The ASTRA website (Yahoo/Flash Developer Center) sums it up best:

ASTRA, the ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications, is a collection of Flash and Flex components, code libraries, toolkits and utilties developed by Yahoo! for ActionScript developers. These libraries available under the terms of the open source BSD license.

Yahoo has built components that are available for Flex 3 AND Flash CS3. The components are well documented, and they appear to be easily skinnable. Great work Yahoo!

The Ultrashock community has been a big inspiration for me over the years. I haven't spent as much time on their site lately, but I used to really enjoy reading through their forums.

A site upgrade may have been long overdue, but they have certainly outdone themselves this time around. They have hooked up one of the sweetest Flex sites I have seen. I'm not sure how practical this type of implementation is (especially in regards to search engine compatibility), but it sure looks cool :). It also looks like they have earned an FWA site of the day. Nice!

I follow Ryan Stewart's blog. He is well versed in Flex and other RIA technologies, and is employed at Adobe as an RIA Evangelist. His opinions are generally not heavily weighted in Adobe's favor. There were no big surprises here, but it's nice to know that we're moving the right direction.

His post on RIA predictions for 2008 is worth reading...

Ryan Stewart: Rich Internet application predictions for 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=699

Here is another good (and very relevant) forecast article:

12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=157

I ran across a site called FillColors.com that is promoting the separation of style and layout in Flex applications.

The concept isn't new; CSS Zen Garden has been using a similar tactic for ages to generate buzz around CSS styling in HTML pages, but I think this could be a great way to derail the idea that all Flex applications have to have the same basic, default, out-of-the-box look and feel.

Fill Colors is also sponsoring a contest to encourage new entries. The winner will receive a license for Flex Builder 2.

Thought you guys might be interested to know about a cool usage of Papervision3D I just found. They are first person shooter environments.

Click the top two links on that page and use the following keys for control:

Mouse click and move - look around
e - walk forward
d - backward
s - strafe left
f - strafe right

For those that don't know, your Window's "hosts" file can be used to map a domain name to an IP address to trick your browser into thinking routing requests for a particular domain to a different server.

This file is not typically needed in development, but if you ever need to map a domain to the IP address of a another server (i.e. a development server or QA server), then knowing how to edit this file may come in handy.

In Windows XP, this file is located here:

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

There are plenty of resources out there on how to edit this file, so I won't elaborate on that, but I wanted to point out a trick that is handy if you are editing this file on a regular basis.

Since the hosts file doesn't have a file extension, by default, you have to choose which program you would like to use to open it, when you double click on it. You can fix this annoying behavior by following these steps:

1. Create a shortcut to the hosts file on your desktop.
2. Right Click on the shortcut and choose properties.
3. Before continuing, you may wish to change the ugly icon by clicking the "Change Icon" button.
4. Next, edit the field called "Target" to say this:

   C:\WINDOWS\system32\notepad.exe 'c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts'

5. Then click ok to save.

That's it, now double click the icon and it will open your hosts file in notepad.

The Flex Bug and Issue Management System is now available publicly for the Flash community. Adobe has opened the doors on the internal development efforts and provided a powerful tool for direct feedback from developers. Permission is granted to all users not only browse reports, but create new ones. Equally important, Adobe engineers use this same tracking system and all issues are reviewed and maintained by QA on a daily basis.

Since so many issues and feature requests are reported, the Jira tracking system provides a clever way to rank issue importance. Developers who find a particular issue of high importance, can vote for that issue. More votes equals higher priority. QA has done a nice job of tagging those issues that need more votes to be implemented.

I can think of no more proactive way to mold a product release than by participating here. It's a good idea to check on issues regularly and vote for what best helps you develop better applications. If you don't find what you need, submit a new issue. If you don't like how Flex 3 turns out, you should have seen it coming...