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I got an email this morning from The Movie Chef about how he liked one of my articles and had put a reference to me on his home page. I figured I would return the favor.

Here is what he had to say:

I want to especially thank author Jack Herrington for an excellent article on Ajax that explainedthe basics in a way that several multi-hundred page books had not. All of the flaws of this site are my own, but any Web 2.0 goodies that work, come from his insights and examples.

Thank you!

To be honest when I first started in C# I didn't think much about the syntax. Having worked for years in C++ and Java it was nice to see a language that was a cleaned up hybrid of both. At first I was glad to be rid of C++ generics because of the complexity that they brought to the language. But the lack of strongly typed collections was a bit of a drag.

The big news of the day is that a beta of Flash Player 10 has been released. Astro has 3D rendering built-in, as well as a new filtering suite. This is going to be an amazing release for Adobe and give a big boost to the Flex community. I can't wait to dig in.

I love it when I have a little project in mind and it comes together really quickly. I wanted to build an image uploader that used Amazon's S3 storage service as a back-end. One Google search got me the S3 AS3 library and within an hour I was done. What a great little API. I've worked with S3 API's before and this one is by far the cleanest. My only complaint is that it doesn't give me the ability to specify public/private access controls on objects that I upload.

I'm an instant fan of Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope. What a great idea. Access to tons of astronomical pictures and data at your fingertips. I really enjoy the tours. Some of which are done very professionally, and other's, like one done by a six year old that I listened to, were just for the fun of it. It's nice to see Microsoft getting out there and using some of it's massive resources for the benefit of the community.

I had thought of spending most of the weekend writing up some Flex examples for a chapter of a book I'm working on. But then came Boom Blox. I gave the game to my daughter as a present for doing a huge mega-clean on her room. Unfortunately I didn't realize how addictive the game is. It combines the best thing about Jenga, which is watching the thing collapse, and explosions, which are always fun.

I'm not sure why Silverlight 2 doesn't have the normal Timer class. Perhaps it's to keep people from using it instead of Timelines and Storyboards. But, as it turns out, it does have a timer, it's called DispatchTimer and it's in the System.Windows.Threading namespace.

You should have a look at the Thermo demo from MAX. It looks really good.

Looks like states will be getting more attention in the next release of Flex. Thank goodness. I think states are one of the defining features of Flex, and yet are the most uncovered. We spend so much time talking about the control set that we don't spend enough time covering the entire body of the UI and it's interaction modes with the customer. And that's where states really come in handy.

Book update: The title is now officially 'Getting Started With Flex 3'.

Juan Sanchez has a great Introduction to Degrafa up on InsideRIA. Degrafa is well worth the look. It makes building custom graphics in Flex applications a snap. Plus it fits nicely into the framework so that you can do things like use Degrafa for control skinning.