The first Flex SDK BugQuash is now over and we're pulling together stats and listing things we learned so that future events will be even better.

Here's some numbers to show roughly how successful the event was:

Total patches submitted: 57

see what got submitted that day
Previous to the event, there were 111 patches submitted since Flex went open source.  That means that in one day, the community submitted half of what had been submitted prior to the event.  Phenomonal!

Patches accepted: 19 (at the time of this post)

And growing... Twelve patches were able to be reviewed and accepted by the Flex team that day.  This was a Saturday and there wasn't the entire Flex SDK team available, but that is still amazing.  Consider that a patch must be reviewed and considered for it's impact to the SDK by the team.  They were working hard to get through as many as they could.

I've subscribed to the forums that show when patches are committed to the trunk.  There's been a number of patches accepted since the BugQuash by members of the SDK team.

The Flex team is under a lot of pressure right now since there is the fx name change they are working on, the additional features for Flex 4 and everything else.  The fact that they are still working at getting the submitted patches reviewed shows an incredible dedication to the community.  They understand that the community worked hard and they are doing all they can to show that it is appreciated.

Participants in person: 60

This is amazing considering we had around 64 register to be there in person.  This kind of turnout is unheard of.  There were people attending from Vancouver BC, Utah, Dallas, Atlanta, Portland, Tacoma and Spokane.

Participants online: 122

That's huge.  The connect room had over 50 people in it all day.  Many people broke off into ConnectNow rooms to collaborate with other online participants so it's hard to track exactly how many.  The fact that we had 244 registered to participate online means that 50% of those registered actually participated.  This number might be a little off since we know that some registered to participate but participated in groups, sharing the connect room so the actual number is probably slightly higher.  I am also impressed that even when the event was winding down, the connect session was still going strong.

Here's a video of Nate and I discussing the event with Ryan Stewart.

Marty and Nate Talk About BugQuash from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.

I'd like to personally thank my wife and Nate's wife for supporting us while we were preparing for the event.

I recently ran into a problem that held me up for a little while, although it seemed like it would be a simple problem.  After searching around and finding the solution, I found that it is actually pretty simple, just not obvious.  Since it took me a while to find the answer, I thought it would be good to share my new found knowledge with the world.

For the past couple weeks, Nate Beck and I have been working on putting together a little get-together where us and a few of our friends work on bugs in the Flex SDK.  Well, that little get-together has exploded into something much, much greater!

Announcing, the first ever, worldwide Flex BugQuash!

Hosted at Adobe's Seattle site on March 28th, we'll have a room full of people dedicated to fixing as many bugs in the Flex SDK as possible in 10 hours.  We'll have an Acrobat Connect session for remote participants to join in and watch the room live.  Even a keynote with Mark Anders from Adobe.

See details and register at http://www.bugquash.com.

Today, I found a solution to a minor but perpetually annoying problem that I've run into many times and decided to share it for those of you who, like me, didn't know there was a solution available yet.

First, some background.

There are a lot of examples and tutorials out there in the worldwide Flex community.  Often I find one I want to plug into Flex Builder and see working for myself.  So, what do I do?  I copy and paste, then I go through and fix all the indentation problems caused by the difference in how they format their code and the "standard" formatting.  Or, it could be that the way it was posted on the webpage left spaces instead of tabs or whatever.  You get the idea.

I'm a perfectionist with some things and it will annoy me if the indentations are off, or even when I know that a line was indented with spaces instead of a tab.  I guess something in my head complains ahead of time, anticipating the few extra seconds it might take me to backspace over those spaces should the time come that I need to do that.  I know, there's some issues I need to deal with.  We all have our vices.

So, on to the solution.  Today, I was dealing with this little annoyance and decided to do some googling to see if I wasn't alone and more importantly, if someone had come up with a solution.  There is a bug in the Flex jira bugbase, so if you feel like it would be a good addition to Flex Builder, you can vote for it.  This requires a log in, which if you don't have one, you should take a moment to create one.

In browsing the comments for the bug, someone has created a simple little formatter Eclipse plugin that from my limited use so far, seems to work sufficiently well.