I’m going to 360|Flex. Are you?

What are you doing February 25-27th? You should definitely make the trip to Atlanta for the upcoming 360|Flex Conference. The news of what’s in store keeps getting better and it’s definitely a conference you should check out if your interested in Flex. It’s got a community feel where you can meet fellow developers and get your questions answered by some of the Flex team.

I’ve been following the updated schedule and the sessions look awesome. With free pre-conference training and everything else you just can’t beat the price of $480. I’m sure there will a few surprises, if not shenanigans as well.  I expect the keynotes to have some really, really big news too (ice cream and free puppy for each Flex 3 download?)

This is my second time attending 360|Flex and I’ll be speaking about Object Oriented Programming Principles in Flex.  It’s really going to be a 100-level, but should give even those who have been dabbling with Flex some great information. 

If you can make it, I’ll see you in Atlanta!

(Apologies to the Scale-Nine crew for the copy/paste — i liked your copy better!)

Introducing InsideRIA.com

I got this tidbit in one of my emails..   Should be a really neat project between O’Reilly and Adobe. 

What is InsideRIA?:

InsideRIA.com is an online community developed by O’Reilly and sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Our goal is to create an invaluable resource for information on the ever-changing state of design and development of rich Internet applications (RIAs).

InsideRIA brings some of the leading members of the RIA community together, where you can engage with them in an ongoing narrative about where RIA technology is headed. We hope InsideRIA will become your first-stop resource to stay on top of news, events, opinions, and learning. The site and the community will evolve over time, and you’ll see a healthy amount of tweaking (based on your feedback) in the coming months.

We’ve started with general topic areas on Design, Development, and Standards, which will feature blog posts and multimedia content. InsideRIA will also feature articles each month on a variety of RIA-centric topics. Community involvement is extremely important to the success of InsideRIA, and you and other members of the community can participate by sharing your ideas through feedback on articles, videos, tutorials and other features. We’re hoping some of you will even join us as guest bloggers.

Flex and AIR user group Pre-Release Tour visits Michigan!

Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, the Adobe Platform Evangelist team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and some brand new demos.   For the Lansing leg of the tour, we will be hosting Kevin Hoyt from the Flash Platform Team.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you’ve been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour.  Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability) and a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium at this event!

Please RSVP at http://www.theflexgroup.org/tour . Those that register will be counted for the light meal before the meeting.

Februrary 6th 2008 @ 7pm
FREE!
Campus of Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI

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Mental Note: Don’t forget your presentation on Tuesday

The non-final, yet official schedule for 360|Flex has been posted on the conference website! As it stands right now, I will be speaking at 2:30 to 3:50 on Tuesday in the Application Development Track. 

As I usually do, just to drive people to hear my babbling and ranting about colossal cheese-burgers and space monkeys flinging radioactive poo to planet earth, I will be giving away some sort of prize at the end of my session, just so people show up (or at least sit in the room and check their email).  Will be be better than the pen I gave away the last time I spoke?  It just might be!

Domain Security? Nah!

I recently ran into an issue for an RSS reader I was writing… I was trying to consume an RSS feed from a domain I had no control over, and you guessed it… no crossdomain.xml file on the server!

For those who haven’t run across the dreaded Domain Security warning, you can’t connect to a host other than the one that hosts your SWF file unless it explicitly allows you, via the crossdomain.xml file located on the root of their web server.  This poses a problem if you innocently try to consume things like web-services or RSS feeds from sites that you don’t own. 

However, there is a fix to the entire mess. http://www.nocrossdomain.com setup an ingenious redirector that will allow you to get around the security sandbox that the Flash Player has.  They host a crossdomain.xml file that allows any player’s domain to connect to it, and it will do an HTTP redirect to the file you wish to consume. 

Simple as that!!  Get your RSS without any hassle!