Yesterday, I called my friend from SF to arrange for a dinner.  During the conversation, I said that I have to be on a number of technical sessions there. He was surprised that I’m not going to present there, but will be sitting at the desk studying how to do things in Flex and AIR.

Actually, I like studying even more that teaching. Conferences of such caliber don’t happen too often and  if you are lucky to be there, you need to get the most out of it.  MAX 08 gives you a chance to learn from the cream of the crop, from people in the know, from those who spent endless hours trying to figure out what’s happening under the hood.   How can you not use this opportunity?

I’ll just give you one example. Last week my colleague and I were running a private Flex workshop for software architects of a large corporation who are about to start development with Flex. Needless to say that they are smart and experienced software professionals. Some of them already started working with Flex.  While explaining various types of library linking in Flex, I said that if you don’t mention a class in the application, it won’t be included into the compiled SWF.  One of the attendees responded, “It took me six hours to figure it out by myself”. He said it all.

I don’t have time, and I don’t want to waste six hours if I can learn something like this in minutes from well researched professionals by sitting in the classrooms of the conference.    
Training rooms is just one of the ways to learn. The expo floor is another one, but this will be a subject of one of my future blogs.

Here’s my personal learning schedule for a three day semester called Adobe MAX 2008 North America:

Sunday
Attending a full day class on AIR

Mon
11:30 AM  Adobe AIR++
2:00   PM          The Flex Architecture Faceoff, I’m one of four panelists there
3:30   PM    Anatomy of a Video Player       
5:00   PM         Introduction to Thermo and the Next Generation of Flex

9:30  PM   Birds-of-a-Feather meet-up on Flex Frameworks.  You have your own Flex framework or have an opinion on other people’s frameworks, please come to the room MW 2012, and you will be heard.

Tue
9:00 AM Testing your Flex applications:
10:00 AM  Comparing Flex frameworks. I’ll be giving a circumcised session Comparing Flex Frameworks at 360MAX corner.
3:00 PM A deep dive into the Flex 3 Framework
4:30 PM Next generation Flex skinning
6:00 PM Sneak peaks

Wed
9:30AM Maintaining security with Adobe AIR
11:00AM Debugging and profiling with Flex Builder
2:00 PM Building high-performance applications for Adobe AIR
3:30 PM Optimizing Adobe AIR for code execution, memory, and rendering

During general sessions I’ll be blogging and catching up on my emails. Between and after the sessions, I’ll be attending various receptions and press events – This time I have two conference passes – one as a speaker and the press pass too.  

I want to apologize to all these vendors who sent me not answered emails asking for appointments presenting their next revolutionary products.  I just don’t have time for this. This time my goal is to write about new trends in Flex,  MAX spirit in general and other little things that will catch my attention while being there.

My twitter page is http://twitter.com/yfain .

Stay tuned.