Kevin Brammer

I have been dabbling with Flex recently with the intent to try and create a simple XML driven Flash photo gallery with scrolling thumbnails. I am happy with the results so far, although I plan on improving the UX, error handling, load time and adding the ability to browse several categories. Once that's done I'm considering doing the whole project again in Silverlight ^_^

Mark Rasmussen has a really useful XML document fluent interface posted that I have been using for generating XML data feeds for my Flash/Flex projects. While there are certainly alternative methods to acheive the same result, such as LINQ to XML, XMLSerializer or XMLWriter, I have found that Mark's fluent interface is easy to use and has been great for my purposes. What I typically have been doing is creating a web handler, checking the query string for the type of feed required and then sending the appropriate queries to the database to return the desired information that I want to format as XML. The following example certainly has room for improvement - the query string should probably undergo some type of validation and probably a few other things that I haven't even considered yet :-)

Bacardi Bryant has started a great quickstart series for developers looking to get started with test driven development (TDD) over at xnode-online. 

Here are a couple of FF Add-ons that I have been finding really useful:

I just discovered these videos by Johnny Chung Lee showing some pretty interesting projects using C#, a Wii controller and a bluetooth connection. My favorite is "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote":