I just posted online a game I've been working on using Adobe's Stratus. I will probably write more later about developing with stratus and writing multi-player games, but for now, just enjoy!

http://www.multiplayer-tower-defense.com

In mxml, you have no access to the constructor of the component. Therefore, you have no way of requiring constructor arguments to be set.
I was thinking, it would be nice to have a way to enforce at least that certain properties get set.

So here's my solution. Feel free to improve upon it, it's just the first way I could think of to do this.
First, we add a metadata tag to all required properties of your Component.

[Required] public var requiredArgument:Object;

If you want to see this in AS4, vote for it here:
https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/ASC-3153

Many times have I been asked the question, "Should I use Silverlight or Flash?".

Now, I don't want to start off some fanboy discussion or write an article that appears to be biased. I'm a web developer, and I choose the tools best to solve a problem. Having said that, before the question of "Silverlight or Flash?", you should really ask:

HTML or plugin?

• Does your web app require a large amount of interactivity?
• What types of media does your app use? (Images, video, sound, animation)
• Does your media need to be protected?

Flex Repeaters can save you a lot of time. As long as they work, but troubleshooting these little guys can be a serious pain in the butt. In this article I'm going to talk about some best practices to avoid some major headaches.

MNSWF Camp is April 6th in Minneapolis at the Central Library
http://www.mnswf.com/camp/

FlashMN will be hosting a table at FlashBelt this year! Look for us there, we'll have some entertainment and a drawing. We will be offering a 2100$ Adobe software giveaway in order to promote the user group.

*NEW* This Wednesday (May 20th), FlashMN will be giving away two free passes!

If you've ever built a highly customized project before, using the Flex DataGrid, you'll know how much of a headache it can be.

• It chokes on sorting 20K or more rows on custom fields like Dates, case-insensitive Strings, or other data types.
• When you have custom item renderers, you have no easy way of accessing the cell instances.
• It's nearly impossible to extend or add your own functionality.
• Editing with it is troublesome and the UI leaves something to be desired.

So I wrote my own.

In case somebody needs it. Here's a URLValidator. I'm sure there are plenty out there, but it was quick to write, so here it is.

package com.nbilyk.flex.validators {
	import mx.validators.ValidationResult;
	import mx.validators.Validator;
 
	public class URLValidator extends Validator {
		public function URLValidator() {
			super();
		}
 
		private var _invalidUrlError:String = "This is an invalid URL.";
 
		[Inspectable(category="Errors", defaultValue="null")]
 
		/**
		 *  Error message when a string is not a valid url. 

I am in the Flash CS4 IDE.
I have a black background, and white text.

Then I click the white text to edit it.

White on white.... brilliant... Adobe, seriously.