I have recently started reading Clean Code by Robert C. Martin and it is filled to the brim with a ton of great advice. I will be documenting the tips that I find particularly useful and elegant. One such tip was in Chapter 7: Error Handling. When we return null, we are essentially creating work for ourselves and foisting problems upon our callers. All it takes is one missing null check to send an application spinning out of...

I have recently been going through Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0 and trying to shore up gaps in my ActionScript knowledge. The amount of information in that single book is mind boggling. I will be posting interesting tidbits that I am certain I will want to recall at a later time. By “later time” I mean in the middle of some heated argument. So to kick things off, I found this factoid about code at the top of...

As a developer, I am always interested in improving and streamlining my workflow. My pursuit of this is a two pronged attack. First, I strive to maximize my productivity in the IDE that I am primarily using at the time. It is amazing how one good shortcut can save you minutes in a day which added up over a week turns into an hour and hours over a year. Secondly, I am always interested in trying out new IDEs. A couple really promising IDEs...

So I have been immersing myself in all the new Flex 4 goodness and I came across a section in the Adobe Help documentation on two way binding. I am very familiar with bracket based binding in Flex but I was presented with three options for two way binding that was interesting. Well one was just common sense, one made sense and one I had never seen before. Two Objects Define Each Other Define two objects that specify as the source a...

We have all been faced with that sometimes terrifying feeling of ‘OH NO! I need to be convincing on X subject QUICK!’. Or sometimes it is not pressing but one just wants to get a quick, high-level glimpse of something without wading through pages and pages of a book. Well I present my favorite resource for getting up to speed quick on something. Drum roll please! SlideShare For instance, I have been studying the Spark...

Flex 4 has introduced an entirely new and improved approach for creating custom components and skins with the Spark component model. The main take away is that behavior and presentation have been entirely decoupled. I am going to keep a running list of my favorite articles about said topic as I have set out to wrap my mind around this new and exciting paradigm. Dan Orlando has written a couple fantastic articles on the subject Building...

I am a huge fan of mx.data.binding.ObjectDumper when doing AS2 work. It makes debugging Flash Remoting a breeze. The problem is that in the shuffle from AS2 to AS3 and Flash to Flex it seems that ObjectDumper has fallen by the wayside. Jen deHaan blogged about this eons ago here. How does one accomplish the same feat in AS3? A little digging uncovered this approach documented in the LiveDocs here. The new word of the day is Object...