{"id":1081,"date":"2008-12-01T17:37:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-01T16:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1081-amethyst-from-sapphiresteel-develop-flex-in-visual-studio-an-alternative-to-tofino.html"},"modified":"2008-12-01T17:37:49","modified_gmt":"2008-12-01T16:37:49","slug":"amethyst-from-sapphiresteel-develop-flex-in-visual-studio-an-alternative-to-tofino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1081-amethyst-from-sapphiresteel-develop-flex-in-visual-studio-an-alternative-to-tofino.html","title":{"rendered":"Amethyst from SapphireSteel: Develop Flex in Visual Studio, an alternative to Tofino"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not long ago I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1060-develop-for-adobe-flex-in-microsoft-visual-studio.html\" target=\"_blank\">looked<\/a> at an early preview of Ensemble&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ensemble.com\/products\/tofino.html\" target=\"_blank\">Tofino<\/a>, an extension to Visual Studio for developing Flex applications that target the Adobe Flash runtime. It was disappointing, though I&#8217;ve been assured that an improved build is in preparation. Ensemble had better be quick: I&#8217;ve just been informed of an alternative called Amethyst, from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sapphiresteel.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">SapphireSteel<\/a> software, creators of the Ruby Visual Studio extension Ruby in Steel. Here&#8217;s what I know so far about Amethyst:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>ActionScript and MXML editing and project management<\/li>\n<li>Installs into commercial editions of Visual Studio or the free Visual Studio shell<\/li>\n<li>Initial beta of free personal edition available next week<\/li>\n<li>Planned for the 2nd quarter of 2009: commercial Professional Edition with drag-and-drop Flex\/AIR visual design environment, IntelliSense and graphical debugging tools<\/li>\n<li>Can integrate with Ruby In Steel to create a multi-language Visual Studio solution with Flex at the front end and Rails at the back<\/li>\n<li>Amethyst Personal will remain completely free <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All sounds good; and Ruby in Steel is well-regarded so this is worth watching out for if you have any interest in developing for Flex in Visual Studio.<\/p>\n<p>A high quality Visual Studio design tool for Flex would help Adobe gain adoption for Flex and AIR among Microsoft-platform developers.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wlWriterSmartContent\" id=\"scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:f6ecaae1-e924-45e7-88d8-a72cd132a5dc\" style=\"padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px\">Technorati tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/visual%20studio\" rel=\"tag\">visual studio<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/flex\" rel=\"tag\">flex<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/air\" rel=\"tag\">air<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/adobe\" rel=\"tag\">adobe<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/ensemble\" rel=\"tag\">ensemble<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/sapphire%20steel\" rel=\"tag\">sapphire steel<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not long ago I looked at an early preview of Ensemble&#8217;s Tofino, an extension to Visual Studio for developing Flex applications that target the Adobe Flash runtime. It was disappointing, though I&#8217;ve been assured that an improved build is in preparation. Ensemble had better be quick: I&#8217;ve just been informed of an alternative called Amethyst, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1081-amethyst-from-sapphiresteel-develop-flex-in-visual-studio-an-alternative-to-tofino.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Amethyst from SapphireSteel: Develop Flex in Visual Studio, an alternative to Tofino<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,55,80,94,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net","category-adobe","category-microsoft","category-software-development","category-visual-studio","category-web-authoring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}