Adobe Flex and Flash In Visual Studio - Amethyst Beta 8

The 8th and final beta of Amethyst is now available

by Huw Collingbourne

Wednesday 21 April 2010.

The latest beta of Amethyst, SapphireSteel Software’s Visual Studio IDE for the Adobe Flash Platform, is now available for download. This supersedes beta 7 (released in December 2009) and the interim (‘edge’) builds released in the intervening period.

Go To Download Page

Beta 8 incorporates the features from the edge releases including:

‘Go Live’ mode in the Amethyst Designer
Styles support in the Amethyst Designer
Color pickers and other dedicated Editors in the Property Panel
‘Code Behind’ (ActionScript files linked with MXML templates)
User Defined Comments and Tasks
Application Publish capability
Expression Evaluator in the debugger

Styles, property editors and a ‘go live’ mode that lets you interact with your design much as you would in a finished application so that, for example, you can test roll-over and selection effects

In addition the following features are new to this beta:

Ability to target Flash Player instead of browser for run and debug
‘Amethyst Flash Player’ also supplied as an option for debugging
AIR projects supported in the Amethyst Designer
User Component creation supported in the Amethyst Designer
Z-Ordering support (bring to front/send to back)
Third Party Controls supported (preliminary - more in next release)
Auto bracket-pair completion supplied as an option
More auto-expanding snippets supplied
Code formatting improved with previewer built into Format Options dialogs
More code coloring options

Amethyst has over 76 code coloring options and 24 customizable code formatting options

Fore more information on the features of Amethyst, please see:

Screencast Tutorials
Amethyst Online Tutorials

Known Deficiencies

This is still beta software and contains a number of known bugs and incomplete features. For example, the AIR and Component Creation support in the Amethyst Designer are both ‘preliminary’ and are not yet complete. Flex 4 is not currently supported in the Designer. Amethyst cannot be installed into Visual Studio 2010 (VS 2008 is required). We are now working on adding the missing features. We will, as always, announce further developments here on the Blog. If you have any bug reports or feature requests, please post these in the Forum.

This is the final beta release of Amethyst. We are now working towards the first Release Candidate and, shortly after that, version 1.0 of the finished software. We may release one or more interim (‘edge’) builds between the beta and RC1.

Keywords: Amethyst news

Adobe Flex and Flash In Visual Studio - Amethyst Beta 8
29 April 2010, by Borek

Amethyst is getting into a great shape thanks to your hard work - thank you! Will you be able to implement support for Flex 4 and VS2010 before the final release?
- Adobe Flex and Flash In Visual Studio - Amethyst Beta 8
  29 April 2010, by Huw Collingbourne
  
  We are in the final stages of VS2010 integration at the moment. We’ll put up an ’edge’ release of Amethyst for VS2010 in a few days. Soon after that we’ll put up am edge release with Flex 4 support. Expect that in a couple of weeks. After that we’ll be working on a release candidate and at that time we should be able to give more information on the expected release date of version 1.0 of Amethyst (not long now!).
  
  best wishes
  
  Huw
  - Adobe Flex and Flash In Visual Studio - Amethyst Beta 8
    3 May 2010, by Huw Collingbourne
    
    Update: VS2010 version now available. See HERE.