The Joy of Flex

Our preview site is live! This is a pre-beta release that has the general look and feel of the release 1 version, but not all the features. The main purpose of this release is to get the product in front of educators, bloggers, and other decisionmakers so they can get a sense of where we’re headed in the fall. Secondarily, we’re testing out all our internal processes for delivering and supporting software on an increasing scale. And we’re also trying to find the kinds of bugs that are hard to find with in-house testing. But the point is we’re starting small and scaling slowly.

That said, I’m very happy to announce that I have gotten the OK to trickle out a small number of preview invites through this blog. I’m not quite sure how to do this, so I’m going to start by assuming that most you are here because you’re interested in Flex. Therefore, what better way to start than with a Flex programming question?

Here’s how it works. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will get an invitation emailed to them today. To avoid the spambots, don’t put your email address in the post body, just fill in the email address in the posting form — that way, only I will see it. Feel free to post as many times as you like, but only one invite per person. And if you don’t want to bother with the programming question, then please visit our waiting list signup page where you can put in your name and get an invite at some point in the future.

I’ll post a comment declaring the winner when I see the first correct answer to the following two-part question: what is the egregious error in the following code, and what are the consequences of this error?

protected override function updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number):void
{
	super.updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight);
	var g:Graphics = graphics;
	g.beginFill(0xff0000);
	g.drawRect(0, 0, unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight);
	g.endFill();
}

Hint: the answer doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that the same thing could have been accomplished with the background-color style.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Ubiquity, Flex, Word processor, Buzzword Invitations