Yep I have been back working on the Fabulator but first a little on a different project that distracted me. I got the AS3 Msn client working in a c# wrapper and am woring on the GUI. The new security settings in flash are a pain in the rear but I can see they are need for the wider development comunity to accept flash as a new development platform. I have a few ideas for that joined with subersion.

So onto Flabulator.  Its my c# implementation of flash widgets. After failingto find an answer to the flash transperancy issue I pressed on and got a working alpha. The next major issue I have hit is managing the dragging of the widgets. For the alpha I just had a black border upon focus with resize handels to drag and resize, but this wasn’t ideal. In other similar applications you might notice what a couple have name the dragger. A small icon in the top corner allowing dragging of the widget. I would really like to steer away from this in the Flabulator. The problem stems from the fact that as soon as the flash ocx has focus you loose access to the mouse events in c#. So I released the alpha to a couple of people for comments and recieved some really encouraging ones, along with finding a few forum posts about people watching it with interest. I have someone helping on the project now (I will check with them if its ok to mention thier name) so things might move a bit more quickly. Im currently refactoring it to provide a satble base for further features.

I have found (especially when creating the MSN client) that moving in between AS3 and c# to be easy/seamless and the flex development to be really quick. I am really hang out for the XML Data provider classes in the next release of Flex2 as I can then serialize classes from c# into data providers for flash through the external interface. Man thats a mouth full of geek.

One handy class for you c#’ers out ther I found in the Flex builder 2 help files. Its a serializer for Flashes external interface. Under All packages >> Flash.External >> ExternalInterface and about half way down the page. It allows you to just create an instance then call String request = serializer.EncodeInvoke("testExternalAPI", arguments);
and it will build the xml structure for you.

So keep an eye out for a beta of the Flabulator, LOL and some update photos as we come to the end of Movember with my moustache really beginning to bug me, but its all in good fun.