March is shaping up to be a busy month for speaking, and I am pretty happy about it. I have the opportunity to deliver two distinct talks on topics where I feel, let's just say, a lot of passion.

First up in the 360|Flex Conference in San Jose on March 7th-10th. Here I am delivering a talk about the Flex Framework and its relationship to the component development in the Flex 4 methodology. There will actually be quite a few Flex 4 talks (and even component talks) available at 360|Flex this year; however, I think this will come across differently. I intend on tearing apart the framework again along the lines of my Dense and Hot presentation a few years back. The intent of this presentation is less about what and more about why. I want you to know things like the order that nested components have their commitProperties called versus their measure when you leave. More importantly though, I want you to walk away knowing that it's because of priority queues and nest-levels. I want you to feel comfortable explaining it to that poor guy back at the office that couldn't make it to San Jose for the conference. That guys deserves some love to. You want to help him, right? I digress.

In either case, I hope you can make it out to 360|Flex. It is always a good event. It is chocked full of great content and I don't know that there is a better value in the Flex conference space. If you want to be extra-nice to me, you can register with this link. Apparently if enough people register that way, John Wilker is going to carry me from place to place in some type of litter. All said though, try to make it if you can. Even if I wasn't speaking, I would still be there learning from a great community willing to spread a lot of knowledge.

Right on the heels of 360 is the WorldWare conference in Santa Clara on March 16th-18th. WorldWare is a conference dedicated to those developing applications for an international market. I will be doing a pre-conference workshop on the benefits of using the Flex Framework, with all of its UI swapping, layout object goodness, to the benefit of those wishing to write an i18n application in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable expectation of maintaining it (without sleeping at the office for the rest of their lives). This year's theme at WorldWare is the ROI of Software Internationalization and I am honored to even be considered near the profound list of speakers. If your application or company is targeting the international world this is the place to be in March.

Hope to see you at one (or both )of these events,
Cheers,
Labriola

If you are in the midwest this weekend, you should really, really consider dropping by BFusion & BFlex in Bloomington, Indiana. It is a bring your own laptop event full of hands-on tracks conducted by speakers from around the globe combined with optional full-day training sessions. The schedule is packed so full of content on Flex and ColdFusion topics that your only regret will be the inability to attend twice.

Here is a smathering of sessions from the Flex track (and remember, there is also a full day of fusion content too )

• Hooking up Flex and ColdFusion. An introduction to CFAAS
• Integrating BlazeDS and ColdFusion
• New Flash Builder 4 WSDL and HTTP Connectors
• Drag and Drop Image Manager with Flex & AIR
• Practical Cairngorm for Adobe Flex Applications
• Creating Your First HTML-Based Application for Adobe AIR with Dreamweaver CS4
• Building Flex Apps with Swiz: Simple, fast, flexible, powerful.
• Spark Components for Flex 4
• Component Development using the Flex 4 Model
• Using Merapi to tap into native code in your Flex application
• Flex Component Development from Scratch
• 90 Minutes + Flixel = 1 Game
• Creating Applications for the Flash Platform
• Flex Intro for Developers
• Introduction to Flash Catalyst

I am not sure how the folks at BFlex manage to provide this for a $10 price tag, but if you are close enough to even consider going to this event, it would be a mistake to miss it.

I just finished my presentation materials for my Test-driven development session at Adobe Max, and I am pretty excited how it turned out. It is a 90-minute BYOL (Bring your own laptop) lab, which is always challenging. Each person showing up with a diverse setup and (hopefully) our files installed.

So, if you are planning to head to Max, and you are interested in TDD, try to attend. I think it will be well worth the effort.

That said, there will also be two sessions at the 360|Flex Max unconference where we will be reviewing the FlexUnit 4 framework from the inside out. The goal here is to provide initial context for those interested in becoming committers on the project. FlexUnit 4 is a highly functional testing framework, but it is also complex. Until we have the chance to document every corner, this might be your best chance to learn the ins and outs of it.

Finally, working on this session has given me the opportunity to work with the FlexUnit plugin in Flash Builder. I must say I am very pleased with how this is evolving. Nonetheless, there are a few enhancements I would still like. If you are of a like mind, read through the bugs and cast your vote.

• Auto Refresh of the flex unit compiler application when deleting a test case or (minimally) re-running the wizard
  Right now deleting a test case causes a manualy compilation error that needs resolution. I think this could be more elegant.
• Uncheck Create Constructor by default in FU4 test case
  Just a minor inconvenience. You generally don't need constructors in FU4 test cases, so you uncheck a checkbox... often
• Generate Before/After in place of setup/teardown for FU4 testcases
  Right now the wizards don't know how to generate the FU4 equivalent of setUp() and tearDown(). Not a big deal, but I think it's low-hanging fruit.
• Remember Last Selected Type when creating test cases from the wizard
  Just a minor inconvenience. You always need to re-select the radio button when using the wizard with FU4.

For those that attended my 360|Flex session on Array/DataStructure performance, here is an updated version of the code I was using to demo. A few things:

1. The timing method I am using only has millisecond resolution. So, the difference between 0 and 1 millisecond could change in subsequent calls. I would pay more attention to the difference between 1 and 100, which is what we really care about.
2. Right not the default number of items being created in each structure is set to 5000. You can change this and the insert/delete numbers by changing the constants in the main MXML file
3. Playing with the aforementioned numbers will really help you get a sense of how these things work. For instance, it is really interesting to see the difference between sorting the ArrayCollection up front or later as the array size grows.
4. There are (n) more variations of each of these.. using push() instead of direct addressing. Telling the vectors to be fixed size instead of dynamic. I kept this open enough that you should be able to add those cases and explore as you see fit, but I didn't cover every permutation in this code
5. I added some filters on the main page so that you can easily lose/add tests or datapoints to get a better view of the data
6. I didn't include the LinkedListCollection code in this package. I will get that out soon, but I want to clean it up and comment it. It is confusing to me right now and I wrote it

Okay, so, that's it. Have fun and play. In the end, this is all about finding the best tool for any particular job.

September 6th and 7th I am headed down to BFlex in Bloomington Indiana. This is a great FREE two day conference that covers ColdFusion and Flex. There is a planned beginner and advanced track with good sessions and speakers. And, disproving the no-free-lunch theory, lunch is also provided each day, but advanced registration is required and limited to 200 people. Slots are going quickly so, if you are interested, do not delay.

This event takes place Saturday and Sunday, September 6 and 7, from 8:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. at the Kelley School of Business Graduate and Executive Education Center on the IU Bloomington campus. Bloomington is one hour south of Indianapolis and within easy driving distance of Chicago, St. Louis, Columbus, Nashville and other Midwest cities.

I am back in Chicago after a red-eye from San Jose this morning where I was attending 360 Flex. It was yet another wonderful conference put on by Tom and John featuring great presentation and fantastically inquisitive attendees. For my part, I ended up doing two back to back sessions on Drag and Drop with AIR and a deep dive into Flex Data Binding.

The AIR session was originally Jeff Tapper's to do, but he selflessly agreed to hang back when a client emergency kept him working during conference hours. I did my best to fill in for him and hopefully the audience gained some tips and tricks when moving between these technologies.

The data binding session is one I have been looking forward to for quite some time. It is another of my 'Flex from the Inside Out' style presentations where I attack a narrow topic and try to bring light to the darkness. It seemed well received and the crowd seemed to very interested, which makes it worth the effort.

The slides for both of these presentations can be found at SlideShare. The download URLs for these presentations are as follows:

• Unraveling the hassle of Drag and Drop in AIR
• Diving in the Data Binding Waters

Please send any feedback you have so I can make these better for the next time around.

Thanks,
Labriola

Next month (August 18 - 20) I will be speaking and listening at 360|Flex San Jose along with a cadre of some of the best Flex speakers in the world. While this conference certainly offers a ton for beginners and those adopting Flex, 360|Flex distinguishes itself by also offering content for intermediate and advanced teams.

This is a huge deal. Flex teams and developers are growing and evolving but many of the conferences and books (including my own) only focus on beginners. So how does a developer get to the next level in Flex knowledge? That is the most common question I am asked during consulting and mentoring gigs these days. My answer: Start by registering for this 360|Flex San Jose 2008. You will absorb an amazing amount of content, meet some really great people and learn a lot for a really reasonable price.

My topic specifically is about data binding. You know, those stupid little curly brackets that make all of the magic happen. Well, we are going to reveal the magician's tricks, break it all down and learn it from the inside out. I promise you will leave the session with knowledge that will scare your peers and allow you to do horrible things that the Flex framework engineers never intended. Which is pretty much the goal of most of my sessions...

I hope I have the chance to see you there, so register and don't delay. They will sell out and then you will be sad.

I had a blast at the Michigan Flex User Group last night. Great bunch of folks with good questions and an honest desire to learn about Flex.

We spent a fair amount of time on just object oriented concepts, so I think I might put together a set of slides on those topics soon. In the meantime, here are my slides from last night.

Navigating and Extending the Flex Framework

I am also going to try to make it back to at the end of this month to speak at the <michigan:FlexCamp>, which is shaping up to be a great event. If you are even remotely close to the Lansing, Michigan area, you need to check this out. They are offering 1.5 days of beginner/intermediate Flex training for $40. There is even a networking event after day one. Seriously where could you ever get two days of training for that much?

Hope to see you all there,
Labriola

Tomorrow, July 10th, I will be presenting at the Michigan Flex User's Group (http://www.theflexgroup.org/) at Michigan State University. I will be talking about Navigating and Extending the Flex framework.

In essence, the talk is one part understanding component development and lifecycle. One part understanding the source code that comes with flex and one part everything else (that last part means whatever people want to know coupled with some fun things like how to extend components the right way, the wrong way, and what to do when you just want to give up and rebuild the framework yourself)

I have never actually managed to speak at this group before, despite only being a few hours drive east of the office. In any case, I hope to see some of you there with questions so we can have some fun and get off topic quickly (in a really good way).

Labriola

I am back from webDU and quite groggy today, but I wanted to get my slides up online for those who wanted a copy. From this point forward I am going to be posting all of my slides on slideshare. As time permits, I will also post the balance of the better presentations from the last year online there as well.

| View | Upload your own

I attend the majority of the North American Flex conferences, so I tend to meet up with the same presenters every few months. After a while, they all become friends, you have all of your geeky rants and you begin to learn how others approach problems. That is part of what makes webDU so much fun for me. It is almost entirely new crowd of people to meet, engage in harsh framework debates (sorry Robin) and learn from. I heard a lot of new ideas, saw several new approaches to solving Flex based problems and had the opportunity to have my somewhat stubborn mind changed by some creative arguments. All in all, it was a worthwhile event full of great attendees and speakers alike. Thanks to Geoff and Julie for their unending hospitality and dedication to this event.

On the plane on the way home, I started thinking about webDU as a set of bookends to the speaking engagements in the last year. It has been a pretty intense year. All of these conferences have been worthwhile and informative, but the most unusual, and frankly fun, was RIAPalooza in Chicago. This event occurred as a collaboration between Microsoft and Adobe, facilitated by a dedicated group of folks, especially our 'Key Grip' Michael Schaffner, and graciously hosted by the ITA (Illinois Technology Association).

At RIAPalooza, Josh Holmes, RIA Architect Evangelist for Microsoft, and I put on a session entitled Best and Worst Practices Building a RIA. The session used Josh's slides as talking points, from which we expounded until they kicked us off the stage. It was a great time and Josh is a bright guy. Despite coming at the same problem from two different perspectives, we seem to agree on the focus of both efforts.

| View | Upload your own

In any case, the spring speaking season is officially over. I get to spend some time at home now and catch up on all of the things that have been put on hold. See you all in August at 360 Flex San Jose.