At MAX, and here's some photos of the setup!

I'm at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place and holy cow is this convention center huge. I took a half-hour wander around the corner of the center that's housing MAX and snapped some photos along the way.

I'll be taking more pictures as the day and the conference progress. Feel free to take a look at the pics I just took or stay tuned to the Flickr account I set up for my tech conference photos for more images as the conference progresses.

1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:17 PM - Categories: Conferences and Speaking Engagements

Saturday evening dinner at MAX?

I'll be in Chicago for MAX early Saturday morning. If anyone else is getting there on Saturday and would like to meet up for dinner, feel free to drop me a line. I'm also going to look into heading out to see the Sears tower sometime Saturday afternoon.

3 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 7:47 AM - Categories: Conferences and Speaking Engagements

Properly naming custom Flex events

A Flex developer asked me a question about events today. "[When using events], Flex code hinting does something like customName.CUSTOM_NAME. Any idea where it's getting that from?"

When you're creating your own events, it's important to follow this convention: it enables greater compile-time checking of event types.

Let's pretend I was working with Contacts, and I created a ContactEvent with types of "contactSaved" and "contactDeleted" being used in MXML components.

In my component, I do this to create a contact event:

Whoops, I just typed "contractSaved" as the type. That's going to make me spend forever figuring out why its listeners aren't being fired.

To save this kind of mess, use static constants on your custom events and avoid the "magic string" antipattern:

Now, when you raise the event, reference the constant:

No more mystery event names!

1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:01 AM - Categories: Flex | Best Practices

CFDJ's Hilarious Exit

ColdFusion Developer's Journal is no more.

The whole "Silverlight DJ" replacement thing aside, CFDJ's current homepage is a perfect illustration of how the entire publication was run in a Bad News Bears style: it reprints content from their own "Author Blogs" calling the magazine a piece of **** (literally).

Screenshot:

If anyone at SYS-CON objects to me reproducting their content on my blog, I consider it fair use under the principles of critcism, comment, and news reporting, unlike their repeated use of my copywritten content for commercial purposes without my consent.

4 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:22 PM - Categories: Off Topic