Best Adobe MAX Sessions

I attended my first Adobe MAX in San Francisco last month. As a former Java programmer and current Flex RIA and component developer, these are the sessions I found most useful, in no particular order:

Creating New Components in Flex 3 and Beyond with Deepa Subramaniam: I was afraid I’d be bored in this session, because I thought I had component development pretty much figured out. I was wrong. In the first half of the session, Deepa covered a lot of things I didn’t know about developing components in Flex 3. There was so much new info for me in the first half, I almost wasn’t ready to absorb the second half, which was about developing components in Flex 4. If anything, the material in this session could have been spread across two full sessions with no time wasted.

Understanding the Flash Player Security Model with Deneb Meketa: This one had lots of good info about why the Flash Player permits or restricts various security-sensitive operations.

Building High-Performance Applications with Adobe AIR with Oliver Goldman and Optimizing Adobe AIR for Code Execution, Memory, and Rendering with Sean Christmann: These were back-to-back sessions on Wednesday afternoon and they complemented each other well. The first session dealt more with the process of optimizing an app, and the second session focused more on the code-level details of speeding an app up. Both sessions also had good info for anyone who does good old Flex without AIR, too.

What’s New in Flash Player 10 with Emmy Huang: Lots of Flash Player 10 features were introduced in the conference’s general sessions, but this late Wednesday session gave us a chance to see them again, and in more detail, and ask questions.

Testing Your Flex Applications with Michael Labriola: This session gave a great overview of the different types of testing (unit vs. functional vs. integration) and the tools out there for each type.

Introduction to BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES with Christophe Conraets: This session gave a good overview and helped me clear up a few misconceptions I had about these technologies.

Of course, I only attended a small fraction of the sessions and labs available at MAX – there were so many choices for each time slot. If I had to do it over, though, these were the sessions I wouldn’t dare miss. YMMV!