BFUG Bloomington Flex User Group

Saw this while I was browsing Digg today !

http://www.noupe.com/adobe/flex-developers-toolbox-free-components-theme...

Today I'm going to be live-blogging from BFlex, an Adobe Flex conference hosted at the Kelly School of Business in Bloomington, IN. I'm in the beginner's track with BFug Manager Ben Dalton. Ben is an Adobe certified Flex instructor. I'm in the room as his assistant today and we'll be working with people that have little or no Flex experience. The goal of this room is to give people who have some programming exposure an overview of how Flex works and what can be done with it!

One of the great things about Flex is that it is incredibly scalable. It could be used to build a widget on your sidebar, or the entire web page, or a product that is deployed through Adobe Air to the desktop.

Since Flex is delivered via Adobe Flash Player, you know that your clients will be in a situation for a couple of things:

• See The Content: 98% of people out there on the web have Flash Player
• See The Content The Right Way: Much fewer rendering issues between IE 6/7, Firefox 2/3, Safari, Etc. since they all use Flash Player

I'm the Co-Manager of BFUG, the Bloomington Flex User's Group and I'm spending the day at BFusion, an Adobe Cold Fusion event hosted at the Kelly School of Business here in Bloomington, Indiana. BFlex / BFusion is an event that spans the entire weekend and will spend all day Saturday talking about Adobe Cold Fusion, and Sunday talking about Adobe Flex.

I'm really excited to play around with Cold Fusion. I use a lot of other Adobe products, and I've been told that Cold Fusion does a great job of integrating with Flex (and coincidentally, tomorrow I'm helping to instruct BFlex, a similar event as to BFusion just relating to Flex, more on that later.)

So far, we've done a lot of basic setup. Getting Eclipse configured took quite a bit of time for most people around the room. I'm using the Flex Builder from Adobe, which is built on eclipse (same software more or less.) We are also using CFEclipse, a plugin for Eclipse to make it a little more Cold Fusion friendly.

Hopefully you made it to the Flex Release Party on Monday, Feb. 25... and if you didn't you need to come to the next event! Our fearless leader Ben Dalton gave a great keynote address. A lot of new faces were in the room, and I am really happy that new people are finally getting some exposure to Flex, what it does, and how cool its going to become over the next 6 months to a year. Plus, there was free PIzza, a free copy of Flex 3, and a free copy of CS3! (not to mention loads of free schwag!)

I would really encourage anyone that is new to the field to ask questions, google for examples, and dig into the technology. We will be having a BFUG meeting sometime in the near future and I hope you will be able to join us!