How was your Upgrade to Flex 3 Beta 3?
A few weeks ago I finally got to upgrade from Flex Builder 3 (Beta 2) to Flex Builder 3 (Beta 3). I had an AIR application in the works, so along the way I also got a chance to upgrade the AIR runtime and SDK. As with all upgrades, I strongly recommend reading the release notes. Read them twice.
My software upgrade was not very smooth, unfortunately. The first step was to uninstall Beta 2. I opened up the windows control panel and uninstalled it. However, that did not appear to do anything. Any attempt to install Beta 3 would tell me that Beta 2 was still installed. ( I don't remember the exact message ). Eventually I opened up my eclipse directory and manually deleted everything that had com.adobe.* in the directory name. After that process, the Beta 3 install would succesfully complete.
Once I got it installed, the code upgrade process was relatively smooth. I had to change a few APIs on my AIR Application:
- File.applicationResourceDirectory -> File.applicationDirectory: This was documented and had no issues.
- HTMLControl --> HTMLLoader: this was documented and had no issues
- HTMLPDFCapability.STATUS_OK turns into PDFCapability.STATUS_OK I couldn't find this change documented anywhere, but performed some searching of the documents and figured out what was going on.
One issue I had, that wouldn't cause a compiler error was that the URL schemes have changed regarding local file access. The "app-resource" scheme was replaced with "App". In my code, the URLs to local files were always stored as strings; even a wrong URL path is still a valid string, so it makes sense the compiler wouldn't flag them. I wonder if Flex could benefit from a "compatibility analyzer" like used to be in the ColdFusion Administrator? I just used search and replace to address all those changes.
My good friend Jason asked me a question about upgrading and licensing:
I experienced the same issue, although I couldn't find any documentation about it. I assume that Flex Builder 3 has moved to a new version licensing scheme and the Flex Builder 2 serial numbers will no longer work. A computer world article states that the AIR release will be next month (February), so I'm expecting an official release soon. Can you think of any events in February where Adobe could make a big announcement?
What problems did you have when upgrading your application?
My upgrade on my Macbook Pro was also not smooth... so much so that my FB3 install and reinstall are just broken. Intellisense is messed up, the SDK can be found with one luanch, but not the subsequent ones, etc... It's so bad and I have so little time to fix it that I have actually been using FB2 to get work done when I need it. I think I'll wait until the FB3 gold is out and do a final upgrade/repair then. I just dont have the time to fix beta software.
