Here’s a screenshot:

There is so much work left to do on this project, but this release is a start. Rather than wait longer and try to polish it, I felt it was best to get it out there and get some feedback coming in. We’re going to be using it immediately in-house, to be sure — it’s already delivered some valuable news for us on the coverage achieved by our unit test suites!

I’ve been pining for an AS3 code coverage tool for so long, I feel sick. I hate not being able to know how much of my code is actually exercised by test cases, whether automated or manual. So I’ve been playing with an idea on how to get AS3 code coverage working for the last few days and, somewhat to my own amazement, it actually works! Thanks to Adobe’s release of the compiler as an open source distribution, I’ve been able to hack mxmlc to instrument each line of code, adding a call to a global function that logs the line number and the function name.

I invoke the modified compiler on my test program like this (note the additional library for coverage support)

mxmlc.exe -library-path+=../fcov/bin/fcov.swc -coverage src/CoverageTest.mxml
               -output bin/CoverageTest.swf

This generates a special debug version of the SWF that calls a special function in the fcov.swc library. As you can imagine, this piggybacks on the same compiler feature which supports breakpoints. However, the debugger is not involved in any way; there’s no need to run it.

The crude trace log looks like this: (more…)

It’s written in Adobe AIR of course! I find AIR a nice, productive environment for creating UI-driven tools quickly and easily.

Here are some screen shots. Please see the ItDepends project wiki for more information, and please do download the app and try it out. The UI is kind of clunky, as this tool was kind of a quick hack, but it does get the job done.

I’m really pleased about this. It’s been something that badly needed to happen, given that this is one of the major nexuses (nexi?) of Flex development in the country. A bunch of us Boston types had virtually the same idea at the same time, and since then we have been laboring to bring this users group into the world. I’m excited about the potential for great conversations, new connections and novel things to learn. We’re going to have us a good time, yes we are!

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/presentations/AllurentDisplayCaseStudy.pdf

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/mvcs.

I’ve also included a few addenda to MVCS reflecting more recent thoughts and practices. As more materials become available, I will add them to the above location.

Thanks to everyone who prodded me into doing the right thing!

It was right around then that I recalled David Coletta of the Buzzword team mentioning at Flex Camp Boston that the Buzzword application uses a bunch of clever techniques to avoid creating and destroying TextFields as the user types (since they use lots of them to render what appears to be a unified display of a rich-text document). Among other things, he mentioned that they pool TextField instances offscreen — while keeping them on the display list — and reuse them by bringing them back onscreen to show stuff as needed. (more…)

I don’t want to recapitulate the whole project description, which you can read for yourself, but… what the heck is Visual FlexUnit? (more…)

• Uses deep linking approach from Flex 3 to support all major browsers including IE7 and Safari
• Code for UrlKit apps in Flex 2 and Flex 3 is now identical
• New navigate() method allows apps to internally change state by directly specifying a new URL fragment
• New enabled property of FlexBrowserManagerAdapter optionally delays UrlKit startup until application is fully initialized

Happy Holidays!