Thomas Coleman, CUA

I recently attended a meeting of the Chicago Flex group. Kevin Hoyt, the Adobe Flex Platform Evangelist was the guest speaker. He demonstrated using constraint-based layouts for Flex applications. He also recommended not merging the Flex Framework into your Flex projects, but loading it at runtime as an RSL (Runtime Shared Library). This makes your application smaller, and the Framework is cached by the Flash player, so it's a good practice that will benefit all Flex projects. There's a bunch of great (free!) video tutorials on the Adobe Developer website. You can find detailed instructions on loading the Framework as an RSL in the video titled: "Reducing the file size of your Flex application" from Day 5 - Architecture and Advanced topics.

Cheers!