The Space For App Developers

Yesterday Amethyst Beta 5 was released. Amethyst is a Flex development environment for Visual Studio. With every release it becomes more and more feature complete. I think in the future it has a big chance of becoming the Flex IDE of many VS/.NET developers.

This release bring feature like:

Refactoring

• Rename variables, classes and methods
• Encapsulate field (add getters and setters and update references)
• Preview and edit (check or uncheck items) before renaming
• Rename from ‘smart tags’

Organize imports

• Auto-add class to import list
• Sort imports
• Remove unused imports
• Sort and remove imports in a single operation

Configuration-dependent property pages

• Seven pages of categorized project properties
• Save properties as named configurations for easy re-use
• Option to select alternative Flex SDKs
• Options to define symbols for conditional compilation

Find all References

• Highlight an ID such as a class, method or variable to navigate to all references in project

Run and debug on server

• Option to run or debug applications using a web server
• Supports WebDev, Apache, IIS