why I'm not using MTASC

A lot of people have been talking about MTASC in the last few months, and I'm sure many have started to use it. But I haven't.

A stand-alone compiler is what many of us have been asking for from Macromedia, as it could dramatically improve our workflow by letting us integrate properly with our code editors and build tools of choice. So far, for whatever reason, Macromedia have not given it to us, but a few have appeared in the last few years including, but not limited to: Kinetic Fusion, NeoSwiff (C# language) and MTASC.

I haven't used Kinetic Fusion so can't really comment on that, and NeoSwiff is in its own league, using C# instead of Actionscript syntax. But I had a play with MTASC and I read through some of the documentation. For some reason the guys at Motion Twin decided that they didn't have to make their compiler compatible with Macromedia's. This is my problem and the reason why I can't use it.

Mostly the differences are small; for example, MTASC has block-level local variables and supports variable declarations in interfaces (a feature I would love in Flash). But each difference is, in practice, an incompatibility. These differences could cause a project to become depenedent on MTASC, with no easy way to revert back to using the Macromedia Flash compiler. Code sharing between developers is harder, since code works differently with each compiler; if I put open-source code on my site do I need to specify that it's written for MTASC or for Flash?

Truth be told, if MTASC was proven to be identical to the built-in Flash compiler then I would probably use it. Since it isn't, I may as well be using NeoSwiff - at least it is attempting to conform to a standard, and I might even be able to re-use some of my code in a .NET application...

Creating Flash with c#

Globfx just announced a puplic beta of NeoSwiff (formerly Dione), which is a C# compiler, which converts to AS and outputs a swf.

I've been playing with this for a while, and its a truly awesome achievement. It's nice to see Flash APIs so clean. Macromedia take note; we'll have to wait and see if 8ball attempts to clean up the MovieClip/events API and if it brings it close to this standard...