Data push from .NET to Flex

So finally after some delay have my article up on Adobe Developer Connection. The MidnightCoders  provided me with this opportunity to write the article on WebORB for .NET. I like to express my extreme gratitude to people who have helped me directly or indirectly in bringing about this article.

The article is about how one can use MSMQ (free queuing mechanism included with most Windows OS) to push data from .NET to Flex client with the help of WebORB.

I enjoyed writing this piece and also got more understanding about MSMQ. Check out the article - http://adobe.ly/nEil5v. Comments & feedbacks are welcome.

Not enough blogging?

Not an appropriate heading, but nevertheless it is a fact that I have not been here in this world of words from last year. My last proper post was when last Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010 took place. I am not sure if that was a coincidence. However, was busy with lot of different work and also some changes in life.

Now, AFPS 2011 is back tomorrow and I have also decided to get back to blogging with it. Will be attending the summit, which has been an excellent platform for understanding and learning new things/concepts in Flash Platform. The summit is a place where I get to see all the superstars from the community together, it is always a great experience to talk to them and even better when they share their experience and we learn from them. I am sure this time the summit is going to be even bigger.

Would be posting on the new things that I have learned. Also, got a chance to write an article with the encouragement of  MidnightCoders, which is also due for a long time and will be published shortly. Lots to write about but have to decide where to start.

Impressive Notion Ink Adam

Reviews by Engadget on Notion Ink Adam, one of the long awaited Android tablet from India-based start-up is most impressive.
Check out this video for more details:

Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010 was awesome!

Finally, was able to make it to the Adobe Summit last week in Bangalore even though everything was fixed at the last moment. As expected, was able to meet  and share ideas with many of the prominent and active members/managers of the community.The best thing about the Bangalore is its weather and its cosmopolitan culture but the worst thing is the rickshaw wala.

There were about 1000+ attendees in the summit. Learned some new concepts by attending very informative sessions by Deepa Subramaniam,  Mrinal Wadhwa, Hemant Sharma, Uday Shankar, Alvin Zhang. Alvin’s talk on brain power was one which took most of the audience by surprise. Key note sessions by Ben Forta and Ramesh were also inspiring. The dismissal of the session on social, multi-player games was a real disappointment. Even though Adobe Flash is used as a major platform for building games on web, summits like these lacks any representation or discussion on gaming which I think should be considered in the next summits, this is purely my observation, correct me if I am wrong.

Had the company of Aneesh Anand and Juwal Bose(Kerala UG Manager) for two days , this was the first time we met in person and had a really great time together. At the summit, there were booth where different companies showcased their products and services and I believe this was done for the first time. iPlotz and Onion TV were one of the stalls that caught my attention, they have built fantastic products with flash platform. The other highlight of the event was delicious food, and also the giveaways, by Esberi, Teknopoint and of course Adobe..Loved all of the goodies.

Overall, the summit was great and eventually will be more better in the years to come. Looking forward to attending the next summit in 2011. Would like to thank and extend my appreciation to Adobe Evangelist team who had been working hard for last two months to organize such a large and successful event. Cheers Guys

Click on the images below to view more photos. PS: Unfortunately most of the photos are blurred. Don’t blame me

Update: Managed to collect the presentation slides from the speakers at Adobe Flash Platform Summit 2010. Check it out:

MultiScreen experiences with Adobe Flash Platform by Hemant Sharma:

Visual Experience with Flex 4 by Saurabh Narula:

Mechanical Designer by Deepak Pakhare:

Flex 3 to Flex 4 by Yash Mody:

UI Engineering Rebooted by Uday Shankar:

Adobe Flex + Paypal X = Monetization of RIA by Ganesh Hegde:

Less Verbose Actionscript 3.0 – Write less and do more by Arul Kumaran

Adobe Flex and .NET using WebORB

Two weeks back  got a chance to write a technical article on my present company’s blog where I decided to write something related to my current project where we have an application being developed with Adobe Flex on the front end and .NET as the server side technology. In order to invoke .NET objects into the Flex client we are using WebORB for .NET and my experience with it till now is pretty good.

Check out the article which explains how to create a simple Flex application which communicates with .NET objects using WebORB and also it’s configurations – http://tinyurl.com/weborb-flex

Cheers

FX4 Event in Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad Flash Platform User Group is organizing a special UG meet named FX4 Event. For the very first time we will have some one from Adobe to speak for the User Groupin Ahmedabad. Sujit Reddy from the Adobe evangelist team will be taking sessions for this event on Flex 4, Flash Builder. Livecycle DS, Flash Player etc.In Ahmedabad since we are only maturing as a user group it is pretty hard to pull out people from their comfort zone to attend such events but I believe events like this will make a change in the mindset of the crowd and we are trying hard to pull in more crowd to this event.

Initially we were a little hung up with the venue since first we targeted a technical institute then due to some wrong communications and the norms of the Institute we had to change the venue two days back to my office premise where we have a pretty decent conference room.Now everything seems to be set and all geared up for the event.Also will be exciting to see Sujit in action.

Often I have heard companies in Ahmedabad stating that we do not get enough of quality Flash/Flex developers from Ahmedabad and I would say as a user group we can help you out and that is why the user group across the world organize such events. Until and unless people get to know some new things/share experience about the technology they work on, there is no scope for improvement at any level. Hope all the companies in Ahmedabad take these events seriously enough to allow their developers/designers to be a part of such event. The event details are as shown below and for registration http://fx4eventahmedabadfug.eventbrite.com/. Fingers crossed and lets hope for the best.

Channel.Security.Error and webservices

Today I burned out sometime fixing an issue in an application related to security violation of a SWF file when calling a webservice hosted on another domain. At first even though if it was quite obvious that the error had something to do with the crossdomain, I was not sure what was happening, but after some trial and error and some searching, found that this issue occurs when one thing is missing in the crossdomain xml. The missing node was -

<allow-http-request-headers-from domain=”*” headers=”SOAPAction”/>

This addition was made with the update in Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115.0 which means that if a domain wants to receive headers from a remote SWF it should have a crossdomain xml with the above node added. Find more information here – http://bit.ly/a04r0m . After reading this technote came to know that this update was made  in order to increase the security level and defend against malicious HTTP headers sent by content from other domains. Also was made aware that not all headers can be sent from Flash player and list of blacklisted headers can be found here – http://bit.ly/cPy6CW.

Ideally your crossdomain in these scenarios when working with webservice should look like :

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.adobe.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="SOAPAction"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

All these kind of issues only pops up once an application is developed and once we finish integration with a backend. So, better check this out guys whenever you deal with http headers and remote SWF ,so that you dont waste considerable time wondering where did you go wrong. Many of you  might be already aware of this setting and those who don’t yet know about this please take a note.

Cheers

TextArea with dynamic height based on the text

I am sure all the Flex/Air developers might have to use text area most of the times when you are building an application. Text area control with dynamic height seems not be an issue in normal cases but if the height needs to calculated based on text in the control then we need to think. I had the same requirement. Of course no SCROLLS.

I extended mx.controls.TextArea and here is what  I did quickly.

This worked for me.Maybe there is a better way to do this. Let me know if you have tried this in a different way

Cheers.

Good bye 2009

2009 was a year with a lot of ups and downs for me personally and I guess that was the same all over the world. 2009 had been very eventful both personally and professionally. I had to deal with lot of challenges as I move forward in my career and of course nothing to complain about since, good or bad it is always experiences that teaches us to deal with life.

Adobe Flash community strengthened itself this year even in economic recession period it did stand apart from the rest. Hope we won’t face such a recession time ever again. We had our Ahmedabad user group to be more active this year and I believe we should try and put in more efforts to spread more awareness among people about the community and its activities. We planned to launch a user group website this year but unfortunately due to hectic schedules that never happened but this time we will surely get it done. I could see many new development in the RIA and it gives a clear indication that 2010 will be an year which will obviously include wide adoption of Flex 4(as it is due to be released in 2010) but also mobile development will also be a major part. I also got a chance to attend an Adobe event this year for the very first time which was quite important for me and will look forward to attending such events in 2010.

It has been about 3 years in this beautiful city of Ahmedabad and I have been working with a great team here which is rapidly gaining strength. I am not sure as to how long will I continue here but I love this place and love working with my team.
Goodbye 2009. Welcome 2010. Wishing you all a very happy new year

Cheers

AIR – Process terminated without establishing connection to debugger

This is strange and I am not sure if anybody else had the same  experience . Today morning when I opened Flex builder to continue my work on an AIR  application after couple of builds and runs the application stopped launching. I tried several times and was confused as to what could have happened to the application that was running perfectly last time. Then I tried debugging it only to find a prompt which says -”Process terminated without establishing connection to debugger”.

To find a fix to this I turned to the only hope for all developers GOOGLE and found that there was a similar issue reported to the Adobe BugList http://tinyurl.com/d3ws5h but this issue was reported only for MAC machines and mine was windows.

It suddenly struck my mind that it was after the application threw a runtime error all this started and curiously I opened the taskmanger and BINGO!! here it is adl.exe is still running. I ended adl process in the task manager and everything was to normal. The adl.exe which is located inside the bin folder under sdk folder of the Adobe Flex  installation directory is the factor which launches your AIR application (something like C:\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.4.0\bin).

Now what could have happened is when the application threw a run time exception even though the application was closed the instance of adl.exe was still running in the system which prevented the next launch.  This might not be proper fix but surely which can get you out of trouble. I wonder if anybody else had faced the same problem if yes, do let me know if you had some other way to fix this.