Tuesday General Session of MAX

The General Session on Tuesday was led by Tim Buntell, the Sr. Product Manager for Flex Builder. They walked through a lot of functionality with Tim as Agent B doing a James Bond inspired walk-thru the 'lab' to look at all of the cool new stuff. It was definitely entertaining.

There were a few things that really caught my attention (besides the James Bond theme) during this session. One was Project Alchemy. This technology allows you to take C/C++ code and recompile it into ActionScript! Think of all that C/C++ code bouncing around the web that Flex developers can not take advantage of! They showed an example of a NES emulator running in Flash player as well as a Quake Player. That was pretty awesome to see. I can't wait to take advantage of some C/C++ code!

Something else that I'm sure many people will be excited to hear is that there is an IDE coming out for Cold Fusion called Bolt. It will be built off of Eclipse just like Flex Builder and from the little they talked about it I think it will be a nice change for Cold Fusion developers.

Now how is this for a shell shocker: There is a new plugin for VS 2008 called Tofino that allows you to create Flex applications/front ends for your projects! That's right, you can develop a Flex application in Visual Studio! If anyone gives this a try please let me know. It didn't seem to be that big of a deal to anyone at MAX but I think it was because most of them have never even used Visual Studio. I'd like to hear how well it performs and integrates with a normal .NET workflow.