All the sessions were recorded and now they are freely available to download. In order to get them click on the badge bellow to install Adobe Media Player and subscribe to 360Flex Channel.
3 full days of Flex talk are over. It was really great to see how everybody is trying to improve their experience with Flex. I found out about some new cool open source projects, I saw some live demos of how Flex interacts with other technologies and we even dived deep into the internals of Flex. Most importantly we (Felipe and I) got a few project ideas that would improve our development cycle (more on this later).
Since in our day to day development we use a combination of Java (JBoss Seam), Flamingo and Flex one session was of special interest to us: Lazy Loading using dpHibernate. dpHibernate works with BlazeDS and Hibernate so we’ll try to see if we can integrate dpHibernate (or parts of it) with Flamingo in order to make lazy loading available for our projects. This would be really cool because JBoss Seam does all the wiring and session handling that one needs to do if using directly Hiberbate. I was lucky enough to go see the session on DataBinding because it explained a lot of the Flex internals and it also touched on what made dpHibernate possible. I loved this session the most and I find it really useful. If you’d like to know exactly how binding works I highly recommend taking a look at Michael’s presentation.
This being said it’s time to go back to work and stop dreaming about cool projects… at least for a few days 
Oh, and thanks to Tom and John for making all this possible.
360|Flex is coming back to San Jose, CA on August 18-20, 2008. There are 3 full days of Flex sessions that should satisfy everybody’s needs from developers that are just getting started to the most advanced ones. They have a nice schedule so take a look and see what gets you excited. If you are serious about Flex you must attend this conference. The price is only $480 for all 3 days!!!
I also have a 1gb flash drive with content from 360|Flex Atlanta and Europe to give away to a commenter to this post. Just make sure that your email is correct so I can contact you. I’ll randomly select one commenter on August 10th and send him/her the flash drive. Good luck and see you there!
Did it happen to you that you removed or moved around an image or some other flex element and you could still see traces of that element in the initial position? It happened to me the other day and it took me a bit of time to find out a way of doing it. Here is what I came up with: yourDirtyFlexComponent.graphics.clear() or, depending on your application, you might want to do something like yourDirtyFlexComponent.parentApplication.graphics.clear(). Do you know another way of doing this? I would like to hear some alternatives.
Here is what a “dirty” stage might look like:
A couple weeks back I had to implement a vertical TabBar and it was one of the few times when Flex surprised me with it’s behavior. The fix was pretty simple but it took me some extra time looking at the source code trying to figure what was going on.
Here is a horizontal TabBar:
And here is a TabBar with direction="vertical":
Not so pretty, right? Wouldn’t it make sense to round the corners on the right side instead of the top? So I checked the source code for the TabSkin and there it was:
override protected function updateDisplayList(w:Number, h:Number):void
{
...
var cr:Object = { tl: cornerRadius, tr: cornerRadius, bl: 0, br: 0 };
var cr2:Object = { tl: cornerRadius2, tr: cornerRadius2, bl: 0, br: 0 };
...
}
cr and cr2 are used to draw the tabs and they are set to round up the top left and top right corners. All what needs to be done is to check if the direction is vertical and if so do the rounding on the right side:
var cr:Object = { tl: 0, tr: cornerRadius, bl: 0, br: cornerRadius };
var cr2:Object = { tl: 0, tr: cornerRadius2, bl: 0, br: cornerRadius2 };
Here is our new vertical TabBar:
Doesn’t this look more like what you’d expect to get if you set direction="vertical"?