Flex Beta, Free Flex
I work for Adobe but I still sometimes hear the new stuff from news sites, like this ZDNews article that says that Adobe will be releasing a basic version of Flex 2.0 for free:
Adobe is introducing a free, basic software developers kit that includes the Flex Framework, compiler and documentation. The Flex Builder development tool costs $1,000 per developer.
That’s awesome! I’ve been planning to get into Flex once the beta hits, which sounds like it will be tomorrow. A free version of Flex is going to be a big deal.
If you’re not familiar with Flex but you’re familiar with .NET, think of it using these comparisons: Flash = the CLR, Flex Framework = .NET Framework, and ActionScript = C#. ActionScript is a JITted language now, so it’s possible to write fast code in Flash, and the fact that your code runs everywhere today is, IMHO, a big deal.
Oh and Flex Builder = Visual Studio .NET. The Flex IDE is Eclipse-based so it builds on top of a very strong toolset.
Watch for it at Adobe Labs or check out some Examples if you want to see Flex in action.