FlexCamp

I went to FlexCamp last night at Adobe's office in San Francisco. It was awesome. Adobe really knows how to host an event and how to treat developers. I was impressed. It was really cool seeing new Flex Builder 3 features presented by developers (and QA!) One of the sweetest moments was one of the developers showing how you can preview variable expressions during debug sessions just by mousing over the expressions. That may sound like a small thing if you haven't debugged code, but it's really useful. It elicited huge, spontaneous applause from the crowd of developers.

The demos by MixBook and SlideRocket were also really impressive. I was particularly blown away by SlideRocket. I was talking to one of the Adobe guys during a break and he told me that SlideRocket was completely coded by one guy, which just blew me away.

I was also really impressed with the Fireworks integration with Flex. I loved the idea of a designer using Fireworks to create a visual prototype using actual Flex UI components. Designer-developer workflow is still a holy grail of application programming IMO, and this was a small, but significant step in the right direction.

I did a presentation on using Flex to build a Facebook app. It was late at night. I was pretty tired and tried to keep it to 15 minutes, but I think it went over pretty well. I had lots of people asking me for the slides afterwards, so here are the slides in PDF. Also, here's the code for YouTubeFaves.