I just got back from San Diego where we've all been working feverishly on the swf creation tool (almost ready for beta 2). Now I understand that I may not be the least biased person in the world here, but holy shit, it is getting pretty compelling. Before you run away screaming infomercial, please let me explain why this isn't just bragging or self promotion...

Let me say first, the best things about it (imo of course) are:
1) it runs on the Flash Player (not ours), and
2) it uses C#, .Net, and editors of the Visual Studio caliber (also not ours).
So you can think of this part like a very negatively charged thundercloud, and a very positively charged earth. We just supply the golf club.

We are indeed making components, using very well crafted code and beautiful designs, so naturally I have nothing to do with either of these things. That leaves our Xaml/IL > Swf compiler. The Xaml part was written before I arrived at Xamlon (and I'm still not nearly as fluent as I would like). I did write some of the swf generator, however anything in there that Kevin Lindsey touches becomes about 800% better within a day or two, so it is pretty easy to remain humble (or outright depressed!). So this really isn't bragging or even Xamlon boosting, I promise, but here it comes.

When using full bore C# in Visual Studio, to make swfs, I feel like -- man I feel like I've got a great big pair of ass kicker boots on. There moments of clarity we had that were actually outright exciting, someone would yell 'DEMO!' and whooa, holy crapola yeaah, whoooo! Its hard to describe, but it was somewhat similar to the rush you get when having 5 vanilla latte ventes in a six hour period. Hmm... actually I'm sure that had nothing to do with it, besides the last two had no vanilla. The best thing though, is now that I'm home I've found my teeth are whiter, my car is shinier, and I can lose weight while still eating all I want. Maybe that part was California though, that state does weird things to your head, I swear.

Moment of clarity #1. Flash users are finally going to have access to good tools. Anyone who tells you Actionscript and Flash are better tools for programming than C# and Visual Studio is on crack, really, check their arm for skid marks and don't turn your back. From AS1 to C# there is a learning curve for sure, but if you want to go OO then it is way easier (because a class is a class, so you don't have to read some stupid ass online tutorial to figure out how to do something as simple as make a class be a subclass). From AS2 there is almost no learning curve, other than it is statically typed, so you get awesome tools. Oh, and it's better, full stop. Best part, if your one of your parents were poultry and you just can't do C#, you can still use VB. The moment of clarity isn't that we didn't see this part coming, just it has now actually happened. That deserves its own moment.

Moment of clarity #2. I've always looked at this from the Flash user side. However last week I was watching Paul  (founder of Xamlon) making a photo demo with this. I kept saying how cool it was you get intellisense etc, and he was like, duh, there's been intellisense for years dude -- not a big deal. He had tried to get into Flash a few times before, but it really requires spending a lot of time learning a 'Flash only' programming style, and one that doesn't give up its secrets easily. Let's not doubt that he could have figured it out eventually (umm, he created JRun, I think he could figure out movieclips), but he always ended too frustrated/busy before getting over the hump. Life is too short to drink bad wine etc. Suddenly, within an hour or two, he has not only a Flash demo program, but a really kick ass one actually. He's emailing people samples, putting things online, checking it out on the office PDA... He's like, I can just send this out and everyone sees it, no framework, no install, no Windows only. And I'm thinking duh, its Flash (well not really, I generally am just hoping I don't get 'found out' when we're all together, very little time to think 'duh' : ) -- but then suddenly I see it. While I've always thought of it like 'if you want universal deployment you need to use flash, you want speed or scaling you need C#/Java/etc', but for a lot of people it's just 'I can't universally deploy unless I spend a bunch of time learning Flash quirks'. I remember in the early days with Flash 2, my brother and I would talk for hours how cool it was, and the punctuation was always, 'and you can just put it out there, no publisher, almost no cost, and anyone, anywhere can see it'. That is so cool, let's remind ourselves again. That is so cool. So glad I was born now and not in the 1300's.   And now .Net developers can do this too.

Moment of clarity #3. Ingo (yet another programmer at Xamlon who's shadow I can hide under) was seeing how hard it would be to recreate a swf in the wild, so he found a little open source physics demo. It had the .fla online, so once he was done (in about an hour, and he'd never made a swf before) he wanted to see how it was done in Flash. We opened it on my machine, and I was drilling around trying to find code, and trying to figure out what snippet did what. What the hell are you doing? Well I'm trying to find the code. So we moved to Movie Explorer, but there we find things like this.parent.myX.blah. So drill around trying to figure out what was named what, who was the parent of whom, its like a small town on father's day. Of course that isn't the only way to do it, but the file wasn't poorly made or anything, not at all. The problem is that this is normal Flash, where lots of things held together by bubble gum. No wonder Flash applications tend not to get past version 1, and I'm not discounting myself out here either. I've done things with external oo files for years, but it is hard for others to just jump in -- the standards I picked aren't any more 'normal' than the ones anyone else picked. It ended up that Ingo gnawed through my power cord before I found the whatever was repositioning the main circle, I do think I was close though.

Moment of clarity #4. There was a data entry sample running that was created in VB, which subclassed the component set created in C#, which was instanciated in xaml, displaying on a PDA, with the persisted data visible on a Mac. That's like turning on Crossfire, and seeing Ted Koppel humping Dan Rather while wearing a sailor hat made from the New York Times Swimsuit Edition. I guess technically this one was somewhere between a moment of clarity and a LSD flashback. Kind of cool though, to actually see that. The data entry thing I mean.

Moment of clarity #5. We were programming at the swf level, (we were using movieclips etc which are fully type safe, have full intellisense, but are at the Flash API level). Then another sample came out that was using the early version of our component set. Suddenly the layout is all coming from markup (well not 100%  yet, but very close), as are the graphics. And this markup is Xaml (and in fact could easily be changed to XUL or whatever). Because of this, the code isn't dependant on anything in swf, so hey, it could actually be run on Avalon. The beautiful thing about the markup is it abstracts away the most system dependant things, making it pretty easy to deploy to swf OR the native OS. Maybe this is the icing, but that might well be the biggest deal in the end.

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Well, the next beta is coming out in about a week. I would really recommend giving it a look, or at least go through the samples to see what it can do. If you haven't checked out Beta 1, I would recommend waiting the week, there are tons of fixes in, so it is a much better experience. We have most of the bugs worked out of the low level stuff, and unit tests galore which has really been helpful. We will be demoing the whole thing at both Flash Forward and FITC (more on that in a bit), please stop by for a look (or just to say hi!) if you are there -- I can hardly wait to finally meet everyone!

Dang, out of beer. Talk soon : ).