AS3

The new ASDoc tool in Flex 4 does a great job getting rid of problems documenting with MXML components. You can now document projects that contain references to MXML and you can document the MXML components themselves!

The ASDoc documentation generator tool that ships with Flex is extremely useful but not without its drawbacks. In Flex 3, ASDoc's support for MXML files is missing completely: not only does it produce no documentation for MXML files, it won't even compile if your regular ActionScript classes make any references to MXML components.

If you're in Vancouver or thereabouts and would like to learn up on Flex, Flash, and AIR, now's your chance! On Thursday there's a free full day of training. They're calling it "RIA Day" and it's happening at the Vancouver Harbour Centre.

Some quick notes using Adobe's ASDoc tool for generating Actionscript documentation.

Checked out the Vancouver Flash Meetup for the first time tonight. Ross Ladell runs the show and while tonight's meetup was a little disorganized (he's gotta work, too!), he did present some pretty interesting and useful code.

I was using the Hurlant AS3 eval library in Flex with no problems but when I tried to use it in Flash I couldn't get it to compile. After prodding the internet a bit more I've found a way to get eval for AS3 working in Flash!

Ages ago I did a quick comparison of some Actionscript documentation generators and found good tools but nothing that fit my needs perfectly. Finally, the search is over.

In Actionscript 3.0 the getBounds() method will include invisible display objects in its calculations. I had a situation where I didn't want this and frankly, was a bit surprised that invisible objects were included in the calculation at all.

Solution source code after the break.

The Flash security sandbox has been around for a while so you'd think we'd seen all the errors. When firefox started reporting an "error calling method on NPObject," I was surprised to find Google didn't drop the answer at my feet. No, this took a bit more exploring to figure out.

If you miss the eval method from AS2, the AS3 Eval library from Hurlant is what you're looking for. I found there were extras I needed so I created a wrapper class which you might find useful.

The ProgressBar component in Flash and Flex can easily be used to indicate the progress of a file download. Here, we'll use a simple method to display the progress of some other server-side action, such as parsing a large file.