GRINDSTONE MEDIA

There are many developers having problems getting the Flex Builder profiler to connect to their applications and unfortunately not many solutions that address the issue.

I would say that ninety nine point nine percent of the time Flex Builder cannot connect to the Flash Player Debugger because the Flash Player Debugger uses the TCP/IP protocol to connect to Flex Builder on various ports and those ports are blocked by a local firewall or security software. It is possible that the you may not have the Flash Player Debugger installed but by simply installing and making sure that you have the right software is an easy enough fix. If you still cannot connect, continue reading.

Systems that are mostly affected are Windows because Mac users usually don’t run any third party security software. I have tested on a Windows Vista machine and tested against Windows Defender and the built in Windows Firewall and both do not affect Flex Builder using the default install settings. I personally use the ESET Smart Security Suite and after hours of testing by turning off various features I managed to narrow down the problem.

If you are using ESET Smart Security follow the following steps:

1. Open Smart Security.
2. If you are in standard mode and do not see a menu in the top right hand corner click Setup->Toggle Advanced Mode.
3. Click on the ‘Enter entire advanced setup tree…’ link at the bottom.
4. Click Personal Firewall->Protocol Filtering.
5. Make sure ‘Enable application protocol content filtering’ is selected.
6. Below that select Redirect traffic for filtering->HTTP and POP3 ports.

By doing so you are telling your firewall to only filter over the HTTP and POP3 protocols.

If you are using a different firewall system or security suite, I would recommend making absolutely sure you know what you are doing before modifying and opening ports and potentially exposing your system to the web. An easier solution and safer option would be to add your localhost (127.0.0.1) to a trusted zone.

Try contacting your security software support team, they can sometimes be quite helpful, and by doing so it also makes them aware of the problem.

If you have had any troubles with your system please leave a comment and I will try to solve your problem. I would be interested to see which other systems are affected and the reasons why.

The hackers from hackosis.com posted a neat tip to get your windows vista booting faster. While you at it I noticed that david tucker also had some great tips on getting the most out of your vista machine.

I recently commented on how ant is by far the most versatile and flexible way to compile your Flex applications, take for example this sample swc compiler project.

I keep this project handy in my workspace, and if I ever need to compile or package my source code into a swc file (pronounced swik for the noobs) I do the following:

1. Copy my source code into the source directory
2. Open up build.properties and set the parameters

   flex-sdk-dir=C:/tools/flex3_sdk
   output-name=pixelate.swc
   src-dir=src
   bin-dir=bin

3. And open up build.xml in the Eclipse Ant view
4. Now I am good to go
5. Finally to build my project simply double click the “compile-swc” task in my Ant view.

This is obviously a very basic example, but consider how useful this becomes if you are developing a third-party api for a team of developers.

You can distribute your code in a neat tidy package and be safe in the knowledge that if anyone decides tinker with your code they only have access to available public members.

Don’t even consider compiling a swc file and expecting it to be completely secure and inaccessible, because where there’s a will there is a way. The point is that you have a working tool that you can distribute and safe guard yourself against bugs caused by other developers.

Download the above mentioned swccompiler.

Remote Synthesis posted a solution that fixes your AIR application preview in the latest version of Flex Builder 3.

In case you use FabForce DBDesigner and have had problems connecting to your MySQL server, it could be that your MySQL installation did not encrypt your password correctly. To do so simply start the MySQL console and reset your password.

Run the following command:

SET PASSWORD FOR root@localhost = OLD_PASSWORD(”newpassword”);

By issuing this command MySQL will automatically encrypt your password in a compatible format for use with DBDesigner.