A Good ImageCache for Flex Lists

A while back I brought to life a dream custom component I had wanted for a long time. It's basically a horizontal scrolling thumbnail image holder, the ubiquitous kind that's in everything from YouTube to Flickr. Mine is a little different in that it combines the following:

• Hover side-scrolling
• Accurate shuttle indicator below images
• Accu-sizes to any display object container width
• and finally...it caches the images for no lag

Pretty much does the job for me. I'll post it soon, happy to share and hear feedback on it. And on that note, I ran across a legacy of cache issue explorations and solutions by other flex scripters. The earlier one, which I noted but haven't tried out, is Ely's SuperImage from a couple of years back. It touches on the all-important performance issue of non-caching assets in Flex components.

The follow-up, which I'm stoked to note is lean, lithe and easy to plug in, is thanksMister's ImageCache. There's even a sample app using the Flickr API. Tested and hereby endorsed. Hope you get some use out of it.

Data Access Layer adding custom classes

When you create DataTables, the custom code is generated as an XML Schema Definition file, or .xsd.  If you right-click the definition for your DataTable in the Solution Explorer you can see the generated markup.  

This is useful to know, because while the autogenerated content does its job fine as is, you can add further stubs of code to modify Data Access operations or customize your results.  I did this by creating a new class file in the App_Code folder.  The new class file is a partial class that allows me to perform a custom method on a Row within a Table once the row has been instantiated.  This is a handy technique to cleanly procedureize a complex filter operation.  

More info on this technique is available at asp.net.