Making the move to Windows 7 Professional 64 brought about a plethora of problems, some minor and some not so minor.<\/p>\n
Fortunately most of the troubles were shared with other developers, and information is there to be found using our favourite search engines.<\/p>\n
If you’re a Flex developer, like me, you might not have as much luck.\u00a0 If you’ve downloaded the latest (stable) Flex SDK\u20143.4.1 at the time of this writing\u2014it’s not possible to set up your “Installed Flex SDKs”, in order to set this SDK as the compiler default from the Preferences dialog.\u00a0 That’s because of an issue on current x64 Windows where controls won’t get resized once the nesting hierarchy of windows exceeds a certain depth<\/a>, which was referred to from the only useful information I could find about this specific issue<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s also not possible to set many preferences, as certain project properties show up as blank, and certain buttons are missing.\u00a0 It’s absolutely abysmal that Adobe hasn’t remedied these issues; how does it expect developers to do any serious Flex development on 64 bit Windows that’s becoming mainstream?<\/p>\n Fortunately, there is a workaround, at least for the issues that affected me.\u00a0 The solution lies in having a working copy of Flex Builder on a 32-bit Windows platform.\u00a0 Flex stores these preferences in %USERPROFILE%\\My Documents\\Flex Builder 3\\.metadata ( %USERPROFILE% is the environment variable with a typical value of “C:\\Documents and Settings\\{username}” on Windows XP, and “C:\\Users\\{username}” on Windows 7), and subfolders therein.<\/p>\n To configure your installed Flex SDKs, first unzip your Flex SDK to “C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Adobe\\Flex Builder 3\\sdks” (or wherever it is on your system); there is a file at the top level called flex-sdk-description.xml.\u00a0 Open this up and make a note of the <name> element.\u00a0 Next, open the file “%USERPROFILE%\\My Documents\\Flex Builder 3\\.metadata\\.plugins\\org.eclipse.core.runtime\\.settings\\com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.prefs”.\u00a0 This is where you’ll insert the setting for com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.flex_sdks, making sure you use the SDK name noted earlier.\u00a0 My entire file looks like this (without the line breaks before “\\r\\n”):<\/p>\n That fixes the first problem.<\/p>\n My other main problem was that I needed to debug the Flex application, but I was unable to add the launch configuration under Run\/Debug Settings of the project properties\u2014the New, Duplicate, Edit, and Delete buttons are missing and cannot be activated via the Windows shortcut keys.\u00a0 If your project is called ProjectX, you’ll need to have a file called “%USERPROFILE%\\My Documents\\Flex Builder 3\\.metadata\\.plugins\\org.eclipse.debug.core\\.launches\\ProjectX.launch”.\u00a0 For me, the .launches folder wasn’t there, so I copied it from my 32-bit system.\u00a0 You can create the .launches folder manually, though not from Windows Explorer (you may have to use the command line).\u00a0 My file looks like this:<\/p>\n For any other properties, you can search for a relevant string in the .metadata folder of your 32-bit machine, then copy or create the appropriate file in your 64-bit system.\u00a0 It’s a pain, but at least you’ll be able to get your work done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Making the move to Windows 7 Professional 64 brought about a plethora of problems, some minor and some not so minor. Fortunately most of the troubles were shared with other developers, and information is there to be found using our favourite search engines. If you’re a Flex developer, like me, you might not have as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,6],"tags":[14,17,13,15,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.danielansari.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}#Wed Feb 10 17:49:32 EST 2010\r\neclipse.preferences.version=1\r\nplayerTrustFileCleaned30=true\r\ncom.adobe.flexbuilder.project.flex_sdks=<?xml version\\=\"1.0\" encoding\\=\"UTF-8\"?>\\r\\n<sdks>\r\n\\r\\n<sdk location\\=\"C\\:\/Program Files (x86)\/Adobe\/Flex Builder 3\/sdks\/3.0.0\" name\\=\"Flex 3\"\/>\r\n\\r\\n<sdk defaultSDK\\=\"true\" location\\=\"C\\:\/Program Files (x86)\/Adobe\/Flex Builder 3\/sdks\/3.4.1\" name\\=\"Flex 3.4\"\/>\r\n\\r\\n<sdk location\\=\"C\\:\/Program Files (x86)\/Adobe\/Flex Builder 3\/sdks\/2.0.1\" name\\=\"Flex 2.0.1 Hotfix 3\"\/>\\r\\n<\/sdks>\\r\\n\r\nflexBuilderVersion=3.0.194161<\/pre>\n
<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><\/pre>\n
<launchConfiguration type=\"com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.launchConfigurationType.flash\"><\/pre>\n
<stringAttribute key=\"com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ATTR_APPLICATION\" value=\"src\/ProjectX.mxml\"\/><\/pre>\n
<stringAttribute key=\"com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ATTR_DEBUG_URL\" value=\"http:\/\/localhost\/abcde\"\/><\/pre>\n
<stringAttribute key=\"com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ATTR_PROFILE_URL\" value=\"C:\\Projects\\ProjectX\\bin-debug\\ProjectX.html\"\/><\/pre>\n
<stringAttribute key=\"com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ATTR_PROJECT\" value=\"ProjectX\"\/><\/pre>\n
<stringAttribute key=\"com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ATTR_RUN_URL\" value=\"C:\\Projects\\ProjectX\\bin-debug\\ProjectX.html\"\/><\/pre>\n
<booleanAttribute key=\"com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ATTR_USE_DEFAULT_URLS\" value=\"false\"\/><\/pre>\n
<listAttribute key=\"org.eclipse.debug.core.MAPPED_RESOURCE_PATHS\"><\/pre>\n
<listEntry value=\"\/ProjectX\"\/><\/pre>\n
<listEntry value=\"\/ProjectX\/src\/ProjectX.mxml\"\/><\/pre>\n
<\/listAttribute><\/pre>\n
<listAttribute key=\"org.eclipse.debug.core.MAPPED_RESOURCE_TYPES\"><\/pre>\n
<listEntry value=\"4\"\/><\/pre>\n
<listEntry value=\"1\"\/><\/pre>\n
<\/listAttribute><\/pre>\n
<\/launchConfiguration><\/pre>\n