Strange Compile Error in Flex Builder

Yesterdy I started a small project in Flex Builder. But I was stuck in the middle of the night, since Flex Builder complained about something in my source code. The Problems View in Flex Builder displayed the following error:




Wow, what a precise error message. Right-click for more information brought me to a very generic webpage telling me, that I could have probably found a compiler error. Great! First time ever that I discovered a compiler error. But wait: I bing'ed (can you say this?) for the error message, to see if somebody already reported this. BING! Match. And here we go:

The solution was pretty easy and documented here.

I searched my source code and found this line:

Have you noticed the first "=" instead of the ":"? Lucky you! It took me far too much time to discover this typo.

Fixing this typo and the error went away.

Bugfix for Project-Sprouts

A couple of days ago I setup Project-Sprouts on my Mac. I usually use maven with flex-mojos to build my Flex projects, but I wanted to have something that creates the TestRunner class and adds the necessary dependencies (in this case asUnit) to my project.
So I decided to give Project-Sprouts a try.

After updating my RubyGems installation I was able to install everything and create my first project.

Calling rake (per documentation) and downloading several other necessary stuff (flex sdk, flashplayer, asunit) the execution of the mxmlc failed with a weird error (at least for me). Rake failed while executing the mxmlc command. I started to investigate on this error and found out, that the mxmlc wrapper shell script had the wrong line endings (in this case for Windows). I opened the wrapper shell script and fixed this temporarily, to see if my analysis was correct (it was). Since I'm not really experienced with rake and the whole infrastructure, I postponed my further exercise with this toolchain to monday night in order to get things fixed. But now I discovered that Luke Bayes already found the problem and provided a fix for it. I updated Project-Sprouts with the latest version and now it's working "out of the Box". Thanks.

Growl Binding for AS3

Today I wanted to realize an idea I had for a long time: I wanted to have growl notifications for an AIR application that I'm currently writing. But I realized at some point that I need an UDP Socket to communicate with the growl subsystem and that this kind of Socket is not available from Flex. I was really disappointed but I finally found a different solution: there is a project as3growl which implements the network protocol for growl which uses the distributed objects over tcp approach. I'll give it a try tomorrow.