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.

My second choice and certainly worth mentioning would have been Fedora, this is a really professional distribution with great support and a large community.

The difference between the two? Ubuntu roots are Debian based while Fedora is based on RedHat. (Keep in mind that linux is very customizable and most of the time workarounds exist for both).

So after installation everything worked first time no major problems, installation was easier than windows and most of my devices were detected and working straight out the box. Not bad for an open source operating system eh?

So whats the first thing I do once my installation is complete, install Flex Builder of course. InisdeRIA.com had a great article on getting java and eclipse set up, that’s pretty much all you need to get flex builder rocking.

Next up, vmware workstation. With vmware workstation installed you can run windows inside a virtual machine and use all your favourites like photoshop and flash. I had a few problems when I had to install vmware workstaition on the latest linux kernel, luckily in true linux tradition, somebody wrote a patch that fixes any issues during installation. I have mirrored the patch here for other people who need it.
Download vmware-any-any-update-115-k2624-wirelessbridgetar

Since making the switch I would say that yes I probably did not have to switch to Linux to get my work done, but every day I honestly do find a reason not to switch back and although there are a few bits of windows that I do miss, nothing compares to the amount of useful development software available for linux. I really am in programmer heaven right now. Give it a go if you have the time, you won’t be sorry…

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.

Upgrade your flash player if you see this message

Flex = Dopamine = sm:)e

var event:CairngormEvent = new CairngormEvent();
dispatchEvent(event);

At first glance this seems completely normal but will fail silently and cease to trigger the associated command.

While I do appreciate the new CairngormEvent helper method which should look like this:

var event:CairngormEvent = new CairngormEvent();
event.dispatch();

for clarity towards fellow team members who may not be familiar with Cairngorm and better distinction between Cairngorm application events and standard view events, I recommend still using the original syntax to dispatch your events:

var event:CairngormEvent = new CairngormEvent();
CairngormEventDispatcher.getInstance().dispatchEvent(event);

This will ensure that the event is clearly dispatched by the Cairngorm framework and not your view.

The advantage is that you can configure exactly how you would like your application to compile, build and deploy and share this same configuration with fellow colleagues.

The only configuration for other team members would be to set the path to their Flex 3 SDK directory.

To get started here is a tutorial worth reading.

When you have a moment I encourage you to give a sample project a test run compiling with Ant, and as a challenge see if you can set it up to email you if there were any build errors.

While you getting into it why not read through some Ant best practices.

Read the full story on BBC news.