Joeflash’s Enigmacopaedia

I’ve long wanted to use FDT to turbocharge my ActionScript coding, but without Flex MXML support I couldn’t justify the cost of getting both Flex Builder and FDT. Then FDT 3.2 came out this past May — finally I had an answer to my prayers with FDT’s new MXML support. And I actually won a copy of FDT Enterprise at 360|Flex Indy: total awesomeness! Now I could decide if once and for all I could get rid of Flex Builder in favour of FDT.

So I tinkered with FDT, converting some of my old projects and seeing how they compiled and ran. And for the most part it all went off without a hitch. I was really quite impressed with FDT’s new Flex capabilities. Also, I had been using Flex Builder for the occasional Flash Professional project for code editing, and FDT now makes that sooo much easier, much like SEPY used to do back in the day.

But it was not to be. Shortly after porting over a Flex project I’m working on, I realize I’d gotten used to having aspects of Flex Builder available in my workflow. Like certain Flex project settings, and the Profiler. Maybe later on I’ll explore the enterprise features of FDT like the Debugger or the SoS logger, but for now all I want FDT to do is gimme that sweet coding savvy which Flex Builder sorely lacks. I mean, there isn’t a single Eclipse-based IDE or plugin I’ve seen which comes anywhere close to the sheer overwhelmingly awesome coding intelligence and snippet templates of FDT.

So what I’d like to be able to do is use FDT for coding both AS and MXML files, and use Flex Builder for the actual compilation, debugging and profiling. And of course the faster compiler and the Network Monitor in Flash Builder 4, when it’s released.

So how do I get the best of both worlds? They’re both available as plugins, so I should be able to install and use them both, right?
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