When I first started doing PlayBook development with Flash Builder “Burrito” I found it kind of confusing how the PlayBook SDK installed itself. During the install process, the PlayBook AIR SDK installer prompts you for two locations; one is the location of your Flash Builder installation and the second is an existing AIR 2.5 SDK installation. If you’re using Burrito, it drops a new SDK into the sdk folder of the Burrito install (blackberry-tablet-sdk-0.9.x) and then defaults to the 4.5.0 sdk in the next screen as the AIR 2.5 SDK.

If you’re used to doing Android development then the first thing you probably did was go to create a new Flex Mobile or ActionScript Mobile Project using the PlayBook SDK. Unfortunately you’ll get this screen:

Luckily, when you selected the existing AIR 2.5 SDK (assuming you put it in the default 4.5.0 folder or any version of the “Hero” SDK with mobile components) the PlayBook installer has already linked the PlayBook SDK to that sdk. So when you create a Flex Mobile project with the Flex Hero SDK set you’ll see the required QNX .swc files already linked:

But I ran into an issue when I tried to upgrade. My colleague Mihai has a great runthrough of how to migrate from the 0.9.1 PlayBook SDK to the 0.9.2 SDK. But after I tried to upgrade all of my Flex Hero projects kept referring to the old 0.9.1 SDK. And any new Flex Hero projects I created would reference the old 0.9.1 installation. What I discovered was that something during the install process wasn’t overwriting the link in the 4.5.0 folder to the old SDK.

It seems like there is a bug that won’t overwrite the reference to the 0.9.1 correctly but the SDK is referenced in the Flash Builder preferences under Target Platforms. I just had to change it from 0.9.1 to 0.9.2 and all of my old projects as well as all of the new projects started using the new version.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Flash Builder 4 has been out in public beta for a while and it’s been fun to see it progress. One of the things I noticed about the early betas was how some of the basic features like refactoring and event handler generation made a huge difference in my productivity regardless of whether I was using Flex 3 or Flex 4.

Now that Flash Builder 4 is out, it’s even more polished and you still get some of those benefits in your Flex 3 projects. If you’re currently in the middle of a Flex 3 application or you’re planning on targeting Flex 3 for a while, you can still get a lot out of Flash Builder 4. Andrew Shorten has a good rundown of how you can use Flash Builder 4 with Flex 3 projects. It’ll save you a lot of time and make your Flex experience that much better.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog