Version control. Macromedia Flash and Visual SourceSafe.

Version control is usually a pain. Many stand-alone programmers or small companies do not need any, or at least they think so. My group managed working without using any version control software also. But it was getting harder and harder each day because of the growing scope and quantity of projects. You just can not remember all the things…

Here are a few articles about, which I found helpful when setting Microsoft Visual SourceSafe to work with Macromedia flash:

• At dmxZone


• At communityMX


• At ActionScripts.org


• At LiveDocs

Visio and form design

I used to make quick sketches on paper for my coworkers, when tried to explain what functionality of the form I need. Of course paper sketches management is far to hard task for any group leader :). I looked for some way of doing that in some electronic form – and, what a surprise, our old fried MS VISIO suites for these purposes perfectly.

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Google analytics

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Everyone talks about new Google service Google analytics for a last few days. I'll bring my opinion after useing it for some time.

Flash compiler again

We have few fellow developers developing flash application over network. And some not understandable compiler behavior arises from time to time – changes made in class (*.as) files does not effect compiled *.swf files. It seems that classes are taken from cache. Actually the compiler creates corresponding .aso files for each class in this directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash MX 2004\\Configuration\Classes\aso

Compiler uses the Timestamps of the ASO file to determine if class needs to be recompiled. So ones, developing application over the network can run into this issue if clocks are not synchronized.

More about this issue.

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