Now that I've completed some things I've been meaning to do, I can pick up development of SharpFlash again. For those that haven't been following my weblog, SharpFlash is a project of mine that falls into the "third party Flash projector" category. It's written in C#, and of course has a Flash user interface. See here, here and here for more information.
Originally, I had written a socket server to comminicate from the C# wrapper to the Flash application. This was because I did not want to sacrifice the callback model that I have already implemented and I wanted to be backwards compatible with as many previous versions of Flash as possible. However, with Flash 7 looming around the corner and given the penetration of Flash 6... I'm going to ditch the socket server for a different approach. With the object.watch functionality I will be able to fire an event inside the Flash player just like the onData event of the socket server that I'm currently using. The plus is that the applications will run faster as they will no longer be multi-threaded. The downside is that you'll only be able to build Flash 6+ projects with it. Sorry to everyone still developing in Flash 5... hopefully there aren't too many of you left.
I'll keep posting status updates this week. I'm really going to try to get something "releasable" by the end of this week as it looks like I'll have a decent amount of development time available.
After I release a very alpha version with a not-even-close-to-being-complete feature set, I'll take all the help I can get in building out the libraries. Eventually I'll get around to releasing a sourceforge project, espeically if more people want to get involved, but I want to make a little more progress first...
Stay tuned...
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