Monday, November 17, 2008

Advanced Tips and Tricks for Flex Builder

My third session was "Advanced Tips and Tricks for Flex Builder". It was a mixture of various tips and admonition to use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible and a descriptionf of some of the more useful keyboard shortcuts.



Working on a project that had a main.mxml file that was over 5000 lines long. After refactoring, they reduced it to 50 lines.

Tweak startup parameters. You can specify the JVM used, use the latest available.

Edit the flexbuilder.ini and increase the following memory settings
xms 512m
xmx 512m

Use mark occurances – you can change the highlighting color in actionscript occurances

Refactoring – use rename – it has a preview option you can use to see the impact

Team – Show Local History – can use to revert changes without having to grab the previous version from the source control system. It saves the last 50 changes by default, but the number can be adjusted in preferences

If you install the CF plug-ins you can create a CF value object from Flex code and visa-versa.
There are third-party tools that do the same for Java to Flex and Flex to Java.

Managing web services

Watch value objects in the debugger

Ctrl – F11 -> debug

F11 -> run

Use profiler to track object use

Turn off build automatically and then use Ctrl-B to force a build

Export preferences so you can move settings between workspaces

Use design mode for prototyping

Lots and lots of keyboard shortcuts

Outline view – particularly useful to select items in design view that are overlaying one another

Don’t type filter

Export -> release build

Link the flex framework so the browser will cache it separately

No comments: