The 360|Flex Conference, Atlanta version [1], is drawing to a close and it is now time to take home the fancy conference schwag and tons of new information. I'll be driving for 5 hours to get home but honestly, I'd much rather spend that time coding with some of the techniques and libraries I learned about during conference sessions.

We were excited to be a part of the launch of Flex 3, AIR 1.0 and Flex Builder 3 [2]. We were also excited to get interesting first-hand information from the prestigious line up of speakers. The sessions were a good mix of content and experience level with topics ranging from Memory Management to The Flex Framework Life Cycle, from Open Source AS3 libraries to Custom Component Creation and Skinning. There was even a presentation on making 3D, you know the kind, viewed with the red and green glasses? It Was Very Cool!

There was information for people of all skill levels. This is a good thing because it turns out about 35% are self confessed newcomers to the Flex platform. There were plenty of Senior Developers who came to sharpen their skills, but I talked with many people who came to the conference just to get exposure to the platform. Some wanted to move their skills towards RIAs, some represented organizations that wanted to evaluate the feasability of RIAs and 85 people came to the Sunday Hands On Training course!

This reinforces the notion that Flex and RIAs are in a heavy growth cycle. There was much esprit du corps in the AIR (pun intended) and a good time was had by all. Great Job John and Tom for their organization of the conference. I'm already looking forward to the next installation of 360|Flex!