Flash Chat Example

Unfortunately, I couldn't easily find any decent place to host FluorineFx for free (or indeed, any ASP.NET application) otherwise there'd be something here to simply click on and try. As it is, you'll need to grab my source code and build it yourself. Everything you need to do this is freely available.

Free Software Requirements

• IIS: comes with Windows 2000, XP, Vista as long as you have Professional.
• Visual C# Express 2008 from Microsoft: Web Edition is not required since you'll be running the ASP.NET code from IIS.
• Flex 2 SDK from Adobe: Comes with MXMLC command-line compiler.
• My Examples' Source Code: the FluorineFx DLL's are provided under the Bin directory.

Installation

1. Create an IIS Virtual Directory on your localhost called FluorineFx and point it to the base folder of my examples, wherever you put them on your machine.
2. Build Chat.swf from Chat.mxml with MXMLC and/or Obrunski. This is as simple as bringing up a command prompt and typing mxmlc Chat.mxml; assuming you have the Flex SDK's Bin directory on your PATH.
3. Build Chat.dll from Chat.csproj with Visual C#. It'll probably ask you to create a solution file called Chat.sln, just drop it in the same directory. The output is already set to go into the main Bin directory where the other assemblies already are.
4. If you don't want/need to run Chat.swf directly (e.g. not embed from web page on localhost) then you're done. Otherwise create a plain text file called FluorineFx.cfg, put one line in it that is the full path to the SWF's base directory, and then copy that to C:\Documents and Settings\user.name\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#Security\FlashPlayerTrust\.

Running

Visit http://localhost/FluorineFx/Chat.aspx and you should get a nice big gray screen with a login prompt entitled "Connect". Go ahead and type anything in, I bet you'll see this:


Don't be frightened, this is just due to the fact that this example doesn't have any real way to authenticate users so what it does is create a new one if it doesn't recognize what you typed in. So you might see this error more of a "Successfully created user" response. Click "OK", retype the password, and then click "Connect" again and voila (hopefully).

Problems and Solutions

You have a real problem if you see this:



This means that the FluorineFx service is not running in IIS and therefore not taking connections or receiving data. Take a look at the log\fluorine.log for clues and/or check the system event log. A couple common issues are:

• Port 1939 is already in use. Change this in the services-config/channels/channel-definition/endpoint node of WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml.
• You launched Chat.swf directly rather than from IIS. The web page must be loaded at least once to start the FluorineFx service within IIS, otherwise there's nothing to connect to!

Credit

The Chat example is a slightly modified version of the one that comes with FluorineFx 1.0.0.5 and all credit should be deferred to its creators. I'm just trying to get a good grasp on this stuff!