Beginner videos: Flex Builder debugger
Posted January 3, 2007 
Comments(5)
Comments(5) Lynda.com has posted some videos that introduce the basic functionality of the Flex Builder debugger. If you are new to debuggers, you may find them informative. And even if you are an experienced user, the last free video in the series shows how <mx:TraceTarget/> can sometimes be helpful for watching the network traffic between your Flex app and a server.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the heads up on Dave Gassner’s videos at Lynda.com.
Also, thank you very, very much for your amazing work on FB2! I came to Flex 2 after developing RIAs with Flash. The FB2 debugger alone closed the deal for me to move my development over to Flex 2. Your work is very much appreciated by us out here in the field :-)
In you post above, you called out:
how <mx:TraceTarget/> can sometimes be helpful for watching
the network traffic between your Flex app and a server.
Just curious, is there any chance of the Flash Netconnection Debugger being updated for use with Flex 2 and AMF3? In my prior work with Flash RIAs, I found the Netconnection Debugger indispensable.
Tools like <mx:TraceTarget/> really pale in comparison to the Netconnection Debugger. And it is kind of sad that Flex 2 developers uniformly need to resort to 3rd party solutions for the essential functionality of monitoring data communications. See for instance this thread that started just yesterday:
http://www.jessewarden.com/archives/2007/01/debugging_tools.html
btw … I saw your reply on the post at the following link two months ago. Could you ask the docs team to be sure to include documentation of the meaning of the debugger’s icons in future updates to the docs? :-)
http://renaun.com/blog/2006/11/14/151/
Thanks again for the amazing tools you have been building for us.
Best regards,
g
D’oh!
In two places in my comment above I had put in mx:TraceTarget/ with the enclosing angle brackets, and the comment filter stripped it out.
The two places were (this time with the angle brackets removed):
1) how mx:TraceTarget/ can sometimes be helpful …
2) Tools like mx:TraceTarget/ really pale in comparison …
g
[I have edited your original comment, adding back in the mx:TraceTarget. Gotta figure out how to fix my WordPress to not mess up comments like that... -Mike]
Greg, I agree that mx:TraceTarget is pretty weak compared to something like Netconnection Debugger. Personally, I have used the Charles web debugging proxy, and like it; and I know there are many others out there. <mx:TraceTarget/> is a bit of a crutch — after all, the whole point of a powerful debugger such as Flex Builder is to move beyond trace(). So yes, we would like to integrate some sort of more powerful network monitor into a future version of Flex Builder. Not sure when that will happen, though. Thanks for the feedback!
And yes, I will ask the documentation dudes to document the icons in the variables view. Thanks for reminding me!
guys I use Runtime Flex Tracer class rather than using the very basic trace in flex. This class is very small and easy to use. With the added color option for traces it makes very easy to read particular set of traces. It works whether flash player is debugging or not. Check it here
<a href="http://askmeflash.com/applications/9/runtime-flex-tracer-and-debugger">http://askmeflash.com/applications/9/runtime-flex-tracer-and-debugger</a>