So I installed Flexbuilder and the Flash Player 8.5 last night and went through the quickstart PDF and trying a few tutorials.  It’s been a loooong time since I worked with MXML/Flex and it’s definitely going to take some work to get up to speed on it. 

Anyway, so after hunting around some I found how to add some old style ActionScript to my “app” and have it reference a text field.  It wasn’t hard to do mind you, just didn’t see any examples in the quickstart guide so had to dig a bit further.

So I wanted to see if the “performance tricks” that I’ve been collecting still apply to the new Player/VM. I only had time to try one..  Test #15 - string concatenating vs. Array join.  Pulling up the old “Flash 8” SWF in the Flash Player 8.5 was no real change as expected..  but after I published the SWF from FlexBuilder the results are awesome..  the performance gain in the Flash Player 8.5 in working with Arrays looks to be huge.  The String methods were also improved so the difference between concatenating the string or joining the array is fairly small (31ms vs 20ms) when compared to the FP7 days (830ms vs 109ms) seems relatively insignificant.

At any rate, this will prompt me to find some time over the next week or so to update my little performance tests.  The original intent of my “actionscript performance tests” wasn’t to test one player vs. another, but to collect some of the tricks people used for performance gains.  But naturally a performance trick in one Player doesn’t always work in the next version.  So it’s going to be interesting to see what changed in 8.5.  Also, if you know of new performance tricks that only work in FP8.5 please point me towards them..