The Flex family extends far beyond the Flex Framework and the Flash Builder IDE. A lot of third party vendors have created applications, frameworks, components and tools to help you be successful in your application development. There are tools for functional, performance and security testing, third party components, AMF products, licensing and encryption tools and even plugins for Visual Studio.

To make it easier for you to find these third party tools, we’ve just posted a comprehensive list of products and projects that provide support for the Flex framework.

I can’t believe I missed that but a few weeks ago Nokia released a free set of Flash Lite components on Forum Nokia.

The set consists of a button component, contacts list component, list component, media data component, popup component and scrollbar component. They’re all very easy to use and also customizable.

Kudos to Nokia for releasing these! Flash on!

“Aruba, Jamaica, oooh I wanna take ya…”. That’s the first thing that came to mind when I heard the Cocomo codename. Cocomo is far more than a cheesy song though. It was actually the acronym of Common Collaboration Model.

Cocomo is now the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service. AFCS is a Platform as a Service that allows Flash Platform developers to easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA. Using both Flex-based client components and a hosted services infrastructure, Adobe Flash Collaboration Service allows you to build real-time, multi-user applications with Flex in less time than ever before.

Check out the AFCS team blog for more information on the roadmap. Want to start adding collaboration and multi-user capabilities to your applications? Then sign up for a free developer account on Adobe Labs.

Have you ever wished you had an evangelist by your side every day? Oh… Really? Now that’s just weird ;-) But seriously, it’s always a good thing to be able to tap in to someone’s brain when you get stuck on something or forgot about a component’s capabilities and properties. Or maybe you just want to browse the Flex component library to get an idea of its power and possibilities.

Enter the downloadable evangelist Tour de Flex, a really cool AIR application that showcases core Flex components, AIR capabilities, Flex data access (BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services), numerous coding techniques, cloud APIs, and a growing list of community-developed components, effects, skins, and more. There are currently 217 code samples in the application but since this is an AIR application, it’s obvious that we will be updating that with new samples on a regular basis.

Tour De Flex also comes with an Eclipse plugin that allows the various samples to be searched directly from an Eclipse view window.

If you are at MAX, come and find one of us (we’re wearing a Tour de Flex shirt today) to get one of the Tour De Flex USB sticks or go ahead and download it from http://flex.org/tour.

Kudos to Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets and James Ward who started this idea.