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January 31, 2008
Vote for Flex Bugs and Feature Requests on Super Tuesday
Tuesday February 5th is Super Tuesday in the U.S., when over 20 states go to the polls to select their candidate for President of the United States. That's all well and good, but what if you don't live in the U.S.? What if your state already voted? What if your state doesn't vote yet? What if you're not 18? What if you don't care? Don't you still want to have the voting experience?
For this reason we offer Tuesday as a special day to vote on Flex Feature Requests and Bugs.
1. Go to http://bugs.adobe.com/flex
2. Register or login
3. Click on the link for "Find Issues"
4. On the left column, under, "project", select "Flex Builder" and the "Flex SDK" .
5. Under "type", select "Feature Request".
6. Click the button to "View". This will bring up a list of all of the Flex feature requests that we are considering. Peruse the list and select ones that you feel passionate about.
7. When viewing a bug, you can click on the "view" link next to the "Votes" label (on the left hand column) of the bug.
8. From this screen, you can "add" your vote to this bug. It also helps our team if you add comments to bugs describing why this bug is important to you.
Early voting is available, so, you can vote today!
Also, please file any new Feature Requests that have not been recorded in the bugbase. By Tuesday, you may also be able to vote for the bugs that are currently "Deferred". However, this isn't allowed yet, and we don't know if this will be available by then but we hope it will.
I'm Matt Chotin, a member of the Flex SDK team, and I approved this message.
Posted by mchotin at 10:22 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
Beta 2 expiring, Beta 3 watermarks, the world is ending!
Today I'm getting a nice bit of evidence in the difficulty of having a long-running public beta. Turns out there's a lot of folks who did not upgrade from beta 2 to beta 3 even though beta 3 came out well over a month ago and Flex Builder indicates that it's going to expire (ETA: looks like maybe we have a bug here since numerous folks are saying they had 44 days left according to FB. We're investigating). This expiration date is hard-coded, there's no way to extend it because guess what... we really want you to move to the new beta because feedback on an old beta is pretty useless to us.
OK, fair enough, but what if you were using the charting and ADG and were doing more than experimenting? You purchased Flex Builder 2 and Charting to make sure you had no watermarks, and now beta 3 is showing them and your FB2 serial doesn't work. Yes, this was an unfortunate side-effect of our scheduling where we had to implement a new serialization scheme. This was originally supposed to happen after our last public beta so that we wouldn't run into this, but then life happened and we had to put it in earlier. If you have a valid use-case for removing the watermark you can mail me (mchotin at you can guess where.com) and I can get you a serial that will get you through beta 3.
Sorry for the inconvenience! Despite the fact that this is clearly beta software, it's pretty interesting to see how many folks are already doing production-worthy things with it.
Posted by mchotin at 08:35 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 30, 2008
Speaking at 360Flex Atlanta
Tom beat me to the punch with a description of what we're hoping to talk about at the 360Flex Atlanta keynote. Now that Ted can't make it (it's a lie, I totally stole this keynote from him) the plan is to rock the audience with tales of the development of Flex 3, secrets about team members, and whatever else might interest folks. Interested in any inside scoop info on the Flex team or our development process? Want to see what a particular team member actually looks like? Ask in the comments and I'll see if I can get the answers into the presentation.
In addition to the Monday keynote the Flex Team is presenting two sessions that I think will be fantastic. Deepa is going to talk about the Future of Flex and Pete Farland is going to give you a tour of the Open Source Flex SDK. This means 360Flex is going to be your first opportunity to see the internals of the compiler, and how can that not be exciting?!?
If you haven't registered yet you really have no excuse.
Posted by mchotin at 01:55 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
January 21, 2008
InsideRIA now live
Looks like the world already knows but a great new site, InsideRIA is now up and running. Owned by O'Reilly, sponsored by Adobe, two great companies build one awesome site. You'll find all sorts of information there about building RIAs: from the tools and technologies, to best practices and standards, to discussions on design. Just looking at the initial line up of contributors makes it pretty clear you're going to be getting first-class information.
Congratulations to all the folks making this possible, especially Rich and Andre.
Posted by mchotin at 05:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2008
Addressing Bugs in Flex
One of my primary functions as a Product Manager is to interact with the Flex community to make sure that the current product is meeting its needs and find out things we can be doing in the future to meet those needs even better. As we've moved Flex towards open source we've introduced additional infrastructure to help facilitate these kinds of interactions, most importantly the public bugbase. This has been a great mechanism for everyone to let us know what problems they're facing as well as keep folks informed of what fixes are becoming available. I think it's worked pretty well, but there are certainly some things that can be improved.
One difficulty for the community is finding a way to let Flex management know that the resolution of a bug is unsatisfactory. E.g., you cannot currently vote on deferred bugs, or if a bug is marked Not a Bug you have little recourse to have the bug re-opened. We do have plans to make sure you can vote on deferred bugs (in fact the implementation is waiting on a staging server, due to release timing we need to wait a little). We also need to implement some queries that will allow us to find bugs that have been commented on after their latest status change, which may indicate the need to revisit.
You may recognize why I bring this up, Doug McCune had a pretty strongly-worded criticism on the behavior of the Panel class when its borderStyle was set to a non-default value. I think there are a few reasons why this ended up being frustrating and want to explore that a little.
From the Adobe side, our attitude was that we never intended the behavior to work. However, this was not called out in Flex 2, so folks began to take advantage of untested behavior. When we formalized the lack of support in Flex 3 (and removed some hacks that we didn't like), folks who were using what we considered unsupported behavior ran into issues. We marked the issue as Not a Bug and explained that we didn't support those additional borderStyles. This may be fair enough if we're working on something new right? The problem was that regardless of our own internal understanding of whether the behavior was supported, the fact of the matter was that it used to work and therefore reasonable people were relying on the behavior. What we internally might have considered a bug (Panel not rejecting unsupported styles) had become a feature for developers. We made a mistake in failing to recognize that the same bug was being filed multiple times by different people and therefore it was a behavior that multiple folks cared about having back. Folks might have understood (grudgingly) if we had marked the bug as Will Not Fix (because we're mean, or out of time, or whatever). The Not a Bug status was being taken as an insult. So we needed to reconsider.
We are at a point in Flex 3 where we do not consider fixes lightly and generally are now trying to avoid checking in more code. We admittedly only considered evaluating this situation because of the number of folks who seemed to make a statement on it (a bug that doesn't affect a large number of people has very little chance of being addressed in the 3.0.0 release at this point). We also looked at what the fix would actually be. If we could have put a fix entirely in PanelSkin we probably would have posted the code on Doug's blog, said "use this new skin" and been done with it. However we found that we did need to make a change in the Panel class which meant that a workaround was much harder for developers. After evaluating the risk of hurting other code we decided to check the fix in. So there you go, PanelSkin will support some of the non-default borderStyles now (and we'll have to decide if this is now behavior that we need to support forever).
So what recourse do you have if you think we're dropping the ball on other issues? I mentioned a few things above about having voting on deferred issues and better querying that the management team can use to make sure we are paying attention to the community. Additionally when the open source infrastructure is live we will have a development list that can occasionally be used to make sure that the SDK developers are aware of an issue where it seems like it may be lost in the bug system. The final option of course is to contact a Product Manager (like me). My job is about making sure we're doing the right thing. If you think things are messed up, let's discuss (mchotin AT adobe DOT com).
Posted by mchotin at 09:51 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
January 11, 2008
What would you like to hear about from the Flex team at 360Flex?
If you haven't checked out what's going on at 360Flex in Atlanta you really should, it looks like it's going to be great! As you look at the schedule you'll see that there is a ton of great content planned, along with two open slots for the Flex team. What would you like to see us talk about? Are you looking to understand a particular feature better (either in the SDK or Flex Builder)? Want to learn more about future plans? Popular topics in the past have been about Flex Builder secrets, and understanding more about the framework architecture. We can certainly repeat those if you're a new attendee, but if you've seen these online maybe you're looking for something new. What can the Flex Team offer you that you can't get elsewhere (talk-wise)?
Posted by mchotin at 02:23 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack