Dave Carabetta: My Thoughts

Know Your Congressman Using Adobe Flex 4 and Catalyst!

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:20:00 -0400

One of the things that continually keeps me energized about my job is that Cynergy is always on the leading edge of the latest trends in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) world. As a former developer, I love the latest and greatest technologies, and in my current role on the Business Development team, it really makes my job easier. :) A few months ago, Adobe approached us to get some feedback on Flex 4 and Catalyst and how they would fit into our design and development workflow (our workflow was recently covered by Forrester, if you're interested). Rather than just providing anecdotal feedback, we built out a real application without taking any shortcuts in our approach. To that end, we have just announced the first ever Adobe Flex 4 and Catalyst application called Cynergy.Congress. This application allows you to learn about United States members of Congress, including their terms, policies, committees, recent news and even videos of their testimony on the floor of the House or Senate. I know I am aggregated by some tech-centric blog aggregators and if all I was passing along was a link to a Flex application, that wouldn't interest a lot of you. Well, as Dave Wolf announced in his blog entry, we will also be releasing the source code in the coming days so that you can download, explore, and extend the code to start getting familiar with the next version of Flex. Andy Trice, who is Cynergy's Principal Architect for Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex, was the lead developer on the project, so I can promise you that nothing but the very best practices were used during development and this isn't simply demo-ware. He has already started posting about his experience with the project and it provides some great insight into the new workflows that Adobe is introducing with the next version of the Adobe Flash platform. Have a look!

How To Build RIAs...Successfully

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:00:00 -0400

As their home page says, Forrester Research is a technology and market research company that provides pragmatic advice to global leaders in business and technology. Anybody who works in our industry has heard of Forrester just like they would have heard of their competitors such as Gartner. They are fiercely independent in their case studies and truly have a hand in boosting -- or busting -- trends. Forrester has been trying to understand the rich Internet applications (RIAs) design and development process. While many firms like Cynergy have been doing this sort of development for so long that it seems like it's old hat, the fact of the matter is that building real applications with technologies like Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and Microsoft WPF is still pretty new and lots of companies are trying to get their heads around how to set up a successful workflow. After a lot of research, Forrester essentially concluded that Cynergy's approach -- and what we have learned by approaching our projects this way -- is the template from which other firms should be modeling their workflows, and Dave Wolf, Cynergy's vice president has blogged a nice summary with a link to a free copy of the report (which usually goes for $750). Now, I want to be very careful with the messaging here. I still (barely) maintain a separate blog from Cynergy's blogs because I don't want to be a shill for everything we do -- at least, not on my blog. :) That said, one thing I've learned in the time I've been at Cynergy is just how hard it is to set up a repeatable workflow for designing and developing successful RIAs. And by "successful RIAs" I mean real, enterprise-level applications upon which you can build your business. Trust me, if this workflow were that easy, a lot more people would be doing it, and it's one thing to do something once but another thing entirely to continually "rinse and repeat" it successfully. I encourage you to check out the report and compare how we're building RIAs with how you're building them (or would like to). At 7 pages, it won't take more than 15-20 minutes of your time but it could provide insights into a process that will save you hundreds of hours down the line. Oh yeah, and if you'd like to see the output of having a sound process, check out CynergyTV for some examples of real apps built to solve real business needs.

Happy New Year!

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:45:00 -0400

Yes, this is admittedly a REALLY lame way to resurface after all these months of virtual tumbleweeds, but I did want to wish everybody who stumbles upon this a very happy and healthy New Year. I know there are many who are more than happy to see 2008 go, but I'm admittedly an exception. While the economy has tanked, my 401k went to hell, and good friends and acquaintances unfortunately lost their jobs, there have also been some amazing things that have happened to me this year... I have switched from a technical role at Cynergy to business development (and am incredibly happy), had several very good friends get married, and oh yeah, I got married myself back in September! :) While the experts are predicting that at least the first half of 2009 is going to be ugly, our lives are what we make of them and while there are always going to be some unfortunate events along the way, that will only make the good moments that much sweeter. Best of luck to everybody as we close out 2008, and again, Happy New Year!

CynergyTV: Flex, Silverlight And Why I've Disappeared

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:21:00 -0400

So why have I been so quiet for pretty much the last year outside of some token posts? Well, our re-launched CynergyTV experience holds the reason, and I'm glad I can finally talk about it. So Dave, you mean you've spent the last year re-building CynergyTV? Nope, not quite. That was done by an extremely talented team here at Cynergy that worked extremely hard to not only refresh the user experience but deliver the content in professional audio/video quality supported by lots of hardware and software upgrades in our data center. Incidentally, when I say team, I mean it in the truest sense of the word -- our president, Carson Hager, recognizing that we could and should present our accomplishments better and allowing guys to stop being billable in order to get this done; our Marketing group spending hours in the recording studio choreographing the audio/video; our User Experience group iterating through lots of potential look and feel options until it was nailed; our Rich Interface team implementing the user experience in Adobe Flex; and finally, our Enterprise Services and Network Support teams building out the services tier to support the streaming video content (not a trivial task as I've come to learn), notifying the appropriate people when the Let's Talk form is submitted, and then setting up the appropriate infrastructure to host it all in our data center. If that sounds like a lot of work, that's because it was -- and it was well worth the investment. So back to my opening question as to why I've been so quiet. Well, if you head over to CynergyTV (after reading this post, of course), you'll see that one of the showcases is for an application we built called Quickcomm Enterprise, a telecom expense management (TEM) tool for one of our clients, Quickcomm. It is this application that has basically been most of the last year of my life. As the Technical Lead on the project (which is a combination senior application architect and project manager here at Cynergy), I have spent over 1,600 hours working with my team here at Cynergy and the team at Quickcomm to deliver the most disruptive TEM solution on the market and I'm extraordinarily proud and privileged to have worked with both teams. Since the completion of that project a short while back, I have since made the transition for being a Technical Lead to Business Development -- yes, the dreaded "sales" guy. I was ready for a new challenge beyond coding and the growth opportunities here at Cynergy made this transition both seamless and a no-brainer. So now I get to put on my sales hat: If you're interested in speaking with us about an idea you have or have an existing application you want re-invented to provide a better user experience, drop us a line and we're happy to speak with you further. And of course, if you have any feedback at all about the re-launched CynergyTV, feel free to leave a comment and I'll make sure it reaches the right people immediately. Lastly, if you're a developer who wants to work with a phenomenally talented team that continually delivers cutting edge applications, we'd love to speak with you about career opportunities at Cynergy. It's a great time to be building RIAs and we'd love for you to be a part of it!

Adobe Announces Searchable SWF Collaboration With Google And Yahoo!

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:50:00 -0400

One reason (OK, there are many, I admit) why this blog has gone bare lately is because I try not to post announcements that every other similar blog in the world has already announced. It's a waste of my time and being one of 2,000 posts on the same exact subject doesn't tend to interest me (anymore). However, today's announcement by Adobe that they are working with Google and Yahoo! to enhance the search capabilities of SWF files (Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex applications in case you don't know what a SWF file is) is a long overdue breakthrough for the rich Internet application (RIA) trend, and is yet another validation of technologies such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight for delivering public-facing, web-based applications. Let's get one thing right out there though: Not all RIAs should be searchable by search engines. Many (most?) RIAs are not and should not be simple ports of HTML-based web sites over to these newer technologies. That would be a waste of time and money. RIAs really excel for true web-based application development -- think applications like Picnik, an online photo editor. There isn't any real value in Google being able to index the photo editing application itself -- that's sort of like indexing Microsoft Word. However, an Adobe Flex-based RIA that captures the latest new stories and visualizes them -- i.e., displaying the titles in little bubbles and having more popular stories have larger bubbles -- is right in the wheelhouse of the utility of this announcement. The ability for Google and Yahoo! to be able to crawl the SWF itself for the content rather than having to expose the raw RSS feed, XML file, or whatever the source is incredibly valuable. A social network RIA that allows search engines to index public profiles -- think LinkedIn -- is yet another example of where the convergence of the sticky user experience Flex provides and the search engine power of Google and Yahoo! is extremely powerful. Lastly, and this is a lesser point yet one I still wish to make, I've been to trade shows where AJAX-focused companies tout their products. Interestingly, I invariably hear them say as part of their pitch that one of the big distinctions between AJAX applications and Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight applications is that AJAX apps can be searched by the major search engines. Well, the competitive advantage is leveled today. I certainly am one who is curious to see how Adobe's announcement plays out in reality (name the last technical solution you saw that worked flawlessly on the first try), but hopefully the AJAX vs. Flex/Silverlight debate can start to move back to what really matters: the user experience.

See You At The Web 2.0 Show In San Francisco?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:00:00 -0400

As we announced in early January, Cynergy is a platinum sponsor of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. Of note, our Vice President, Dave Wolf, will be giving a presentation in Room 2016 entitled Sticky Eyeballs: How UX Wins Market Share. Dave has spoken at numerous conferences, including last year's keynote at AJAXWorld, and he's extremely engaging and passionate about this topic, so I highly recommend you check it out if you're attending the show. Also, Cynergy continues to push the envelope to deliver stunning, engaging rich internet applications (RIAs) using Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and we'd love to show you what we've been working on. We'll have a large booth (#721) in the expo hall where we will be showing off our latest applications and we'd love for you to stop by and say hello. If you can't make the conference, don't forget that we still have demonstrations of some of our applications online via CynergyTV and we also have our Cynergy Labs R&D site up, which includes a demonstration of our wildly popular Project Maestro. Hope to see you in San Franscisco!

Understanding Which Channel To Use In BlazeDS And LCDS

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:15:00 -0400

Tap, Tap. Does this thing still work? :) I have been heads down on a major project for several months now and the delivery is in the next few weeks. I promise I'm still alive and rearing to get back into blogging on a more regular basis. I can't wait to be able to show off the killer app I've been working on! I just came across a phenomenal blog post outlining the different channel/endpoint options available in BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services along with a breakdown of the pros and cons of using each connectivity option. I'm not a fan of link dumps like this, but, honestly, anything I write will just be a regurgitation of this excellent summary, so I'm going to break my own rule and direct you to Damon Cooper's blog instead. If you're doing any work with BlazeDS or LCDS, you have to read and bookmark this post!

A Very Important Change From Flex Builder 2 To Flex Builder 3

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:27:00 -0400

This has come up several times on the flexcoders mailing list and since it's such an important change, I thought I would post it to help make sure it doesn't get missed. With the release of Flex Builder 3 Beta 2 on Adobe Labs, when you now compile your application, Flex Builder only generates a debug version of the SWF by default. However, and this is the part that is tripping people up, there is no -debug suffix on the generated SWF file, so it will be named as if it were the release version. The big difference is that the file size will be much larger. This last point has raised a red flag with some developers, who mistakenly believe that the latest beta actually increases the file size of the release version of their application. Why did Adobe do this? Well, if you've built a good size Flex application, you'll have likely noticed that the compilation time grows dramatically to the point where you can sometimes literally go and get some coffee in the time that it takes to compile your application. Seriously. This is (partly) because, prior to Flex Builder 3 Beta 2, both a release version and a debug version of the application were being generated in the output directory, so you were waiting roughly twice the amount of time for Flex Builder to do its job (OK, the delay is not quite that linear, but you get the point). Further, if you're using the Modules feature, you had to write some hack-ish runtime code to determine which SWF file to use between development and production. But when you're developing your application, you usually don't care about the release version of the SWF, right? Well, to reduce this "wait time," only the debug version of the SWF is created, and since the file name will always remain the same, your hack-ish runtime code is no longer needed. OK, so this is great while you're developing, but what happens when you're ready to release your application and really do want the release version of the SWF? Well, the latest beta introduced the Export Release Wizard. Found in the Project menu, this handy wizard will create the release version of your application in a bin-release directory by default. It is in this new output directory that you will find a clean, compressed version of your application all ready to deploy to your production environment. Mike Morearty and Tim Buntel of Adobe give excellent explanations of this change and I encourage you to take a look at their posts if you would like more information. It's a change that makes sense, but if you're a long-time Flex developer, then it's definitely going to take some time to get used to remembering it.

Flex 3 (and 2.0.1) Nightly Builds Available

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:25:00 -0400

If you're following the Adobe Flex 3 release cycle, it may seem as if there hasn't been an update since Beta 1 was released back in June. However, there are nightly builds of the Flex 3 (aka Moxie) SDK and compiler module available for download. Further, there are nightly builds available for the 2.0.1 release as well if you happen to be using that and are having issues. Each build comes with a set of release notes (which just look to be an export of the comments from the associated bug base cases). Big Disclaimer: Please be aware that nightly builds are not as rigorously tested for stability by the Flex engineering team before release, which is why you don't see them labeled with the official "Beta" tags. In fact, it is possible that some nightly builds may not work at all. Further, the nightly builds do not include further support for Adobe AIR, so you'll need to stick with the June release if using that technology. Installation is as simple as backing up the "moxie" directory in your current installation (which is located under the "sdks" directory in the installation root) and then overwriting its contents with the downloaded zip (I also clean my projects in Flex Builder via the Project -> Clean...) option to make sure there are no lingering issues. Unfortunately, there are no nightly builds of the Flex Builder 3 IDE available, but the Flex 3 Planning Guide indicates that a refresh will be available in early October (I'm guessing at MAX, even though it's technically at the end of September).

Come See Us At Flex360

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 14:10:00 -0400

Wow, so I've totally sucked with posting lately, but I guess that's the life of a consultant -- you're easy really busy or unbelievably slammed with work! Anyway, I wanted to make sure that, if you're attending the Flex 360 conference next week in Seattle, please stop by and say hello to our team (registration is still open if you're interested). We'd love to meet you and "talk shop" about Flex or any other topic. Unfortunately, I can't make it out there for the conference but you won't be able to miss the other Cynergy guys wearing their bright red shirts (which sounds obnoxious, but they're actually really cool). Dave Wolf, our Vice President, has posted a comprehensive summary of what Cynergy will be contributing to the conference, including an announcement about our participation in the Charity Code Jam in support of the Northwest Harvest, which is a hunger relief agency in Washington state. There's also a recruiting event that we're hosting whose details is on double-secret probation. All you have to do is show up with a resume if you're interested in working with us and we'll let you in on the details. It's going to be an amazing time in Seattle next week and I'm incredibly bummed that I won't be able to make it. As I said, if you're going to be there, make sure to stop by to see our team. The guys are so excited to be heading out there and we have lots that we're excited to show off!

30

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 11:10:00 -0400

Well, it happened. At 12:30 am this morning I had no choice but to turn 30 years old. I have decided that while I'm in this decade transition period that my age will now be "formerly 29" until I get used to the idea. It's all good though -- my body certainly feels more 30 than twenty something, so I'm just mentally catching up to where I've physically been for a while! Here's to a new decade!

Straight From The Boss's Mouth: Come Work At Cynergy

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:15:00 -0400

So this is one of those posts that is blatant shilling for my company. While I try and stay away from doing that (hence I maintain my own blog), Carson's post yesterday can't be emphasized enough: the RIA industry's boom is our gain and has us on the prowl for good talent to join our team. OK, with the advertisement out of the way, let me expand a little bit on who we're looking for and why we're a great place to work. What We're Looking For First and foremost, if you're new to Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight, that's totally OK. From talking with other developers at conferences and meetings, there seems to be a misconception that you need to be a seasoned Flex developer in order to be considered for a position at Cynergy (and, well, Silverlight is literally only months old). However, nothing could be further from the truth. While we have some of the most experienced Flex developers around, this is what we're looking for:

Passion: I put this before any technical skill because it's the most important thing that we're looking for. We want people who are as excited as we are about the RIA market and who want to continually push the envelope by developing world-class experiences for our customers using Adobe Flex, Adobe Apollo, and/or Microsoft Silverlight. When I was first looking into joining Cynergy, I was a bit skeptical as to the definition of this "passion" that people always say they're looking for, as it's seemingly arbitrary. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that the energy my co-workers have on a daily basis is both jaw-dropping and contagious, and my personal fire to get into building RIAs fit in perfectly.
Object Oriented skills: Not everything about working here is "abstract." The reality is that you simply can't build scalable, maintainable RIAs without a solid OO foundation. You don't have to be able to recite and define every single design pattern, but you need to be able to define and understand terms such classes, objects, inheritance, composition, etc. If you have a firm grasp there, then learning the language is just syntactic sugar and you'll take right off.
Current experience: OK, so hopefully it goes without saying that if you have current experience with any versions of these technologies that it's serious bonus points. That being said, we've found that people with solid AJAX experience do well because the asynchronous nature of the Flash Player is a web development mind shift that can trip people up. However, don't worry about what specific technologies you have or haven't worked with in the past; the reality is that the RIA market is still young and you're just not going to get resumes with four, five, or six years of real RIA experience.
Possibility of relocating near one of our offices: Let me stress right off the bat that this is not a core requirement to joining our team. Heck, I'm currently writing this from my apartment in New York City. If you have existing solid experience or are willing to travel to one of our offices for a while at the beginning to get up to speed (we pay for all expenses, of course), working remotely is certainly an option. That being said, we do find that being in one of our offices accelerates your growth at a much more rapid pace and try to get people as close as possible to one of them. Currently, we have offices in Washington, DC; San Diego, California; Grand Rapids; Michigan; Rochester, New York; and Copenhagen, Denmark. We are absolutely going to be expanding that list in the very near future, though I'm not at liberty to disclose that information just yet (sorry!).

If you're not put off by any of those items and are looking for a new challenge, then please, please, please, send us your resume. The great part about Cynergy is that everybody is accessible, including our president, Carson Hager. To that end, please e-mail him if you have any questions that you don't think are appropriate for me (i.e., I don't deal with anything related to compensation) and he will get back to you as close to immediately as possible. Of course, if there's anything I haven't addressed here that you want to know more about, please leave a comment or contact me offline, as I'm happy to answer any and all questions myself. Why Cynergy? So now that you have idea as to who we're looking for, why do you want to be working here? Well, frankly, I am constantly amazed at the type of applications we're building. A year ago, I never would have thought these sorts of applications could be developed using web technologies. Now, a lot of that credit has to go to Adobe for providing us with such a powerful, easy-to-use framework, however I've seen co-workers like Andrew Trice and Keun Lee do things with Flex that I never thought could be done with the current framework features. And have you seen our CynergyTV showcase? That's just a small tip of the iceberg relative to the other applications we have built (we value our customers' privacy and we're sometimes restricted from publicly demo-ing the solutions we build for them). While those are amazing applications, what does that have to do with wanting to work here? Well, the same developers who built those applications are still here at Cynergy and delivering better applications all the time. The sense of genuinely being a part of a team is prevalent throughout the company and I've never run into a situation where somebody wasn't willing to help, regardless of their own workload. That teamwork starts from the top, and Carson, Dave Wolf, and Keith O'Donnell (our Management Team), treat us as their equals and we are very much involved in many aspects of the direction of the company (but hey, we're still developers, so we leave many other things to them!). They recognize that without us, Cynergy will not survive, and we're very well taken care of and are provided any and all resources necessary to succeed as a result. If you're curious about our retention rate, since I've started here last fall, literally nobody has left the company. That's just the type of fun, yet professional, culture that has been built and we are fiercely protective of that. This is an amazing time to be working at the leading RIA services firm, and you can help be a part of that success. Send us your resume because we'd love to chat!

Adobe Flex 2.0.1 Hotfix 2 and LiveCycle Data Services 2.5 Available

Tue, 29 May 2007 10:10:00 -0400

Adobe released Hotfix 2 for Adobe Flex 2.0.1 and an update to the now re-named LiveCycle Data Services on Friday afternoon for immediate download. Of particular interest in this hotfix are a couple of fixes specifically for memory leaks in high-use components:

Memory leak in Accordion.
ViewStack containers are not GC'd - memory leak.

In a somewhat questionable move when you consider that this is just a hotfix, please be aware that some classes specific to the LiveCycle Data Services product (formerly Flex Data Services) have been moved out of the SDK and may break existing code, particularly for those of you who use the Cairngorm framework. Specifically, the Consumer class has been moved out of the SDK and Cairngorm makes a reference to it in the ServiceLocator class. Alistair McLeod has posted more details on the issue and expects to have an update of Cairngorm available as soon as possible. Further, Matt Chotin has posted that the main installers will not be updated with the hotfix bits due to the lack of desire to update all the documentation, so if you need to re-install Flex Builder or are trying it out for the first time, you'll need to make sure you run the Hotfix 2 installer separately. Lastly, the update is cumulative, so you will not need to install Hotfix 1 first. Also released was an update to the Flex Data Services product line. Perhaps most importantly, Flex Data Services is now named LiveCycle Data Services, though the Adobe site looks to have been not made the appropriate site updates as of this posting. Further, the links in the updater's readme file to the main product page, Release Notes, Installation Instructions, and Known Issues currently redirects to the Adobe.com home page, so there's no way of knowing what was addressed in this update. This isn't the first time that Adobe has released an update to a product without updating the supporting web site references for a noticeable period of time (i.e., days), and hopefully the disconnect is addressed in the future, as it's frustrating to not be able to get to the information we need to make important decisions about installing and/or updating a product.

Why Silverlight Is A Phenomenally Important Announcement For Adobe Flex

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:15:00 -0400

There's been a big discussion over the last few days across mailing lists and blogs about the impact of Microsoft's Silverlight announcement. The loyalists from both the Microsoft and the Adobe developer camps have come out of their respective wood works to debate Silverlight's merit vis-a-vis Flex. What's interesting to me about this debate is that, once again, with the introduction of a new, potentially disruptive technology, it always winds up being an "either/or" discussion rather than an "and" discussion. That is, the debate can usually be distilled down to why one would use technology X rather than technology Y when the discussion should really be how one can use both technology X and technology Y. As a real-world example, simply replace "technology X" with "Adobe Flex" and replace "technology Y" with "AJAX" in the previous example and do a simple internet search. I mean, I thought that we, as developers, were in the business of delivering the best product to our employer/customer/client rather than a product that uses a specific technology simply because that's their personal preference? Did I miss something? Dave Wolf, Vice President of Consulting at my employer, Cynergy Systems, wrote an excellent blog entry this morning entitled Wake up and see the Silverlight, which discusses just how phenomenally important Microsoft's Silverlight announcement is to the Rich Internet Application (RIA) industry. As he notes:

...[T]his week's news that Microsoft has officially named Sparkle - WPF/E as Silverlight and that it is clearly and finally on its way to market truly is the tipping point that establishes that RIA's are real, RIA's are the future and RIA's will shape the way we are going to be developing software for some time to come. Microsoft just justified and legitimized RIA. That is HUGE.

Dave hits the nail on the head in his entry, and I won't try and re-hash it here, as I wouldn't be able to do it justice. However, my point is that this isn't about how Silverlight is going to squash Flex, or vice versa. This is about how the RIA industry just became the focal point for future development, and that's an incredibly important validation of Adobe Flex and, by extension, Apollo. By recognizing that the equivalent of the Adobe Flash Player is the future of delivering engaging web applications, Microsoft validated the Player as that delivery platform. Hence, they built their own. Did Microsoft declare that Adobe is officially in their cross-hairs? Absolutely. Is the first release of Silverlight going to knock the snot out of Adobe Flex? Absolutely not. But let's be honest here -- for anybody that used either Flex 1.0 or Flex 1.5, those initial releases left a lot to be desired themselves, so let's not be so quick to bash Silverlight as a failure waiting to happen. It'll likely have its warts, much the same as Flex 1.x did. But, in true Microsoft form, once they get that second or third release out and their development community on board, the RIA space is going to have at least two major players from which developers will be able to deliver rich, engaging applications. I don't know about you, but I couldn't be more excited! Have a look at Dave's entry to get a more thorough analysis of the impact of the Silverlight announcement. Don't worry Adobe fans, Flex isn't going anywhere. In fact, I think it got just a whole lot stronger!

A Couple Of Issues With The Latest Adobe Flash Player Release (9.0.45)

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:05:00 -0400

So Adobe quietly released an update to the Flash Player late last week on April 12th. Funny enough, I only knew about it because a co-worker of mine was prompted to upgrade his Flash Player when he went to run an application. However, I've come across a couple of issues with this release that I think are worth noting publicly in case you should run into them. Neither of them are show-stoppers, but number 2 especially is annoying.

You'll need to download the latest uninstaller (dated 11/14/2006) to get rid of the version 9.0.28 bits. You can likely just install the upgrade over an existing 9.0.x installation, but I know in the past that Macromedia-now-Adobe has recommended first uninstalling the existing Flash Player before installing the new version, so I tend to follow that to be safe. I had an uninstaller from the 9.0.16 release, and it threw a runtime error during the uninstall process for the 9.0.28 Player because a method was missing from one of the installed DLLs (sorry I can't be more helpful with the specific message because I resolved the problem before capturing a snapshot).
This problem I have yet to solve. I am using the Eclipse plugin version of Flex Builder 2.0.1 with the SDK Hotfix 1 installed and every time I go to launch one of my Flex applications, I now receive this lovely error message:

What really annoys me about this error is that it still launches the application without issue using the 9.0.45 Flash Player, but there's no way of turning it off via a "Remember this decision" error, so I now have to Click the "Yes" button every time! If I happen to come across a solution to number 2 or if Adobe happens to post a workaround, I'll post an update back here.