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First:

FlexUnit 4 has NOTHING to do with Flash Builder 4 in terms of version number. It actually relates to JUnit 4 (which specific version, I don’t know, someone?). So for those of you wondering, yes, it can test Flex 3 SDK , not just Flex 4 SDK projects.

Next: Getting started

Whether you have an already created project, or are starting a brand new one, there is a simple set of steps that you can perform in Flex Builder 4 to set up your project for unit testing.

I am writing this, because I thought it should be easy, and it is, I just went about it the wrong way and I want you out there to not have to make the same mistake.

Originally, I was right clicking on the Package Explorer and trying to use Execute FlexUnit Tests menu item. While this will eventually work, it won’t yet. Why? You haven’t set up your project to know that it has FlexUnit tests!

Steps: (This is the way I know how to do it, if you know another way, let me know!)

1. Select Run > Run > FlexUnit Tests
   1. This brings up a progress dialog that sets up all of the libraries into your project.
   2. Then the Run FlexUnit Tests dialog comes up.
   3. If you haven’t written any tests yet, then you can only Cancel from this.
2. Write some tests!
   1. Create a new package that will contain all of your tests. This way you can keep track of them more easily and separate them out of your production code.
   2. A simple testing class will look like this:
   ^?Download download.txt

   package TestingPackage { import flexunit.framework.Assert;   public class TestSampleLayout { [Test] public function testAssertFalse():void { Assert.assertFalse( false ); }   [Test] public function testSampleLayoutFunctionReturn():void { var initialString : String = "Hello World."; var finalString : String; finalString = new SampleLayout().sampleFunctionReturnTest( initialString ); Assert.assertEquals( initialString, finalString ); }   public function TestSampleLayout() { } } }

   3. This class does two tests.
      1. It asserts that False really is false. You normally wouldn’t do this, but it shows you something of what you can do.
      2. It tests the method “sampleFunctionReturnTest” of the class SampleLayout. The method merely spits back whatever string it was entered.
   4. So when it gets run through AssertEquals, and they are equal, then the test passes. If they are not, then it would fail.
3. Note that before each test method is [Test], this is what FlexUnit 4 uses to determine if a method is a test or not. So you need that before every test you want run.

I am still working out all of the different types of testing that are available, but this should hopefully get you started until I post more, or more documentation becomes available.

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I’m still working at Digital Primates and loving what I do there. I haven’t had much time while on the job to study up for the Flex Developer’s Certification, so I do that as much as I can from home. I need to take a practice test or two to see where I would score if I took the actual test, and where I need to focus my studies to make sure I pass.

Over the last several months I have worked more with the Flex Framework than I have ever before. I am so used to doing things in pure AS2 an AS3, that I had to retrain myself to look for things in the framework that were already waiting for me to just use them. Some of the people at DP also have been a great help in this. I’d thank them all here, but I’d really be thanking everyone at the company, so thanks guys.

Moving on into the late summer, I am still working on my augmented reality project. My friend and now co-worker (he’s an intern at Digital Primates), Joe, is helping me work through the FLARToolkit. Making things make sense, and finding out where we can speed things up. Optimization was the main topic last week. This week it was me solo, but I was able to get DAZ3D models into our app. Definitely need more optimizing there (15 Meg for a model! jeesh!).

Oh, and I am also now a contributor to the FLARToolkit’s repo. Haven’t submitted anything yet, but I should before the next post. So with Podiobooks.com, this is the second open source project that I am currently active in.

I may get out another post before Gen Con, so stay tuned.

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The sessions were nearly all good, I gained both knowledge and varying ways of presenting from them. I did record most of the sessions that I participated in, but since I am behind on getting Flex Camp Chicago recordings to you, and I didn’t get permission to post recordings, they won’t show up here. Don’t despair though, the Flex Show recorded all of the sessions and will be releasing them. When they do I will notify you here.

A note for all future presenters, if you use an internet connection for your presentation make sure you have a backup plan or can talk past it. I saw at least two presentations where the connection was too slow to be useful. One handled it smoothly, the other was derailed and was less engaging because of it.

I participated in the Charity Code Jam for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). It was an app that would track runners in a marathon via RFID and display the runners on the map. It also allowed coaches to look up and change runner information, volunteers to check in runners, and had an interactive mode for spectators to look up individual runners. It was an amazing time, and I met a lot of great developers of all skill levels. We got the app to about 70% for the Wednesday keynote speech, and since I had been up for more than 24 hours straight at that point I ended my participation there. The code is open source, and will be released for further development and use in other marathons. So when I find out where the project is going to be hosted, I will post that here too.

The people I met at the Charity Code Jam and around the convention are people that I look forward to keeping up with. They are developers of varying stripes. People that do pure Flex, some PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, you name it and I probably could tell you someone who did it. Definitely more on those folks as I gather the business cards, twitter handles, and email addresses for them.

As I keep saying, more to come in later posts. 360|Conferences is starting to host more conferences, so if you aren’t a Flex developer they probably will have a development conference for you at some point. Right now they have an iPhone developer conference, an RIA and mobile conferences are scheduled. The blog site for 360|Conferences is very basic right now, but don’t let that put you off. This conference was excellent and if I have the time I will be going to more.

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…

Before I was hired, I thought I knew a fair amount about Flex, having been working with Flash AS2 for many years, and then moving over to Flex and AS3, it seemed more or less like a change in syntax, plus some nice things with the Flex framework that were definite improvements over the Flash IDE for developers.

I was wrong.

I thought I knew, but there is so much more that I didn’t know that I am humbled by the amount that I know is still there and the huge leap in knowledge that I have gained since working there for the few short weeks that I have been training there. Yep, you heard right, training. It’s been a while since I have worked at a job that cared enough about it’s employees, and it’s reputation enough to train new employees enough so that they can do the job right the first time.

…

I’ve had this blog post mostly written for at least a month now. So I am posting it here so you can get an update on what I have been doing. The rest of the post I will write up later. It will be about the Flex component framework. From what I understand, as soon as Flex 4 comes out later this year, that post may become out of date. I’ll be doing it anyway so I know it better, and there are probably more than a few people who will be using Flex 3 for a while after Flex 4 comes out. It’s just the nature of business to not upgrade right away.

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There was also an all to brief introduction to AMF and it’s capabilities. I would love to be able to use BlazeDS, but I am fairly sure that my current ISP won’t support it. I may have to set up a box at home just to play around with it. It has a lot of capabilities that I would like to use both for The Stone Table (more on that in a later post), and PodioBooks.com.

It’s about 20 minutes until start time here, and today looks to be even better than yesterday. Today is supposed to be the expert session, while yesterday was the beginner session. I consider myself fairly well versed in Flex and ActionScript 3, but I can see that there is a whole lot more that I could dig into, and that excites me to no end.

–

Edit: I forgot to mention, I am also Twittering during the sessions, and recording them. Follow me on Twitter today (vandermore), or search for #flexcampchi.

A podcast of the sessions, hopefully with the demonstrations, should be coming as soon as I can edit things and get the files.

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So right now I am looking for more work, especially contract, but more and more the stability of the full time position is looking really good. I have another interview tomorrow for one, and it looks to be somewhere I would like to work.

Tomorrow I also go to Flex Camp Chicago, both to learn more about Flex and to meet people in the Chicago area Flex community. It’s the first real conference I have been to in a long time, and I am looking forward to it. http://flexcampchicago.com

It turns out that my resume seems to focus on my design skills, which I really haven’t used in the last 4.5 years. I am definitely a developer, and one that knows OOP and Design Patterns. This doesn’t do me justice when I am in interviews unfortunately, so a revision of the resume is in order.

Speaking of interviews, I do have a gripe. I’ll try to stay as positive as possible, but it is going to be hard. I have had several technical interviews over the last few weeks, and two stand out as WTF moments. Here I am, a Flash and Flex developer, and in both of these interviews I am asked about 2 questions on ActionScript development. The rest of them were all on HTML, CSS (in web pages, not in Flex), and JavaScript. After both interviewers told me that they were not ActionScript developers, and they then asked their questions about JavaScript and HTML, I should have stopped the interview right there and asked them if they were going to ask any questions relating to the actual skills that I had. As it turns out, I did poorly on those “technical” interviews, since I haven’t used any of those skills in 4.5 years, and it isn’t something that I want to do with my career anyway. Ok, I do want to learn AJAX, but I already know that I couldn’t answer questions on it now. So live and learn I suppose. The next time I get into that situation, I will be polite but firm about asking if they are going to ask Flex and Flash development questions, and if they say no, then I will end the interview, letting them know that I am not a JavaScript, HTML, and CSS developer.

On to more positive stuff. I have become a developer on the newly open sourced PodioBooks.com, and I am going to be learning Python to work with it. It’s a language that intrigues me, and in addition to that, learning several languages will inform my coding overall. The Stone Table project is also something that is being taken out of mothballs, Chris Miller and I are reviving it, and I hope that Ken Newquist will also rejoin us.

Enough for now, back to coding!

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Three days later, I found myself distressingly back to normal, blessedly back to normal. At least my outward routine hadn’t changed. I told my wife that I had hit a deer, and the car was in the body shop for repairs. I however, would take a lot longer to get over that late night incident. I’m still not over it actually.

“Max. Max? Hey Man!” At the shove on my shoulder, I shook myself out of my memories for the fifth time that day, and focused up on my boss, Terry. He’s a large man, made larger from years sitting in a chair looking at code on a screen. Which is the same thing I do, and only through decent genetics have I avoided the worst of the weight gain that most people in my line of work get as they get older; though I am by no means thin. “Sorry Terry, must be the lunch catching up with me.” He frowned, “We have to get this thing out the door tonight. Quit daydreaming and get into it!” He walked off with a “hmpf,” and with him went most of my drive to code. I tried for the sixth time to get back into the code that I was working on. It’s not brain surgery, just a financial web site, but the client wanted it out yesterday and was paying my company big bucks to make it happen. Were we going to see any of that money? Nope. Which is why I have been spending most of the last month at the computer, up late, and is the reason I was on that road at 3am to meet my date with fate.

I hunkered down for the last few hours of the day, leaving after 7pm, late again. My wife wouldn’t be happy, heck I wasn’t. Once again, it was getting dark as I left the building. I hurried a bit to my rental car, a fairly nice one, well at least nicer than the 5 year old car that was currently in the shop. I just didn’t want to be outside when the sun finally did go down. Turns out, that was a good thing.

I was driving home, avoiding “the road”, as I had ever since the accident. It was a longer route, but I didn’t want to be anywhere around there since that night three days ago. It didn’t matter. As I was coming down the hill near my house, I saw them. The shadows out of the corner of my eye, the ones that I used to see all the time on the road. I leaned forwards to get a better look out my window. Like that ever helps. It made me feel more alert though. My hands grew cold, and I don’t mean from the temperature, I mean they grew cold. My breath started to steam up as it passed over the top of my hands, and I knew that wasn’t a good sign. They hurt a little, like I had just shoved my warm hands into wet snow, but I wasn’t going to pay attention to that when I was seeing those shadows outside. I was coming up fast on the stop sign at the end of the street, just a few blocks away from my home. I debated about running it, but saw that there were cars already there, so running it would mean running into one. I really didn’t want to stop, but I didn’t want to get into an accident and have to get out of my car even less. I’m still not sure if I should have stopped, but I did, and that is when they came.

I pulled up short at the stop sign, the tires screeching a bit. I had every intent to start up again as soon as it was my turn to go, but I never got that chance. The shadows that I had been seeing, the ones shaped like people, that always got out of the way before, didn’t. They got closer instead. Suddenly, the only light that I could see was that of my gauges on my car, and the reflection of them in the windows. Everything else was pitch black. I was terrified. I couldn’t move, even though I knew I just needed to pull my foot off the break. I couldn’t move, because I could see faces, faces in the blackness. The faces were similar to the one I saw three nights ago, but each was different, like a ghostly people. Each was looking at me. It seemed forever, them staring at me, me staring back. I half wondered what it looked like outside the car, if anyone else was engulfed in the blackness, probably me just sitting in my car, the car just sitting there at the stop sign. I slowly raised my hands in a conciliatory gesture. When I did, all eyes went from mine, to my hands. I swear I saw several of those eyes widen, and then they all disappeared back into the dusk. My world returned to normal, instantly, and my hands began to warm up. The intersection was empty, all the cars must have gone while I sat there encased in shadowy forms. I slowly looked at my hands, backs, then palms, nothing strange to the eyes. So I put them back on the wheel and slowly started through the intersection. I drove the rest of the way back to my house in silence, and blessedly uneventfully.

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As I watched my hands I started talking to myself again, which is fairly normal when I am under stress. “Ok, ok, not sleeping tonight. What in the heck was that guy? I mean I always wanted there to be stuff out there, but never really believed it. Ok, maybe I did when I was a kid, but not for a while now. Even then I knew that it wasn’t real.” The soap, got to have soap. “So what do I do now? Look into it obviously, but how? If there were one of them, there have to be more.” At that thought, I remembered the feeling of people looking on just before I left the scene. I took a moment to flip on the lights above the sink in the kitchen. Then, hands still wet, turned on the main lights as well, suddenly afraid of a shadowy reprisal. I looked over both shoulders, just to make sure nothing was there. Luckily, nothing was.

I finished washing my hands, and dried them off. Moving to the living room, I turned on all the lights, and sat on the couch. It’s a nice couch, comfortable, but sometimes takes my body heat and turns it around and heats me up. It was then that I saw the remote across the room, got up, and turned on the tv with it. Returning to the couch, I dropped into it, and slouched. Flipping channels until the sun came up.

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There is a road I used to take on the way home at night. The shadows moved strangely there, getting out of the headlights just before I got to them like people moving quickly across the street. One night, one of them didn’t move fast enough.

My tires screetched as I jammed on the brakes, but I was way to late for that. The thump and crunch sounds as I hit the man I will never forget. The soft but solid thump of his body being hit by my car sounded like someone hitting a large plastic garbage can. The crunching snapping sounds of my car’s bumper being smashed in happened at the same time, but seemed much less important than the living thing that I had just hit; so the sounds of the body sound louder in my mind even today. I barely felt the car slow.

I wasn’t trying to hit anyone, I was actually being fairly careful; since deer and other animals cross that road often at night. Even though I had my eyes out for those, the man surprised me. As soon as the car stopped, I turned off the car, set the hazards, and jumped out, trying to see if I could help, but knowing that hitting a person at 45 miles an hour, it was probably impossible that someone could survive. I was right, unfortunately.

The man lay there, dressed in a dark hooded overcoat, blood streaming from his head and face. His legs didn’t look right, and to be honest, I was surprised he was concious. He looked in pain, but didn’t scream out, or even moan. He made nearly no sounds at all. He seemed surprised to see me, when I looked him in the eyes. His mouth opened to say something, but he only choked a bit. The sound of his cough loud in my ears. Blood dribbled out of his mouth, and his eyes rolled up into his head. I lurched forward to help him, careful not to let him move in case it would hurt him more. When I touched him, my hands sank through, into, the back of his hooded head, and into his shoulder, then turned cold as ice in a moment. That’s when the man’s eyes locked onto mine, snapping back from his near seizure. They grew wide, and then he dissappeared. Yeah, you heard me right, dissappeared. Like a cloud of dark smoke, his body just popped. I knew he was dead, I don’t know how, or at least back then I didn’t, but I knew. As the last wisps of smoke floated away, a great contrast to the violent hit earlier, I looked into the broken headlight of my car, seeing for the first time the blood on the hood. It wasn’t much, and I might have missed it normally. As wired as I was though, it seemed to stand out like a neon sign. It was then that I felt like I was being watched, that something bad was coming my way.

It was then that I got in my car and sped away.

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Right now I am doing work with LifeSnapz, and have several roleplaying game writing contracts on deck. I am still looking at one full time employment opportunity, but I have at least one other possible large job that is definitely interesting. Note: Make that three others. Overall, I am really hoping to make this business work.

I am really enjoying being on my own with this. I still have some schedules set by other people, and I still need to meet those deadlines. The place that I work, and when I work though, are pretty much up to me. It is amazing how much I realized the commute and working in an office was taking out of me, now that I am not doing the 2-3 hours of commute a day, plus the hours in the office. I also get to see my kids a lot more, big huge plus there.

If any of you out there are needing Rich Internet Application (RIA), Flex/Flash, or web development work done, contact me through the comments if you don’t know my normal contact info. I’ll get some contact information or a form up soon. Just realized that I don’t have that up.

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Note the nugget of wisdom above for other contract and freelance workers. December, especially the last two weeks of December, is the worst time to find work over the entire year. I suppose that this year for many people that it is doubly so. So if you have the chance to grab a contract or three that will last you into January, do so early.

Here’s an almost disaster turned into a great customer service story. My machine is an HP Pavilion notebook, a dv7 series for those that are interested. I have had it for several months now, and earlier last week, the AC adapter started making strange noises. Today, I thought it would be a good time to call HP service to see what they would do about it. While on the call, the adapter stopped charging my notebook, and I couldn’t get it to work again. (I have since the call, but then, no power.) Let me just say that the HP support person was very helpful, almost too self deprecating, and she was quite efficient, even if her computer systems were slow. I was on the phone just about 20 minutes from the start of the call, to the end where they took my address and were shipping me the new AC adapter. A fairly short, and definitely productive, call and I will have the new AC adapter on December 26th via FedEx. The computer is under warranty, and I was thinking that they would need me to cross ship the old adapter, and so did the support person, but as we both found out, I don’t need to. I keep the one that is acting up, and get the new one later this week. Not that I am going to want to use the old one, but in case the new one shorts out, I can go to the old one for backup. Overall, I would continue buying HP products. A few years ago, I would not have said that. Good job HP.

Happy holidays!

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