I've been playing with the Flex Builder plug-in for enterprise development, a new add-on to Flex Builder which has some very useful features for the average developer. I'll share below the good and bad of what I've seen.
The good:
There's a huge number of features, a lot of things that I want to use right away:
Enhanced AS3, MXML and Cairngorm wizards
Cairngorm Explorer
Flex Code Metrics Explorer
FlexUnit test and test suite generators
Flex Package Explorer
It's been stable for me. That's always a plus for a beta that's being used in your main work environment.
The bad:
My main gripe, and the only reason I won't be using the plug-in right now, is that it only picks up the details of the main source folder. In the projects that I work on, most of the source files are in the "additional source folders". The plug-in does not use these source folders to find Cairngorm commands, compute code metrics, etc.
It'd be very helpful to allow the copying of the text in the code metrics explorer.
The unknown:
How many of these features are already planned for the next version of Flex Builder? It's not great for the plug-in, but there's a lot of things in here that I just expect Flex Builder to get to eventually. On the other hand, it does feel to me like there's a lot of niche enterprise-y features to do to keep the plug-in going.
There's a lot of new directions that the product can go in, a million feature that could be added. I wonder what will happen next? I hope that the product can first make sure the current pieces are solid and start selling the plug-in, as I think it'd be a great addition to the Flex ecosystem.
