In yesterday’s BFUG meeting, I came to know about SearchCoders.

It is a fantastic way of going through the huge flexcoders archive. flexcoders yahoo group is a vast collection of Flex knowledge with almost 7000 Flex users registered on it and more than 100 email messages per day. It is a great example of the powerful Flex ecosystem that has developed around Flex.

But, newcomers to Flex get overwhelmed in finding the answers to their questions in such a huge collection of email messages. And, since this groups has been around for more than 3 years now, so the level of expertise of the group members is actually quite advanced - thus very trivial questions sometimes are left unanswered. So searchcoders comes in very handy. It has a Flex based interface too which is very easy to use.

Mrinal Wadhwa also recommended using the Searchcoders Apollo application, which he says has a more powerful user interface and make life lot more easier. (I haven’t tried out the Apollo app myself though. You will need to install Apollo runtime on your desktop to try it out)

The first meeting of the Bangalore Flex User Group (BFUG), happened yesterday. And, I’m very grateful to Mr. Ramesh from Aztecsoft, who helped organise the meeting by providing space at their office. (The Aztecsoft office is on the 2nd Floor in Salarpuria Infinity building on Bannerghatta Road, next to the HUGE Accenture office)

I found it fantastic to meet the people with whom I had been till date communicating over email. There was Mrinal, Ajay and Rashmi - all of them very active members of the flex_india google group. Then there were two Flex users from a startup named ‘Flat World’ and four users from ‘PSI data systems’.

The meeting was also attended by few members of the Adobe Flex team which is based out of Bangalore. There were - me, Raghu,Harish,Nisheeth,Shameer, Arijit, Swaroop CH, and Ram. There was Gautam Palthady also, who is from a different team in Adobe - and is a Flex user.

I should say it was a great set of people with some very cool attitude. (I would love to have beer with these guy, anytime!) We discussed what everybody was doing, what problems they were facing and what expectations they had from BFUG. It turns out that most of the members were newbies (most of them with 0-3 months of experience)

(And I noticed, that a lot of them were having problems understanding Flex Data Services - looks like I need to get a tutorial out)

We decided to have the following BFUG meeting a little later in the evenings (after 6pm), so that more people can join in. And, that we will consolidate all the various links on Flex at flex-india.org or some other website.

I’m looking forward to having the next BFUG meeting and meeting more cool people!