April 2005 Archives

This entry started off as me describing some of the cool features of NeoSwiff that Flash is currently lacking. Then, I started rambling and made this post much longer than I wanted, so I decided to cut out the NeoSwiff features for another day and leave my ramblings in tact.

Hi, my name is Darron. I'm a developer, and I love seeing new .swf creation tools hit the market. Here's why.

It has always been the philosophy of Microsoft that if you want people to develop for your platform you have to give them appealing tools that increase productivity and efficiency. While I'm not a fan of Visual Studio itself, I do appreciate how Microsoft caters to developers and tries to make tools as developer friendly as possible. I prefer Eclipse to Visual Studio, but I liken that to my time at Lehigh where we learned Microsoft was the devil and you had to code in emacs to be a real programmer.

For the longest time, the only kid on the block to build Flash applications has been the Macromedia Flash IDE. While this has been a good thing for Macromedia, it has been a bad thing for developers. Macromedia does not seem to share the philosophy of providing great developer tools to bring developers to the platform. Rather, the platform itself (the Flash Player runtime) has always been attractive enough. If you wanted to build a Flash application you simply used Macromedia Flash, no questions asked.

Now, don't get me wrong here. Macromedia has a very open developer community with great people behind it. In fact, I'm not sure that I really blame them at the moment for their lack of good developer tools as Flash has historically catered to designers. Too much of the general public still associates Flash with annoying banner ads, though I see this mentality changing in the future. Rich Internet Applications have only been starting to gain steam in the past few years, so the Flash developer base is still a work in progress...

That said, tools like NeoSwiff and Xamlon Pro Flash Edition are amazing wins for the Flash developer community. Macromedia has some competition now, and it's going to have to fight to keep it's developers using ActionScript. Right now, I'd say they're behind the curve. In Visual Studio I have a much better coding experience than I do in the Flash IDE. It's not just the IDE either, but rather the assortment of complimentary tools available. How many UML programs generate ActionScript? How many generate C#? Now how about round trip engineering? Model driven architecture, anyone? These are the things that appeal to my inner Software Engineer. ActionScript doesn't even come close to C# in this respect.

At the end of the day it's the coding experience and supplemental tools that drive which product I'll use to build my Rich Internet Applications. I like NeoSwiff not because I have something to prove or because I'm angry with Macromedia, but rather because I like the plethora of tools available for the C# language itself (remember, C# != .NET, the language itself is an ECMA standard). As an aside, check out Aral's post on RIA development tools.

To be honest, that's why I wanted to help with ASDT. Since I'm using ActionScript every day and no tool out there currently meets my needs, I started using ASDT coupled with Eclipse. I event wrote an XMI to AS code generator so I can export models from ArgoUML and automate stub code creation. I then donated some spare time to help build in the features to ASDT that I wanted that weren't currently available. But then a reality check hit me - it shouldn't be the developer community's responsibility to build the tools we need, it should fall on the company that wants us to code for their platform.

I love the Flash Player.. and with NeoSwiff we're finally able to use the sophisticated tools that traditional software developers have been using for years to deploy to our beloved Flash platform. It's about time.

Macromedia, are you listening?

Here's a simple example of a Flash movie compiled with NeoSwiff. This is based on the PasswordGenerator I wrote a long time ago in C#. I just took that C# code, plunked it into NeoSwiff, cleaned a few things up, removed some components not built yet, added a change skin option, and got the example you see below:

You can download the source code here. This is meant to run in the standalone version of NeoSwiff.

To me, the coolest thing about ths project is that there's so much C# code already written, and the C# development tools are *much* better than what we have available for ActionScript. It's awesome to be able to find some C# code that I wrote over a year ago, and all of sudden be able to use that in Flash projects going forward.

Oh, and check out how easy it is to change skins:
this.Skin = new Skins.Flat.FlatSkin();
.. or
this.Skin = new Skins.WinXP.WinXPSkin();

I haven't tried creating my own skin yet, but a nice feature is that when you set the Skin property on a form, it will automatically skin all of the controls in that form for you. It's pretty slick.. but there's a downside that all of the skins you reference are bundled into the .swf, so the filesize is bigger the more skins you have available. There may be a smart way around that, but I haven't been experimenting with NeoSwiff long enough to figure it out..

Anyway, this project has a lot of cool stuff in it even though it's not complete yet. I'm looking forward to seeing more components added along with some more functionality (like Remoting and Web Services). Until then, I'll probably just try creating more simple examples like what you see above, as time allows.

Flashbelt: The midwest's Flash conference is back for 2005 and it's bigger and better. Flashbelt 2005 takes place over 3 days, and delivers 14 presentations and 8 workshops led by North America's leading Flash developers. So head up to the North Star State to get all the Flash you can handle.

Speakers include: Matthew David, Carla Diana, Loc Dao, Matthew Zoern, Ze Frank, Jeremy Thorp, Joey Lott, Erik Falat, Andreas Heim, Robert Reinhardt, Snow Dowd, John Lenker, Nate Hunsaker, Ryan Moore, Nachi Katti, Chris Wiggins.

Also, new this year to Flashbelt is KeyWorks; a juried Flash contest. Enter you work online to win accolades a plenty. See the website for details.

The mission of FlashBelt is to bring together Flash developers and enthusiasts in the Midwest to share knowledge, inspiration and build community.

FLASHBELT 2005
June 14,15,16, 2005
Minneapolis, MN
http://www.flashbelt.com

I was asked to speak this year, but had to turn it down due to my wedding coming up in June. As Keith pointed out, it's a great deal.. I hope to be there next year!

Here are the slides for my Extending Components presentation at FITC 2005.

Extending Components

For those that attended my session, you can find the example code here

This years FITC was really a great conference. I'm honored to have been selected as a speaker, and hope that everyone who attended my session had an enjoyable time. It was great meeting up with so many people that I've corresponded with online, finally being able to put a face on an email address.

I played XBOX with Mike and the gang for 1 game, coming in at an amazing -1 kills. Something tells me I need more practice - maybe I should play more than once every 3 months... :-)

So, FITC is going really well. I think my presentation was pretty well received, and I'll get my slides up here in the next few days. Thanks to all that attended my session - I hope I encouraged you to explore a bit on your own and gave you enough information to hit the ground running.

That's not the reason for this post though.. I've been monitoring the ActionStep site every now and again for the past few weeks, and it appears that the site has finally launched. This looks to be a very cool project - it's a component set entirely built through code modeled after the OpenStep Application Kit.

ActionStep - The pure ActionScript 2.0 component framework for Flash.

Check out the project links and poke around a bit. This could be that open source component framework that the Flash Community is searching for...

The conference hasn't even started yet, and already we have a picture that says it all...

(Click image to view Larger).

This is what Flash developer's do in a beautiful city in a fancy hotel with plenty to see and do, and lots going on around us.. we take advantage of wireless internet access. :-)

From left to right: Josh Dura (front, white hat), Danny Dura (back), Me (orange shirt), Mike Chambers (behind me in chair), Chafic Kazoun, Mike Downey, Branden Hall, and the laptop on the coffee table belongs to none other than Colin Moock. He took the picture.

What's even more interesting is that we all either have a Powerbook or a Thinkpad. Dude, where's the dell?

I'm leaving for Flash in the Can today. This conference looks like it's going to be the Flash Conference of the year... The speaker list is very impressive. I have a lot of friends to catch up with, and some new ones to meet.

My presentaton is Saturday morning at 10:15 in Ballroom C. The topic is Extending Components, where I'll be explaining how to build components the easy way, by letting everyone else do the hard work for you. :-) After the conference I'll get my presentation notes online here.

If you're going to be at the conference, definitely come say hi. There's quite a few people that will be there that I've never met before, so it'll be good to put more faces to names. Also, if you attend my session, please be brutally honest with the feedback. I believe the presentation will go well, but I'm always trying to improve on my speaking skills, so your feedback is valuable to me.

Heres to safe travels! I'll be back here Tuesday, so expect the presentation slides sometime shortly after.

Xamlon isn't the only .NET to .SWF compiler on the block. NeoSwiff has been in development for quite some time, and it is now in public beta. This product is awesome, and I encourage you to check it out if you haven't already!

NeoSwiff

Available to download are a Visual Studio plugin, a standalone IDE for Windows 2000/XP, a C# compiler for Linux, and a C# compiler for OS X. The documentation is pretty good as well, and the code generated is solid.

Yes, you can use Linux, code in C#, and get a .SWF file out of it. How awesome is that?