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.

Today at webmaniacs I presented a two-hour hands-on session on advanced component development to a great group. The topic was aggressive and we made it through the balance of the content, but it just wasn't possible to make it all the way through.

So, attached to this message is the power point theory presentation, the hands-on steps and the project to create the simple ZoomStrip app. The app basically just allows you to scroll horizontally through a series of images defined in a dataprovider, zooming and centering the selected photo.

To demonstrate skinning, the caption appears in a style though-bubble tooltip.

dpUInt started as an internal project needed to test frameworks we were developing. FlexUnit was falling short for us and we couldn't build an enterprise component framework without a way to test it continually and reliably. It worked for our needs, so we documented some of it, provided some examples and put it online for the community. Now the community seems to be adopting it quickly, which is fantastic, but our to-do list of features and extensions is growing faster than we can tackle it.

So, we are looking for contributors. People who are serious about helping us take the next dpUInt release (the actual 1.0 version) to a better place with more support for automated build systems, automated test running and to realize the integrated code coverage tool completely.

If you have some spare cycles for a worthy testing framework in need of additional love, please let us know. Join the google code group and give us a hand..

Okay, so since the last time I managed to blog, I had an excellent time presenting 'Dense and Hot' in Milan Italy for 360 Flex. It was a great time with a great bunch of presenters. I am looking forward to what Tom and John manage to do with their next conference. Cheers Guys.

I presented at a few events for Adobe and BEA, Flex Camp Wall Street, the Boston Flex Incubator group and the new Chicago Flex User Group. This week I am out in San Jose for the Adobe Community Summit and learning about the amazing things Adobe has in the pipeline. All I can say, is the next year is going to be exciting.

Next week I am presenting a hands-on lesson in advanced component development and skinning at WebManiacs. Followed closely by 'Dense and Hot' at webDU in Sydney Australia.

And just to bring things back around to the beginning, I will be presenting a brand new presentation at 360 Flex San Jose in August. It's an hour and twenty minutes on the internals of data binding, which will, in my professional opinion, be absolutely awesome.

Attached to this post are all of the slides I have been promising. Next week I will post the WebManiacs slides.

To all those that made these past events great, thanks, each of these events was fantastic in its own way. I hope to see the rest of you at WebManiacs and 360 Flex.

Labriola

The last few weeks have been rough. Serious client projects, exploring unexplored territory in the Flex/FMS and Flex/Java realms, way to many hours in front of computers that seem to get slower with every key I type. The weather sucks in Chicago and simply refuses to become spring.

But a shipment from Peachpit on Wednesday helped bring me out of my manic death spiral. The Flex 3 Training from the Source Books arrived. Less than a month after the release of Flex 3, the new book (another collaboration between Tapper, Boles, Talbot and I on the authoring side. Berling and Thomas on the editing) managed to make its way to the shelves.

We started working on this book at the last FlexManiacs (now WebManiacs) conference, so almost a year ago. Books take an impossibly long time to do well, and I am hoping this one works for those that choose to buy it. There are new lessons on modularizing Flex apps, AIR basics and using the profiler as well as countless small reworks and additions throughout the remaining lessons.

Right now Tapper and I are actually working diligently on our AIR book and trying to stay in front of an 'aggressive' schedule for completion. The timing is actually really good as I leave for 360 Flex Milan in a week and this will give me plenty to do on the plane.

So, for those of you who are in, or might make it to Europe, I look forward to seeing you soon. I plan on lugging a handful of these books over the Atlantic to give away to those who ask. For those of you on the fence about going to 360 Flex, just register already. They just announced that day one is actually free for everyone, now you have no excuse. It is going to be another great Flex conference and I am anxious to see it play out.

Labriola