Last nigh's London MMUG...

We had a packed crowd at the London MMUG last night with close to a hundred people in attending.

... was a wonderful success. We had close to one hundred members turn up to our meeting to watch presentations on AS3 and Flex2 by Tink and myself.

Tink's presentation, which itself was created as an ActionScript 3 (AS3) project using the Flex Builder 2 Alpha 1 tool, introduced members to those changes and new features in AS3 that Tink "thought were important". These included changes to access modifiers (including the new ones, like internal and protected) and the new DisplayList, Sprites, Events, etc. Suffice to say, he covered a range of important topics and covered them well! :)

Not to be outdone by Tink, I also hacked together my presentation in Flex 2 Builder Alpha 1, but this time using the Flex Framework. In fact, in a little over an hour, I was able to put together a basic application for making presentations. With a bit more work during Tink's talk, I was able to add an index view, showing all the slides in the presentation as thumbnails in a TileList component. (Although switching States between my presentation's base state and the Index State caused run time errors during the presentation and now, after a restart, it causes runtime errors every second time! Don't forget that Flex 2 is still alpha and will be improving in future releases. I've reported this bug and I'm sure it will be fixed ASAP if it hasn't already been in some internal build deep within the vaults of Adobe's engineering cavern.) The very fact that I was able to put this application together in such a short amount of time is a testament to the amazing agility Flex 2 gives you during development.

A screenshot of the Flex application I built to create my Flex presentation. Yes, it's all very Escher, when you think about it!

Some of the topics I covered in my talk included the new Eclipse-based Flex Builder, the new Flex Framework, changes to the Flash Framework and AS3, new and existing containers and controls, Data Binding, the new cell/item renderers, keyboard control, and, of course, States.

If you're interested in learning more about ActionScript 3 (AS3) and Flex 2, take a look at two of the one-day Hot Shots Seminars I'm going to be teaching next month in London: Hot Shots: Head Start ActionScript 3 (AS3) and Hot Shots: Head Start Flex 2. During these one-day seminars, I will have time to cover a much broader range of topics and go into further details on the most important aspects of both ActionScript 3 and Flex 2.

Sign up on the London MMUG web site to stay informed of upcoming meetings, topics and speakers. Our next meeting will be on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 (we always meet on the third Thursday of the month) and topics and speakers will be announced shortly.

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