Holy Moly – I’m back from MAX and am absolutely exhausted and incredibly invigorated! What a fantastic conference. Much thanks to the MAX team for setting up such a memorable conference, especially Ted Patrick who looked remarkably put together given that I don’t think he’s slept a full night in months.
As usual, MAX totally delivered in getting the Flex team and customers together to share ideas, complaints and hopes. The anticipation around the release of Flex 3 and the excitement over Flex 4 was palpable. Especially after Thermo was demo’ed at the keynote on day 2. What a fantastic demo! I was watching from the main hall and the audible excitement (I was sitting next to some developers who were literally meowing with glee in their chairs) was impressive. In support of Thermo, we’ll be making some fundamental changes to the Flex framework during the course of Flex 4 and I’m thrilled to begin work there. You may have heard about some of these changes in Ely Greenfield’s Flex Roadmap talk. These changes are necessary in order to support robust skinning, styling, states and transition management within the sub components of a Flex UI control.
My two sessions and custom component Birds of a Feather went quite well too. I was impressed with the advanced Flex knowledge that was apparent in my session attendees. My Customizing the Flex Framework session made me realize that we can really do better with documenting best practices when it comes to custom component development, application architecture, and item renderers. I hope to put more thoughts about these topics here on my blog. The component BOF was awesome. It was late in the evening which meant a few members of the audience (and panel) were tipsy and yet were still bringing great component development tricks to the table.
And of course, one of the best parts of attending conferences like MAX is getting to see my conference “homies” (those friends I don’t get to see except in nerdy, overly air conditioned conference halls). I love how diverse and knowledgeable the Flex community is and as always, am grateful to be a part of such a great piece of technology with such a dope community. All in all, the best MAX I’ve attended so far. I’m already jonesing for next year…..
A lot of people have asked for the code and slides from my session, Customizing the Flex Framework. They are linked to below; feel free to comment if you need any clarifications. I plan on writing a blog post elaborating on the custom metadata topic which was at the tail end of my talk. Its just such a cool concept and a lot of people were interested in how they could take advantage of it during their own Flex development, so I think it warrants its own posting. So, stay tuned for that.
Customizing the Flex Framework
slides :: code
Addendum: The code for my preso is definitely demo code…use them as a starting point for your own Flex development.
