I've Arrived At Max!

After a couple very long airport delays I have arrived in San Francisco and can't wait for the first workshops tomorrow. I have a laptop in tow and hope to blog what I can providing there is wireless available.

ActionScript Date Comparison

I was just staring a a piece of ActionScript code trying to figure out why the two date objects I was comparing were not coming up equal. I'm ashamed to say I didn't notice the problem at first because I had mistakenly typed

if(date1 = date2)

Two equals signs ("==") work a little better than one since the single operator obviously changes the value of the former operand. :) Once I fixed that, I found my real problem.

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Flex Charting: Format Your Data Tips The Same As Your Axes

In case you are wondering, "Axes" is the plural form of "Axis" and it is pronounced "Axees" with a long e as in "see". Perhaps you have never pondered that one, but it's been driving me crazy. In this post I wanted to demonstrate a little experiment I did tonight to try and not duplicate as much formatting when it came to my charting data tips. I can already think of a few problems with it, but I wanted to try anyway.

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Flex Charting: Format Your X And Y Axis

Well, once again this is a pretty basic post of information readily available on the Internet. It took me seemingly forever to piece it all together, so I am blogging it to cement it in my mind and hopefully help someone else down the road. This week I have conquered the formatting of my X and Y axis labels for my charts. As usual, the hoops are a little bulky to jump through when you just want to add a very simple bit of formatting, but the flexibility is awesome.

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Having A Hard Time Finding Flex 3 Language Reference

I feel dumb saying this, but I am having a heck of a time finding consistent information about Flex 3 classes. I am just starting in Flex and it isn't TOO hard to find an example out there that is close to what you are doing, but often times examples don't cover all the bases, and I'll need to look up a method to get its exact signature. (How many arguments, what type, etc) Generally, I'll turn to the livedocs for this, but I have been wasting a lot of time Googling and I don't think it should be this hard.

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Formatting My DataGrid Cells For Currency

If you have been programming in Flex for a while, I have nothing earth-shattering to say here. Nevertheless, having just figured it out I wish to write it down as much for my sake as anyone else. My latest task, simple as it was, involved formatting the numbers in several of my Data Grids as dollars and cents.

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Flex Has Forced Me To Think Differently About My Code

I have been enjoying my dip into Flex so far. Sometimes you don't notice habits until you have to change them. One rut I've gotten into over the years is the procedural way web-based apps have gotten be thinking about programming.

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Flex And IE Out Of Memory Error

So in the past 3 days I have been trying Flex I've had several out of memory errors that crashed my browser. I don't know if it is my operating system, my browser, Flash in general, or Flex, but it sucks. For the record I am using Windows XP Pro, IE 7, Flash 9, and Flex 3. This is what happens: As I develop, I keep hitting save in Flex Builder, waiting for it to recompile in the background, then Alt-tabbing over to IE and whacking F5 to refresh. Well, over the course of 2 or 3 hours of doing this, the memory usage for iexpolore.exe just keeps climbing and climbing as though there is a memory leak or garbage collection isn't happening.

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Flex and Inconsistent Object Initialization

Flex objects extending the UIComponent class have two events that fire during their creation process. The "initialize" event fires when the object is starting to be created, but before its children are created. "creationComplete" fires after that object and all its children have been created. There is a great post and example here. I found this out while trying to figure out an intermittent error I was getting when loading my Flex app that was related to trying to access an object prior to its creation.

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Flex Step 0.1 Alpha

Wow, I don't know if I have ever been so happy to get such a simple piece of code working. I have jumped into Flex 3 with basically no knowledge in order to make some charting functionality and I can confirm that I hate learning new stuff. I mean, I love it AFTERWARDS; but that time at the very beginning when you don't have a clue why your code won't work, Google isn't your friend, and you swear you're the first person in the world to have just received that weird error message-- yeah, that is the part that sucks.

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