Whenever I develop in Flex, I've always used ServiceCapture. It is a commercial product that inpects all type of traffic including Flex's AMF, a binary format based loosely on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). ServiceCapture runs about $34 per seat. It allows me to see what traffic is being sent back and forth between my ColdFusion Server and Flex for debugging and QA purposes.

I was made aware today of a new player in town that integrates into FireBug for FireFox. It's currently experimental, but seems to work nicely. Check it out.

Come hear Kevin Hoyt speak about the next versions of Flex and ColdFusion (Centaur) and the new ColdFusion Builder (Bolt) on June 16th.

Kevin is a member of the Adobe Platform Evangelism team. He's worked with ColdFusion from the earliest Allaire versions.

The Nebraska ColdFusion Users Group will be giving away $50 gift cards to places such as BestBuy and Borders - my favorite part of course!

If you are new to the scene or an experienced developer, this is a must-attend event.

It's free, there's food, and there drinks.

Check out NECFUG.com for details, and please contact them to know you're coming.

It will be hosted at CF Webtools near 114th & Dodge in Omaha.

Adobe added a new resource to help everyone including designers, web developers, programmers, managers and architects learn Flex the way they need to. It's called http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/learn/. I can't wait to dive in and make use of this. From what I've seen so far, it includes real-world examples, videos, links, white papers, articles, excercises, quick starts, and documentation.

Also be sure to check out Tour De Flex. It's an AIR application that explores Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as third-party components, effects, skins, and more.

For me, the Cairngorm Flex Framework has been a bit challenging. Keeping up on different frameworks and libraries for Flex, ColdFusion, JavaScript, etc. can be a bit daunting. So every bit of help is a blessing.

Adobe has released an Eclipse Cairngorm Plugin "that augments Flex Builder to provide tooling that improves productivity when developing Cairngorm-based RIAs."

According to Adobe, "the initial focus of the Cairngorm Plugin is on the Controller. It aims to improve productivity by removing the repetitive action of creating a new Command and associated Event and adding them to the Controller."

It provides a new class wizard for the following Cairngorm artifacts:

• Controller - creates a new Controller
• Command - creates a new Event and a new Command and adds them to the Controller.

View instructions on how to install it.

Learn how to use it by viewing the documentation.

Today Adobe released Adobe Flash Player 10.

Of course the Flash player is the critical piece to be able to use the Flex project that I build. Take advantage of it by installing today.

Here's what adobe says is the top 10 features of the new release:

• New 3D effects
• New custom filters and effects
• New advanced text support - there's a new flexible text layout engine that brings print-quality publishing to the web. I'm looking forward to this as Flash has always seemed to have lacked in this area.
• New dynamic sound generation
• Enhanced drawing API
• Enhanced hardware acceleration
• New vector data type
• New dynamic streaming - flash video has been a great success, but now it's even better with video streams that automatically adjust to changing network conditions.
• New Speex audio codec
• Enhanced File upload and download APIs

Kristen Schofield wants you to take a short RIA survey, and in return she'll share CF8 tag posters.

She's wrapping up the results by Monday, the 13th.

Here's an example I created to bind a text field with a label. This needs to be done with you are dynamically creating components inside of your app instead of using MXML. Be sure to use the if statement on the unwatch function to avoid an error for null pointing.

Here's a great tool to help with Flex debugging. Put <mx:TraceTarget /> into your code and run your app in debugging mode.

You will see valuable debugging information appear in the console area. Great for hassling with remoting like ColdFusion CFC's.

Form more info: Adobe Flex 3 Language Reference TraceTarget

I have a Flex project that I copied in from another source to work on. I changed around some output properties and library paths via the Properties context menu for the project. The changes would hold while Flex was open, but it would never update the .actionScriptProperties file, thus when Eclipse was restarted, the changed would revert.

After doing a little bit of Googling on the issue and not finding much help I ended up making a backup copy of the folder, deleting the folder, and importing the files into the new folder via Flex Builder. This fixed the issue. Not sure what caused this, but it works now.

When removing items from an array via its index number, remember to always start from the end and work your way to the beginning. If you don't, and are removing more than one item, the index you where looking for will no longer be the correct item because one or more have already been removed and the indexes have been reassigned to fill the gap.

Correct Example: (I am using the Cairngorm framework in this example.)

Also remember, that "indices" is the plural form of "index".