Well because of school taking up much of my free time, ok most of it, I haven’t gotten any farther with Flex programming. This seems to be a good thing since the main reason I was working on it was for mobile programming, and Adobe has decided Flash on the mobile is a dead end. So I did some reassessing of things and have decided to go a little different direction. For web work and mobile back ends out on the web I have decided to go with Ruby on Rails, for mobile I will take a two pronged approach. First prong will be learning how to use PhoneGap and tune up my Jquery mobile skills. Second prong will be to work on learning Rhomobile, a Ruby on Rails system for developing mobile apps. This should work well since I will need to learn Rails anyway. I am going to work through the Ruby on Rails tutorial over the winter break, I had started it a while back but classes got in the way, so I will start over and get it done over the next few weeks…. 

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I just finished the ninth chapter of the Training from the Source book which puts me half way through. Of course a lot of the first part was refresher, using Flash Builder, starting a project, View states, Using controls and so forth. Eventually it started to get into some areas I was not so familiar with in Flex such as the Event Model, Using XML Data, E4X, creating classes , Data binding and collections, and then started creating components and classes to develop a better architecture for the application. After completing the ninth chapter I took a short test with the ATTest program and scored a 50%, a little better than I figured since I still have quite a bit to cover, but it makes me feel confident that I should be able to take the certification test in August. I am planning on doing one of the ATTest tests every week from here on out to give me an idea of where I am at.

Well install is done, here are some more pics…

I really did not want to install VS 2005 & VS 2008 on this, the main reason I need VS2005 is because I use MSSQL Reporting Services and use VS2005 to design reports for it, as VS2008 seems to have a problem with that. tHen I remembered that the SQL install had an option for a install of the Reporting Services Dev as a stand alone. So I installed it, and then downloaded the service packs, and updates, then installed VS 2008 and updated it. So far looks good, but will find out for sure when I get to work tomorrow. All I have to do now is get Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop installed, then Flex, and the MotoDev IDE for Android, Mapforce, Oxygen XML editor, and MS Office and I will be back up and running on my Dev laptop . I will have the Adobe products installed tonightand will take care of the rest tomorrow.