Marking Occurrences

Holy Crap! There’s a lot of new stuff in Flash Builder…

David Zuckerman — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:14:55 +0000

Seriously, there are so many new features and enhancements in Flash Builder, it would be impossible to mention them all. Instead, to really get a taste of what’s new in Flash Builder, you really need to watch the videos. Since I work on language features (primarily the language model), I was lucky enough to demo [...]

Flex Builder’s wikipedia entry is a little harsh

David Zuckerman — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:09:02 +0000

I was just surfing wikipedia and thought I’d see what the internets have to say about Flex Builder. Turns out, we’ve made someone very, very angry. They don’t feel like Flex Builder provides anything beyond code hinting, and provides “virtually no functionality to write ActionScript/MXML code.” Not exactly an unbiased, accurate view of reality. As an [...]

Help us decide where to go with Flex 4

David Zuckerman — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:06:56 +0000

Internally on the Flex team, we’ve been talking about how to partition the new Flex 4 features within the existing Flex 3 SDK. Flex 4 introduces new Buttons, CheckBoxes, etc that must live happily with components from Flex 3. And, Flex 4 also introduces new “language” features, like the new states syntax. As an example, [...]

Listen to me rant about ActionScript, part 3

David Zuckerman — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:05:52 +0000

So after a three week vacation, I think I’m finally ready to dive into a few other fun pieces of ActionScript. And really, what better place to start than local variable hoisting. In Java and C++, local variables are scoped per block, starting at the beginning of a function. Each set of curly braces corresponds to [...]

Flex Builder Protip: Import missing imports

David Zuckerman — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:18:03 +0000

Let’s say you’ve just pasted in a snippet of code, or loaded a file that is missing imports. When you compile, you get errors and you’re stuck importing each definition by hand. Flex Builder provides a bit of a hidden feature here to help you import your missing types: next to each type that is [...]

Flex Builder Protip: Jump to matching braces

David Zuckerman — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:06:05 +0000

A feature forever undocumented in Flex Builder is the ability to jump directly to matching braces. To use it, simply place your cursor to the left on an { or the right of an } and press Ctrl/Cmd+shift+P. For the JDT nerds out there, it’s the same key command. Enjoy!

Listen to me rant about ActionScript, part 2

David Zuckerman — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:22:17 +0000

So we all know people build some amazing things using ActionScript: it’s a flexible language that provides some syntactic sugar to make developer’s lives easier. That sugar, however, gives me, umm, toothaches, some of which I talked about already. So now, I’ll rant about some other idiosyncrasies of AS3 that make it an [...]

Listen to me rant about ActionScript, part 1

David Zuckerman — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:38:08 +0000

So I’ve been working on a new feature for Flex Builder (Gumbo), and like always I can’t really tell you what it is yet. But, I can say it’s support for a new language feature in ActionScript that rhymes with “Schmector.” Reading over the ActionScript grammar reminds me how much I dislike so many syntactic elements in the language. [...]

Quick tour of ASDoc support in Gumbo (Flex Builder 4)

David Zuckerman — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:04:24 +0000

If you were lucky enough to be at MAX this year, and even luckier to see the “Looking ahead to Flex Builder 4″ session, then you saw me demo ASDoc support in the next version of Flex Builder, code-named “Gumbo”. For everyone else, this feature is way too cool (and useful) not to know [...]

MAX 2008: Extending Flex Builder presentation

David Zuckerman — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:08:32 +0000

Here’s the presentation Mike and I gave this morning. Thanks to everyone who attended!