Beta 2, mixed impressions

So after a day of using Flex Builder 3, beta 2, I'm loving 90% of the changes. But the other 10% makes me want to punch a baby.

First the 10%. Click "Debug", your project compiles and opens fine. Click "Run", your project compiles, opens, and wants the Flash debugger location. Adobe says "working as intended". Says Peter Flynn, "This is intentional. To create a final, non-debug SWF, use "Export Release Version" (available on the toolbar and the Project menu). You can avoid the "Where's the debugger?" dialog box by installing the latest Flash player that is included in the Flex Builder installer." Hurrah for giving the developers more steps to do! Right now I'm messing with deep linking, I don't want to run in debug mode, I want to keep changing the url and make sure my app reacts to it.

Anchors! In design mode, click any component and you'll get little blue bubbles that make constraining the item more visually intuitive. This replacing what they had in the right side "Flex Properties" dock under layout. They've also reordered things, moving Layout to be the second item, which makes more sense, you ("you"="I") use that more than style.

They've also fixed a bug switching to design mode. Before, when you opened a component and changed to design mode, you'd only see the top-right 200x300 or so of the component. With no "design area" option, I'd have to resize the component and undo the change to get the whole thing to show.

And deep linking! I've been drooling over this example for a while, but those files they're importing haven't existed. Now they do.