I’ve just posted the title and description of the session I’ll be giving at Flash on the Beach, which is happening September 28-Oct 1 in Brighton, England. My session is titled: Decompiling Flex and Flash. Here’s the full description (which you can also find on the FOTB site):

In this session we’ll learn how to decompile ActionScript 3 SWF files and peek inside other people’s code. Decompiling a SWF is often seen as an evil tactic that should be punishable by death, but regardless of your moral opinion, every SWF you create can be decompiled into often beautifully readable source code. If you’ve produced something cool, chances are someone has decompiled it (hell, chances are I’ve decompiled it myself).

In this session you’ll learn what you get when you decompile a SWF and what you don’t. We’ll cover how far you can get piecing a decompiled application back together and I’ll share a few real-world stories of how decompiling has proven invaluable in my development career.

This session will focus on ripping apart some large-scale Flex applications and diving into the source (we’ll see if I can get sued by the end of the session). I’ll cover some Flex-specifics that are important when you decompile a Flex app (Flex framework classes, generated MXML code, data binding code, etc). But decompiling AS3 SWFs is just as applicable for SWFs produced in Flash Authoring as well, so there should be plenty of information for everyone.

And for all the paranoid folks out there, in addition to decompiling code, I’ll also cover a few techniques to protect your source code to make it harder for people to steal.

I hope to see some of you in England!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Flash on the Beach, Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.