Patience is a Vitrue (or something like that)

I admit it, I have been neglecting this blog. In part, that is because I've been in the midst of some really exciting changes.

Before I get into what has been going on, some background. My husband, Steve Howard, moved all the way from the UK to Mississippi to marry yours truly. Soon after he moved here, he got a contract working for a company in the North Atlanta area, and that company extended a full time offer to him. He's been working there ever since--from Mississippi.

In June, I started a contract with Johnson Outdoor Marine Electronics, a division of SC Johnson, working on the upcoming Geonav G12, which will be released March 11. This has been a fantastic experience, and I am pleased to have been a part of it.

If you've followed my posts on InsideRIA (now DevelopRIA), you know that I have been very interested in the exciting possibilities inherent in social media for developers for a long time. So when a recruiter called me to tell me that Vitrue was looking for a Flex developer, I was interested. When I found out they wanted me to develop visual tools to allow non-technical people to create and edit quizzes for Facebook, I was hooked--I have been building these types of tools for many years, and I know this is something I can ace.

Lucky for me, Vitrue felt the same way, and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I will be staying with Johnson Outdoors until the release of the G12 on Friday, then I'll be starting with Vitrue the following Monday. I will miss my friends at Johnson, but I look forward to joining in on the fun at Vitrue.

Installing AMFPHP to Windows 7

I was excited to read about the release of AMFPHP 1.9 in February, but I didn't need to install it until a couple of weeks ago, when I was working on refactoring my Lazy Loading Tree example to take advantage of Maté. I wound up burning up almost an entire day due to permission problems on AMFPHP that were difficult to track down.

It turns out that something about my setup, whether it's Windows 7 or IE 8, caused a problem with the zip file when I downloaded it. The first thing I needed to do was to go into the properties of the zip file and hit the "Unblock" button. I had no idea that the "blocked" setting on a zip file could affect what are, in effect, text files inside.

But even after I did that, I had problems with the AMFPHP files that were in subdirectories, and no matter how I changed security settings on it, I couldn't find anything that would work. It seems that somehow Windows was encrypting the folders as they were being extracted. When I extracted them on a thumb drive, it couldn't apply the encryption. When I copied those extracted files over to my WAMP installation, AMFPHP worked perfectly.

Hope this helps someone avoid blowing out a day on this.

Sample code for OOP + Timeline InsideRIA Article

Several people asked me for code samples for my Combining the Timeline with OOP As3 in Flash that appeared on InsideRIA on April 7. So I've put together two examples, which produce a file that looks like this:

The example files do the same thing, just through different methods. One listens for the added event on the root document to start tweening the smiley faces as they are added, 10 frames apart. The other overrides the setter of the smiley face instance variables to start the tweening.

Download the source code here.

Debugging Responder Result Functions

Lots of times when we use AsyncTokens with Responders, something will go wrong between when the call is made and when it returns. Usually if there is a problem, the fault handler will fire. Because of this, it's fairly straightforward to get information on what has happened in the fault responder function by looking at the FaultEvent's properties, such as the fault property.
But what about when there's an error and the Result handler is the one that fires? This does happen. For example, the infamous Access "Operation must use updateable query" error message in access triggers the result handler.

One of the first things I try to do when there is an error with a database call is to reconstruct the exact call that was made, so I can make the same call directly from a browser. It's not exactly intuitive where to find this information in the ResultEvent that is the parameter in the result handler, but, with a little digging, I found it.

It turns out that AsyncToken has a property called "Message," which is actually a HTTPRequestMessage. HTTPRequestMessage has a "body" property that is described this way: The body of a message contains the specific data that needs to be delivered to the remote destination. This, apparently, is a circuitous way of saying that this is the actual request object that was sent in the HTTPRequest.send() method that returned this token.

Hope this helps someone!

RIAdventure Inspiration

So we're just back from the RIAdventure cruise/conference, and I have to say it was just what the doctor ordered for me. The speakers and attendees were all top notch, and I felt like a little sponge, soaking up ideas from them.

One set of ideas I'd just started reading about before going to the conference was blitting. In my roles as eLearning or Application developer, this wasn't something that I'd been exposed to much. And it seemed like a lot to get my head around until I saw Sam Rivello's Las Viditas presentation. He made this stuff look so easy, I thought maybe it wasn't so hard after all.

Couple that with the fact that I was inspired by Greg Burch's presentation to try an iPhone teaching app for children that needs to have performant animation (when the iPhone api is available), and suddenly this looked like something I needed to learn.

But since the main animation I was concerned with was rotating an object about a central point, the whole idea of repeatedly copying the pixels from different parts of an image seemed to be silly to me. So I came up with the idea of using a Flash Display object and rotating it once, programmatically, taking a snapshot at each rotation increment. Then each snapshot could be used in sequence.

Here's my first prototype of that concept:

Download the source code.

I'll probably write in detail about this code on InsideRIA in the near future, but the code is commented pretty thoroughly.

Flex Template Component

This week on InsideRIA, I blogged about Flex Template components. My mandate for that blog is to talk more about ideas than showing code, but I had a feeling that someone would ask to see code on this one, so I put together an example of code that is similar to the component I show a screen shot of in that post for the curious.

The example linked to below has View Source enabled:

Flex Template Component Example.

RIA Adventure Conference/cruise

I'm really excited to be signed up for the RIAAdventure Cruise. Not only do I get to meet or renew acquaintance with such familiar names as Doug McCune, Ted Patrick, or Ryan Steward, but I get to do it on a cruise ship making its way from port to port in Mexico!

This is going to be so much fun!