We have a project on at the moment that uses Flex as a UI for .net. Very cool and Ill out line that a bit later. But what I have been spending some time with is the ItemRenderer and the Tree component. One of the major points for this customer was that a) it cant look like flex (so much so I have to build a custom right click menu and manager) and two there had to be alot of functionality built into the tree view as this was the basis for the whole project.

While the ItemRenderer is great, I cant help feel like im hacking the framework a bit when I have to override major class methods. I will post some examples next week after I have some more time under my belt with this control as there is a serious lack of these out there (and the documentation is a bit limited). Basically when you place a tree in your app, you can define an ItemRenderer for that tree. This is a class that extends the ItemRenderer interface and can override some methods where you add in your extra "stuff", say handeling the data change and changing the icon, adding custom drag details which is my major pain at the moment.

I am however loving working with the flex framework. It feels like I acheive so much so quickly. It almost takes more time to tweak the flex look out of the UI than develope the thing. Check out Scott Barnes post

Flex 2 Skinning needs more work.

for more about that.