First off, I just want to say that I love FlashDevelop. It is hands down the best free IDE available for editing AcionScript files. If you’re on Windows and want to increase your efficiency 10 fold or more, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s got the best syntax highlighting and completion I’ve seen, it’s lightweight, and it works flawlessly.
I’ve been a fan of FlashDevelop since I first discovered it, and have always loved being able to compile straight from the program, skipping the Adobe IDE compiler altogether. At the company I work at, we all use FlashDevelop and pass around a single project file. However, we publish from the Flash IDE. FlashDevelop does a nice job of integrating the two, giving you the option to create a Flash IDE project specifically for publishing through the Flash IDE. This is great, but the one thing I’ve always wished I had access to was debugging.
Recently, I (quite by accident) figured out how to enable the debugging features in FlashDevelop, even when you are publishing from the Flash IDE. It is mind-bogglingly simple. I’m sure this is buried somewhere in the FlashDevelop documentation, but I had never had a chance to look into it. Here’s how you do it:
- Open up Flash and go the Publish Settings.
- Click on the “Settings” button next to the Script dropdown.
- Choose the “Library Path” tab.
- Click on the plus sign and paste “$(FlexSDK)/frameworks/libs/flex.swc” into the input box (minus the quotes).
- Save your settings, and that’s it!
Now you can go into FlashDevelop, make sure it’s set to debug, set a few break points and run the application (ctrl+enter). FlashDevelop should launch the compiler in the Flash IDE and, once compiled, the debugging views will open up in FlashDevelop and viola! Debugging in FlashDevelop when publishing from the Flash IDE.
At work we are still on Flash CS4, so I can’t speak to these steps in regards to Flash CS5, since I have a Mac at home. I’m using the latest version of FlashDevelop (which at the time of this writing is v3.3.1) so I am also unsure of the earliest version of FlashDevelop that supports this feature. If anyone has any other little known tips or tricks regarding FlashDevelop, or knows the status of this trick for other versions of Flash or FlashDevelop, feel free to share them in the comments!
Update 11/10/2011 –
We are now all on Flash CS 5.5 and the steps above definitely still work. That being said, for some reason when you publish from a .xfl the swf does not automatically open & connect to flash develop’s debugger tool. To get around this, when you run the debug from flash develop, you will need to wait for Flash to compile the swf. At that point, you will need to right click on the newly published swf from within flash develop and click “open” to actually run the swf & have the debug tool hook into it. It will, however, work automatically if you are using the .fla format as opposed to the .xfl format.
For some reason when you publish from a .xfl the swf does not automatically open & connect to flash develop’s debugger
if you use the .xfl format simply change your publish settings and add a “../” (without the quotes) before the output name, this will make the output file appare in the same folder as it would have done if it was a fla and FD will start debugging automaticlly
Hello. Would it be possible to debug in flashdevelop when you have named symbols on the stage in flash. I seem to be hitting a snag on that one….
I use named symbols on the stage and haven’t had any problems debugging in flash develop. What kind of errors are you getting?