I’m John C Bland II

Husband, Father, Tech Author, Deacon.
Founder ofย Katapult Media, and full-stack polyglot developer.
Political Free Agents Podcast Host.

I create. I launch.

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Flex 4 Release Party Preso Recap

Last night I spoke at the AZFPUG and AZCFUG Flex 4 Release party. I am thoroughly happy I did!

What fun it is talking about something you’re passionate about and Flex 4 is definitely something I thoroughly enjoy working in and talking about. With that said, most of what I talked about was pulled directly from Flex 4 in Action. I had my fair share of plugs for the book throughout the meeting. ๐Ÿ˜‰ Hey…it is a great book, biased or not.

Technically something always happens and, according to @nathanstrutz, I didn’t have enough dongles. ๐Ÿ˜‰ I was missing my display connector(s) but thankfully @simpulton saved the day by bringing a couple and one worked. Big props to Ron Haberle for buying one. It wasn’t the right one but the effort must be awarded some kudos.

One example failed to work. It was about rotating an image around the center and the rotate not affecting the layout. Well…I ran the same exact code today…worked! BOGUS! To demonstrate, I put the code online for all to see how it works (view source is included). For simplicity, here is the mxml for the swf:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application xmlns:fx="https://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
               xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" viewSourceURL="srcview/index.html">
  <s:layout>
    <s:VerticalLayout paddingLeft="100" paddingTop="100" />
  </s:layout>
  <fx:Declarations>
    <s:Rotate id="effect" target="{image}" angleBy="45" 
              applyChangesPostLayout="true" autoCenterTransform="true" />
  </fx:Declarations>
  <s:BitmapImage id="image" source="@Embed('images/flex.jpg')" />
  <s:Button id="mybutton" label="Click Me!" click="effect.play()" />
</s:Application>

Other than that, everything was pretty smooth and I filled up 2 hours showing off Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 goodies. What’s crazy is I had even MORE to talk about. Flex 4 is a beefy upgrade and solves so many problems. It shines a light on the fact that more online tutorials, videos, etc are needed. Ahem…maybe I’ll get some done soon. ๐Ÿ™‚

#azfpug and #azcfug, thanks for having me. Catching up with everyone was a true treat. Keep rockin’ guys and keep @simpulton out of the weight room. That dude is lookin’ buff!!! lol

UPDATE

Here are some tweets about the preso:
@lavonwoods – here
@simpulton – here
@bwohl – here and here
@nathanstrutz – here
@alanrother – here

Adobe Flex Development Primer – Recording URL

https://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p35104921/

The session ended up covering Flash Builder 4 (briefly just to explain what we were looking at), mxml vs AS differences (ie – how to do the same thing either way), a brief on custom components, event architecture, data binding, and we started to go into custom events but decided to roll with a part 2. I will update the my schedule with a date/time for part 2. It’ll most likely be next Monday at the same bat time.

Take a look at it and let me know what you want to see in part 2.

Thanks to all who attended!