The other day someone asked me whether you could use ColdFusion Builder extensions and/or snippets in Flash Builder. The answer is yes. When you have ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder installed together in the same Eclipse environment, which you should, many features of the IDE can carry over including things like RDS dataview, RDS fileview, snippets and more. However, when it comes to things like extensions, there are some limitations based on my experience. Still, there's enough added value that even you straight Flash/Flex developers who got a copy of ColdFusion Builder with Flash Builder Premium may want to install it. Here's what I've found.

In part 1 of my Squiggly for Flex tutorial, we discussed how easy it is to use the check-as-you-type spell checking for any TextInput or TextArea. This works great for most scenarios. However, sometimes you're requirements may ask for more customized spell-checking behavior. For example, perhaps you need to persist user custom dictionary items to a database or you need to build a custom spelling suggestion UI - these were just a couple of the requirements I faced. Thankfully, Squiggly provides most of the tools you will need to get these tasks done...with some caveats.

The Day two keynote starts out deafeningly loud. Tim Buntel, senior product manager for Flex Builder, is the first speaker to speak about the Flash Platform. He does a humorous secret agent theme to his presentation, where Ben Forta joins him onstage in a secret agent costume. They discuss almost the entire Adobe product line including Flex, Flash, AIR, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Flash Media Server, Flash Catalyst and more.

Thanks to Judith Dinowitz, I received an advance PDF copy of The Flex Authority, the new Flex-focused quarterly journal by the people behind Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, Fusion Authority and House of Fusion. Jeffry Houser of the Flex Show podcast is the editor of the new journal. The first issue is set to be released at 360Flex which starts next week and I have an article in it onNahuel Foronda and Laura Arguello's Mate framework for Flex. We all know that my article will be outstanding (hey! be nice!), but how is the rest of the content? Let's take a look at some of the content. Below I give brief reviews of the first half of the articles; I had hoped to review the entire journal but it seriously includes so much content I just didn't have time to get through all of it (and it would have been too long). I will cover the second half in a second review to come in the next few days.

For someone who has only attended ColdFusion-specific conferences, it is hard to describe the scale of MAX. I am sitting here waiting for the opening keynote staring at three giant screens with music blasting to a standing-room-only audience of thousands. Finally, the giant screens begin playing an opening montage with Ray Camden, Laura Arguello, Ben Forta and many others speaking about the theme of engagement.