Hello readers. This week I had part 2 of my first real holiday in 2 years. Yes thats right, Flex development has been that good to me lately. And while I subscribe to the “Make hay while the sun shines” theory, it eventually got a bit much. Part 1 of my holiday was a trip to OZ (Australia) which was great, but part 2 was a week at home working on my mustang.

“Why spend your time off doing dusty dirty work” – you ask? Well Its a nice way to get your brain working on something other than computer based problems, and a beer never tasted better after a days of primer sanding inhalation .

First up, what I started with many years ago:

Then where I am at now:

Getting close to final paint. Cant wait

Congratulations Thom Theriault. Scrat picked you as the winner. I will be emailing you soon.

Scrat the chinchilla is highly partial to sticky notes so you can see how I did the draw below:

Nom nom nom….

So to all the entrants (See this post) sorry I couldn’t give you all a book, but I do think it is a great buy and please consider checking out the Amazon page

And from Scrat, Little Miss and I again congratulations Thom Theriault!

Professional Flex 3

Authors from left to right: Joseph Balderson , Andrew Trice, Jun Heider, David Hassoun, Todd Prekaski, Joe Berkovitz, Tom Sugden, [Peter Ent not present], plus five tech editors: Matthew Fabb, Charles Bihis, Campbell Anderson (meeee , Greg Jastrab and Douglas Knudsen

Im some of my little free time over the last year I helped out technical editing on the book above. Professional Flex 3. I have read many flex books in my career, some good in some areas some in others. This book has it all. If you click the image above you can visit the Amazon page and read the first review by Alan. It sums this book up really well.

“Generally, something that does many things well, doesn’t do any one thing great….
This book does many things great.

How did the publisher do this? Well, by making the book 1300 pages and having 8 authors. I think of this book not as ‘one big book’ but more as a few smaller ones put together. ”

I like to think I know the flex framework pretty well, having worked with it solid the last few years, but even this book had points I hadn’t bothered to explore. So to all involved, well done!

And to make things even better I have a free copy to give away. I can send pretty much anywhere in the world, but some places might take a while to see the book delivered from NZ (hate to think of the miles this book will have done in the end).

So to win:

If you win you must write a review, either on you blog or Amazon. Good bad or indifferent I don’t mind.

Leave a comment below (obviously providing your email in the form), and I will get my chinchilla to draw the winner. The winner will be announced next week Friday NZT

And if you dont win, I would still seriously consider buying a copy. I dont get paid for it, so Im not doing a sales job on you. I just think that if your at this blog, you must have some interest in flex

UPDATE: Congratulations Thom Theriault  He was drawn as the winner here.

That’s right kiddies. With the lack of updates to this site, you may expect I have been hard at work, earning money to pay off my new House You would be right. But as WebDU draws closer I am emerging from my cave (read:office) to migrate to the relative warmth of Sydney for the fun and excitement that only WebDU can bring.

If you see me (see photos on the about page, and add stress wrinkles) wandering around in a cafine induced stupor, please come say hi to me. And if your around for the code wars event on wednesday night, come cheer for the WANZAC team, and if we win its Kai’s shout at the bar.

Also note to the right hand side of this post my awsome new avitar (I have been waiting for soooo long for one of these), created by the great people at Nectarine. They do the great animated intros to the conference and I cant wait to see what they have in store for us this year.

A few days ago a new remoting debugger hit the market. The Midnight Coders, more famous for WebOrb released AppPuncher. Now I don’t normally do product reviews but this is one handy tool, so I thought I would share.

AppPuncher Interface

Working with Flash/Flex remoting can be a difficult process, esspecially to debug. You can have alot of factors that contribute to the success of the application and not all can be debugged from inside Flex builder or other debuggers. Up until now I have been using a product called Charles which has done the job very well and had support for AMF structures, but I have now switched to AppPuncher.

Why? Well apart from a few hiccups with the Mac version at the beginning, AppPuncher has been proving itself as a very useful tool. AppPuncher is targeted at Flex/Flash remoting. You can re-invoke the same calls to the server again from within the debugger, without having to touch the flash based application. You can live edit the AMF objects coming in or going out of the debugger to try and fix any issues (this is esspecially handy if you have a non Flash/Flex person developing the server side). Filtering of captured/displayed data is great too. So many of the other alternatives capture and display every request which leaves you having to wade through the masses of automated requests from Google toobars etc to find your service calls.

Talking to the people at The Midnight Coders, they have told me there are A LOT more features coming, and that this is a very early release. New features like, Regression tests from recorded sessions, Code coverage tests and load testing, which is something often hard to test as there are no RTMP based tools for this. Also possibly a lot more tie-in to their server product WebOrb, which will help clients diagnose and work through issues.

If you have always wanted to be able to do something, or wanted a proxy/debugger application to do “XYZ” then now is probably the time to ping The Midnight Coders and let them know while they are still in the development stage. You might get lucky and find the feature in the next release.

For a complete list of features and plenty of images showing the interface head on over to the product page and trial it for FREE! AppPuncher Product page.