One of the things that can be confusing when you are learning Flex is setting things like the selected items on a list or grid. I have seen a number of questions from folks on email lists and blogs on this question. Let's set the scenario. I populate a List item with all of my categories from the server and I get a blog entry from the server as well. You might think, I have a list of categories and my blog entry has an array of its categories, I can simply set my categories List element's selectedItems property equal to entry.categories...this seems obvious right? Except it won't work.

Flex Camp Miami is a little over a month away and we have an incredible lineup of speakers including some very well known names in the Flex and AIR community. This interview will be the first in a series of speaker interviews that will offer some detail about their session but also allow us the opportunity to dig deeper into each speakers specific interests and areas of expertise.

This week we have David Tucker from Universal Mind. David is the author of the recently released Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook and a regular contributor to InsideRIA, including their Weekly RIA RoundUp podcast. David also did the Lynda training series on "AIR for Flash Developers." David and I discuss his upcoming session at Flex Camp Miami as well as some reasons AIR is a compelling option for startups and some of our favorite AIR applications.

Peter Bell and I finally continue our CFArgument after a more than two month hiatus. In this edition, which is on Peter's Blog, we debate the merits and potential pitfalls of the announced Hibernate integration in ColdFusion 9. While we are both excited about the potential of the feature, we are also concerned that it opens up a lot of potential problems which, if addressed well, could make the feature a huge success. However, if the implementation stumbles...well...see the post for more.

Two new projects and six updates this week. As a side note, I am finally getting to rewrite the open source list as I had put on my todo list for this year. I am busy creating a new admin using Flex (with Mate) in order to make it much less of a pain to update and therefore (hopefully) I will update it more often. Anyway, here's this week's update.

Hello, my name is Brian Rinaldi, and I am not a designer. I accept this shortcoming. Thankfully, Francisco Inchauste of Universal Mind's user experience design team is and he donated some time to give my Flex Camp Miami site a new logo and new look, as well as some blog bling. The new look should hopefully garner us some attention (and already has). I am not really sure where he got the inspiration for the new logo and design but somehow it does say "Miami." ;) Feel free to download the blog bling and add it to your blog. For a high resolution version of the image, click here.

Another note, I have begun posting more details about sessions and speakers on the agenda page. In the upcoming weeks I will be highlighting sessions in posts on this blog and on the Flex Camp Miami site.