Today I found a minor problem with my Scroll List (ListBox Alternative) code.  The getScrollPaneRef method would not return a reference to the scroll pane if you used the Macromedia V2 scrollpane component.  This went on unnoticed because I have been using the Metaliq MCOM scrollpane.

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I wish I had a dime for every flash forum post I have seen where the user was asking for very basic usage of the Flash ScrollPane component.  I think at least some of the confusion stems from the differences between the version 1 component and the version 2 component.  In v1 you could set the content to a movieclip that was already on the stage.  In v2 you have to use either an external asset or a movieclip that is in the LIBRARY. You use the linkage id of that movieclip as the contentPath of the scrollpane.

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The ListBox Component that comes with Flash can be handy, but it has some shortcomings that limit its usefulness. For example, the scrolling logic causes items to reload each time they come into view. If you are loading external content, this causes a bothersome blinking effect.  Also the CellRenderer API is a little difficult to work with for some folks.  So, I put together some ActionsScript 2 classes that use the scrollpane component to build a scrolling list of items. It works similar to a ListBox component but with some additional functionality and without all these problems.

You can download the source from here.

Note that in the example fla, not all the items in the list have a caption under them.  This is not a bug, just an example to show that the captions were made optional.

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CliqueSite NewsBlog (the web app this blog runs on) uses PageParser.GetCompiledPageInstance in it's URL rewriting logic.  Unfortunately, this doesn't work in a medium trust environment, like those of most shared hosting providers.  So I needed to find a different method of rewriting the URLs for the links to blog items.  A little searching led me to urlrewriting.net. With this URL rewriting solution and some simple changes to the web.config, my links are now working This looks to be a nice URL rewriting solution.  It's simple to use and supports regular expressions unlike ASP.NET 2.0's built in solution.

While putting this site together I used Visual Studio 2005 to publish a web site for the first time using the "Publish Web Site" function.  Over all it went smoothly .  But then I went to make a small update to the site.  For the sake of speed, I published to a local folder, and I wanted to upload only the files needed for the change.  Problem number one was that the compiled assemblies had random filenames for example "App_Web_6pzl0zez.dll". So there was no easy way to know which assembly contained the change.  Ok, so I'll just upload all the dll's, no big deal.  I deleted the old dll's and uploaded the new ones from the local folder where I published the site.

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Since this is my first blog post I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Steve Krichten, and I'm a web developer for BET Interactive.  Some of my professional interests include ASP.NET, Flash, OOP and web design.  On the personal side of things, My wife Jenna and I have 2 children, Sarah, and Zackary.  You will find pictures of them in the photogallery.  In my spare time I like to spend time with my family, and my hobbies such as tennis, photography, and PC gaming.

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