issue with CFSWITCH under load where the expression was a string.
In my presentations, I often encouraged the use of CFSWITCH over using if/elseif logic. [...]

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In Flex, you use a validator to ensure the values in the fields of an object meet certain criteria. You can assign each field of an object to a single validator. I”ve used the mx.validators.Validator class, which is an ActionScript class that you can extend to add your own validation logic as I have below. I also added a <mx:Model> tag to hold the error message that will be displayed if the validation fails. The model can then be populated with error messages that are maintained outside of the Flex application.

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‘issue when embedding fonts’, ‘In Macromedia Flex 1.5, there is a bit of fun to be had with htmlText in the <mx:Text> component. I was recently building an application in which I was displaying some content from a datasource when, for the strangest reason, some of the content just would not display.

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