Midnight Coders & SapphireSteel Announce Partnership to Further Flash Development In Visual Studio

Sept. 1, 2010 - PRLog -- Today Midnight Coders and SapphireSteel Software announce a technology partnership to provide a uniquely powerful solution to integrate the Adobe Flash Platform with Microsoft .NET.

When it comes to building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for the .NET environment, developers prefer to use the Visual Studio IDE.  Up until now, Visual Studio was easier for pure Microsoft environments (such as for Silverlight client to .NET services), but Silverlight doesn’t have nearly the installed base that Flash has (99% of all Internet-enabled desktops).  

With the release of SapphireSteel’s Amethyst, developers now have an easy way to create Flash-based applications right inside Visual Studio. The problem of linking Flash with .NET is solved by Midnight Coders’ WebORB which provides end-to-end client-server application development across the two platforms. The Midnight Coders and SapphireSteel Software technology partnership is aimed at implementing seamless integration of Amethyst with WebORB. This will give Visual Studio users a simple and elegant way of creating data-driven Flash Platform applications with a .NET ‘back end’.

Some of the features you can expect from both Amethyst and WebORB for .NET include:

Amethyst
•   Drag, Drop and Code – developers can simply drag and drop components onto the design canvas causing the underlying MXML code to automatically be rewritten.  Similarly, changes made by editing the MXML are automatically reflected in the Designer.  The Designer also makes use of the Visual Studio Layout Toolbar and all controls in the Amethyst Designer, unlike in FlashBuilder, are ‘live’.
•   Advanced ActionScript Editing – there are 23 separate formatting option, which have all the essential features offered by C# and VB editors.  One feature Visual Studio users love is auto-expanding snippets (code templates).  Amethyst supports not only snippets, but also the ability to create or edit snippets.
•   Code Browsing & Debugging -  Amethyst extends Visual Studio’s TODO tracker, enabling developers to define their own comment types and track all comments by type in the Task window.  Amethyst’s Cylon debugger enables developers to place simple or conditional breakpoints and drill down into variables in the Watch window or in hovering debug tips inside the code editor.  Developers can also debug multiple SWFs in a single debugging session.
•   Project Importer – enables the Flash IDE and Amethyst to be used in the same project within the Visual Studio environment.  In this way, Flash projects can make full use of Amethyst’s advanced code formatting, refactoring, IntelliSense and debugging and still be available for timeline-based work in Flash CS3, CS4 or CS5.

WebORB for .NET
•   Remoting – enables .NET applications to leverage the AMF remoting protocol for binary communication between clients and server side resources.
•   Code Generation – is an XSLT stylesheet (or collection of stylesheets) which contain information about a selected service (class), all its methods, method arguments, return value and all other referenced types and enumerations to produce source code, documentation and any other artifact necessary to create an integration between the client and server side class.  WebORB supports plugging in custom code generators.
•   Data Management – WebORB provides an extremely powerful data management framework that includes a Data Modeler, Code Generator, Test Drive, Runtime Engine and Runtime Data Management API.  The Data Modeler enables developers to perform full CRUD (create, retrieve, update and delete) operations on application data and the Code Generator exposes the server-side code as a set of remoting services invoked by the client.  The Test Drive enables developers to test integration before actual deployment.
•   Real-time Messaging and Media Streaming Runtime Engine - enables chat messaging, media streaming, media broadcast, server-initiated media streaming, media chat, and media recording—all without the need for separate products, libraries, or support contracts.  Supports RTMP/RTMPT and integrates with MSMQ.

SapphireSteel launched Amethyst on Monday, August 30th.  The integration for WebORB and Amethyst is well underway and will launch by end-of-year.  

SapphireSteel
SapphireSteel Software is the developer of the Steel IDE for programming Ruby and Flex in Microsoft’s Visual Studio.  The company is a division of Rosedown Mill, Ltd., a software development and consultancy company founded in 1994.  SapphireSteel offers a free 60-day trial of its Amethyst Professional Edition.  Visit www.sapphiresteel.com to learn more.

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Midnight Coders, Inc. – Experts in Lean Integration offers development, testing and runtime technology that drastically reduces total time and cost to build online applications, while improving application performance, scalability and profitability.