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Slides for “FlexPMD, Your Canary in a Coal Mine”

Here are the slides and the recording of the presentation Xavier and I presented at MAX this year on FlexPMD and code quality. I hope you enjoyed the presentation!
Watch the recording.
Max flash based code quality is there a canary in your coal mine-
View more presentations from Xavier Agnetti.

Global Exception or Error Handling in Flex

In this post I explain how you can catch unhandled exceptions or errors globally in a declarative mxml-based way using the [Mixin] flex-specific metadata tag.
Starting on FP 10.1 and AIR 2.0 you can capture unhandled exceptions or errors globally. Although you can use these new APIs you should always take care of the exceptions where [...]

Disabling Bindings on certain Views to avoid unnecessary processing time

Once a view has been created, Bindings will always be active no matter if the view is invisible or removed from Stage.
There might be cases when a View is constantly receiving Binding updates (i.e. connected to an LCDS server with big amount of data transfer or messages). Imagine the view that is processing all the [...]

Flex4 Coverflow Layout

Flex4 has shipped and it comes with a ton of new features that open lots of doors. One of my preferred features in which I see a tremendous potential is the new layout mechanism.
As an exercise to better understand the details of the new layout mechanism I played a couple of days creating some layouts [...]

Some thoughts on constructor and method parameters

I consider a best practice to keep to the minimum the number of arguments a method accepts. As uncle Bob explains in his “Clean code” book we should always favour niladic (no arguments), monadic (1 argument) or dyadic (2 argument) methods and avoid whenever possible methods with more than 3 arguments, if not possible we [...]

How to enable Tab key on OS X modal dialogs

I’m a key accelerator man. I hate taking my hands out of my keyboard just to press Yes or No in a Modal Dialog. Until last week I thought there was no way to tab through the different buttons of a modal dialog.

Luckily I came across an option in System Preferences to enable the tab [...]

Some little gems on OSX you might want to know

Here are some little things that might speed you up when working on a Mac.
1. View hidden files in Finder
In terminal type:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
To hide them again:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
2. Manage clipboard from command line
To copy the output of a parameter you can use pbcopy:
pwd | pbcopy
The result from pwd will be [...]

FlexPMD Eclipse plugin + FlexPMD 1.0 + FlexCPD 1.0 + FlexMetrics released!

We’ve been busy, very busy during the last weeks. But we’re now very happy to announce the release of:

FlexPMD 1.0
FlexCPD 1.0
FlexMetrics 1.0

And our first beta for the new FlexPMD Eclipse plugin that will better integrate FlexPMD into your development workflow!!
You can find all the documentation for FlexPMD on the wiki and for the plugin http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexpmd/FlexPMD+Eclipse+plugin
This [...]

FlexPMD now in labs

FlexPMD is a tool that helps to improve code quality by auditing any AS3/Flex source directory and detecting common bad practices, such as:

Unused code (functions, variables, constants, etc.)
Inefficient code (misuse of dynamic filters, heavy constructors, etc.)
Over-complex code (nested loops, too many conditionals, etc.)
Over-long code (classes, methods, etc.)
Incorrect use of the Flex component lifecycle (commitProperties, etc.)
A [...]