breadcrumb arrow home | blog

CS3 and Flex interoperability

Posted: 09/11/07

An image of CS3 and Flex interoperability

Adobe have recently been ranting and raving about improved designer/developer workflows in CS3 and Flex Builder. Now, I'm not sure if many people have tried, but coding Flash applications in Flex Builder is an absolute nightmare at the moment!

You can import the Flash specific classes that you require by using a virtual source path folder, which gives you some level of code hinting; but because you can only use the MXMLC compiler you end up with loads of compiler warnings. It doesn't automatically import classes for you, even if they're on an included source path. You also have to keep switching to CS3 to compile the app, and then watch the console closely for errors. It's like going back to the dark days of programming in the Flash IDE.

I hope in the next few months Adobe release a patch that will allow you select the CS3 compiler for ActionScript projects in Flex, and that it will also load the corresponding SWCs. The current beta of Flex 3 doesn't do this, which is a real shame.

Setting-up a Flash-only project in Flex builder

Keywords for this post: flex, adobe, actionscript 3, flash, flex builder, swc