Well, MAX is over and I’m sure that many, many people are going to be posting about their final thoughts on the conference. Luckily, this is a Flex blog, and Macromedia said a couple of things about Flex (sarcasm just doesn’t travel over the internet). In all seriousness, this was a fantastic conference for Flex developers. Macromedia has put a lot of their eggs in the Flex basket, and I think it’s going to pay off big time.

They started off the conference by announcing labs.macromedia.com which contained a public alpha for the Flex Builder. Everyone who was excited about Flex before but couldn’t afford the high price tag can now download the alpha and know that when the final version comes out, for less than $1000 they will be able to deploy Flex applications to anyone who has the Flash Player. As Kevin showed us, that is a significant population.

There were tons of Flex sessions including ActionScript 3, Layout and UI, Skinning , and my favorite, Enterprise Services. Christophe Coenraets was the presenter and in my mind he stole the show. When you buy the Flex Enterprise edition, you are going to be on the cutting edge of application development. The collaboration and data sharing features that will be built into the product are going to dramatically change how you think about building RIAs and the kinds of things you will want to accomplish.

I think it’s the beginning of a new era where collaboration will become a standard part of RIAs and where Flex 1.5 applications will look static and dated. Flex is well positioned to be the development tool of anyone who wants to create Web 2.0 applications. I can’t wait until next year.

I really enjoyed talking with all of the people who are creating Flex. I had a chance to talk to a lot of them during the “Meet the Zorn/Flex Team BOF” last night and they all seem very excited about the direction that Flex is going and how excited the people at the conference are.

If you haven’t tried out Flex, download it, work through the examples, and see how easy it is to build powerful RIAs.

I am sitting in the Debugging Flex Applications session with Dirk Eismann of richinternet.de fame. I really, really enjoyed the class and Dirk did a great job of going through the debugging tools in both Flex 1.5 and Flex 2.0. One of the places I don’t do a good job is debugging, and part of the reason is that I simply didn’t know what kinds of options were available for Flex debugging.

One of the cool things he showed us was his trace panel, which allows object introspection and unlike the FAST tool by Macromedia, runs as a standalone application.