A good Flex tutorial to start with

Even though I am hevily concentrated in using Flex as a development platform , I am still relatively new to all the opportunities that Flex could provide to a developer, or as in my case a lazy information architect. Moreover, I am always willing to share a good beginner's tutorial, and thus attract the attention of more enthusiasts That's why, I was curious when I approached a presentation done by the Michigan Flex User's Group, called unambiguosly "Your first Flex Application". The tutorial, even though targeted at Flex 2, describes nothing that you cannot do in Flex 3. Basically, I might say that it gives an example of the 20% of Flex related stuff, that a developer will deal with 80% of the time (the 80-20 rule), namely:

1. Flex Builder (perfect for project management/ has integrated code completion/ based on Eclipse)

2. MXML

3. including ActionScript 3 code into MXML

4. Data-binding in MXML

4. using MXML and ActionScript 3 to connect to a remote web service (Cold Fusion in this case), and extracting data based on specific requests.

5. using data-driven Flex components such as Tree and GridView to display the extracted data in an understandable format.

Linux Newbie Tip: Starting GUI apps from the command line

Under the Linux command line shell, I want to be able to start GUI applications, without keeping the console window dependent on the application. If I simply type the application name, and press Enter, the application will run, but the console window will be unusable until I close the app. Moreover, if I close the console window, the GUI app dies with it.

The solution is to start the application as a background process. This is simply done by putting an ampersand ("&") after the command name like that:

nautilus &

emacs &

xmms &

Welcome back...

That's it. This is officially my new home. After trying different blogging systems, I came to the conclusion that Blogger is the best place to store my rambling thoughts. So, here I am, ready to write about anything that deserves to be written about. After I quit writing in my old blog, I fell in love with Adobe Flex and .NET, so in this one I am mostly planning to explain development topics in an easier to grasp (lame, if you like) way. Of course, I will not confine my rambling thoughts only about Flex, .NET, or even about software development, in general. What I will not do in this blog is fill it with photos, quotes, or links that out of nothing happen to be interesting to me. For that purpose, I have my Tumblr log ( http://preslav.tumblr.com ), and everything that is not worth writing a whole post about will be put there. So, check it out, too.