360 Flex Day 1 was very cool.  I really enjoyed "Flex and Hardware" by Justin Mclean.  For the first time ever I played around with an Arduino and Flex.  It really got my head thinking about all the things you can do with an Arduino.  It was very cool to see Flex controller the Arduino and also the Arduino passing information to Flex.  This was done by using as3Glue and also Serial Proxy (Go to the bottom of the Arduino download page).

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Day 1 at 360 Flex in San Jose should be a lot of fun.  I am first sharing a picture of the hotel room turned command center.  The Marriot has terrible wifi that is not free so I am wireless tethering my DROID over Verizon 3G.  It has been working out great for all.

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Steve Weyrick and I (John Gag) will be attending Flex 360 in San Jose this coming weekend.  We will be in San Francisco friday night and then San Jose for the conference. 

Just wondering if anyone else is going and what their plans are.  Happy Monday!

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So I am always on the lookout for new material to read in this world we call Web Development.  More specifically I look for ColdFusion material and Flex material. I bit the bullet and bought Fusion Authority and Flex Authority and here is my short review.

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Cesare Rocchi over at Spreading Funkyness has an excellent post on Garbage Collection with Adobe Flex and Adobe Air.  This is more of a reference for myself but I recommend it to everyone.

http://spreadingfunkyness.com/garbage-collection-with-flex-and-adobe-air/

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Dealing with dates in Flex 3 is a little bit confusing and annoying to me.  The latest confusion is the time zone offest functionality. If you do nothing but pass a date value from a database straight to Flex 3, that date will automatically be adjusted according to the users Time Zone.

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If you havnt tried this out it is a must.  Add this little plugin to your Flex Builder to instantly clean up your code.  The plugin indents your code and adds commenting. You can customize some things in the preferences.

For more details on the plugin go here:

http://flexformatter.sourceforge.net/

Simple Find and Intall this site to Flex Builder:

http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite

Once it is fully installed you will notice 5 new buttons.  They are very self explanatory. Give it a try and thank Seth Duffey over at http://www.leavethatthingalone.com/ for pointing it out to me.

I love the little things that make life easier.  Thanks SETH!

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Once again my friend Nate over at 19nates created a nice video tutorial on doing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations using .NET and Flex 3.  Check it out when you get a chance and let me know what you think. 

http://19nates.com/2009/05/flex-3-video-tutorial-webservice-create-update-and-delete-crud/

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There is a little bug in the AdvancedDataGridColumn formatter.  For whatever reason when you try to call the DataFormatter directly the year gets spit out incorrectly.  The work around is to use a label function that calls the exact same formatter.

The below code shows the code that will throw an incorrect format and the correct format.  I highlighted the 3 columns that are of importance.  The start date calls the labelFunction which correctly formats the date.  The end date uses the built in formatter which incorrectly displays the year and the hours worked uses the formatter to correctly format a number.  I included the hours worked just to show that it is only a date problem.

Hope this helps someone from banging head on the wall!

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