I am trying my best to not go to my blog and rant about Flex Builder 3... but its getting harder by the hour. I had an earlier post about having to dig around and delete some hidden caches to get my code to compile correctly... and now, Flex Builder just hosed by entire website (well -- my localhost copy that I debug against).
I'm pretty annoyed by the whole "Export release build..." change in Flex Builder 3 because I'm building a performance-intensive (i.e. game) Flash app and there's a noticeable difference between release and debug builds. As a result, I like to regularly check out the release build. Annoyingly, the release build doesn't get "exported" to the same spot as the debug build (which is into my web server's document root) so I was exporting it, then copying it by hand. Annoying... So, I had the bright idea of setting the "export..." target folder to be by document root. I was warned that the export may get trampled by the debug build because they're in the same location. Fine with me, I'll rebuild the debug version after I check out the release build. Well, I did it, and sure enough, with automatic building it got confused and so I decided to undo it. I went into "export release build..." and changed the path back. Annoyingly, the linked directory for bin-release didn't update, so now I was stuck with a linked bin-release folder pointing at my document root. Okay, I'll just delete that linked folder... it won't delete the contents of the directory will it? Sure enough, my fears were allayed when FB warned, "Deleting the linked folder will not remove the target folder just the link... OK?" Hey, that's exactly what I want, so yeah, okay! F*CK! Even though the folder was definitely a "linked" folder (little icon and all), even though FB just told me it wasn't going to touch my file system, it deleted the contents of my document root. Zap. Instantly. And it didn't move it the trash like a decent human being, it just nuked it from the file system. Which leaves me to say, F* you Flex Builder... I shoulda just stayed in bed this morning, I'd be further along in my work than I am right now. I know there's not any answers to a post like this... just a heads up, a warning, to be *very* careful when deleting linked folders because there's definitely something buggy happening there. It may be user error on my part, but I feel pretty safe yelling "bug" with the confirmation dialog that I got. At the very least, folks, let have all our apps that delete files from the file system go the extra mile and send them to the trash, m'kay? Troy.
