I am incredibly excited for the upcoming MAX North America conference, in Chicago from October 1st – 3rd. (I’m literally bouncing in my chair as I write this). Its very inspiring to be part of such a cool and community focused event like MAX. If you’re attending – come to my session and BOF and say hi! I’ll be running an advanced Flex session entitled: “Customizing the Flex Framework” on Monday from 2-3 pm and on Wednesday morning from 9:30-10:30 am. Here’s the blurb from the MAX site:
Customizing the Flex Framework
Skill: Advanced
Dive deep into the Flex framework and its extensibility layers. We’ll cover commonly requested customizations as well as concepts that have been considered difficult to implement. Topics include skins, item renderers for list-based controls, collections and sorting, validators and formatters, dataDescriptors for hierarchical controls, tool tips, menus, drag&drop behavior, and effects. Be prepared to view a lot of code!
- Monday, October 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm
- Wednesday, October 39:30 am – 10:30 am
Now, let me explain the session in my own words. We’re going to go beyond what people normally think of when they think of customizing the Flex framework – that is, go beyond simply extending existing Flex framework controls. There are so many other extension points in the framework to take advantage of when developing a Flex application! We’ll cover ways to customize how your application manipulates and displays dynamic data, how to customize the validation and formatting of data, how (and why) to create custom metadata and custom events, how to patch the framework when you find a bug (yowzah!) and so much more. As is mentioned above, its an advanced session, but those new to Flex, don’t be scared off. I plan on clearly explaining the concepts and walking through code to illustrate the ideas even further (though I will have to move at a fast clip since the sessions are only 60 minutes). After my sessions, I’ll post the code and slides here for people to peruse on their own.
In addition to running a session, I’m also running the Flex Custom Component BOF (Birds of a Feather) on Monday evening from 9:30-10:30 pm with a fantastic group of Flex gurus: Chafic Kazoun, Doug McCune, Adam Flater, Tony Hillerson and Andy McIntosh. We’re going to spend those precious 60 minutes diving into some of our favorite custom component topics and open up the floor to any and all questions. I’m hoping it’ll be a high-energy, organic discussion where everyone (including the panel) learns some real good Flex development tricks.
And lastly – I’m really looking forward to the Boot Camp for Flex on Wednesday morning from 9-12:30. Its a collaborative session where you can plunk down with your laptop and code with the Flex development team and other Flex developers.
So, if you haven’t already signed up for MAX – do so! Its going to be an event not worth missing.
