Doug McCune
Bio
Doug is a data junkie. He's not content to simply listen to the news report about local crime, he needs to get the data and map it himself (how else are you going to learn where to find all the narcotics activity in San Francisco?). Doug's current obsessions include mapping absurd things like the prostitution activity of his city, the destruction caused by hurricanes, and the most likely places cops pull you over for DUIs. Luckily, he gets to play with all these things during his day job and pretend like it's work.
Doug has been doing Flex development for the past three years with the group of talented developers at Universal Mind. During that time he helped launch SpatialKey, which is the best damn geospatial mapping application you've ever seen.
He's also the co-author of Flex 3.0 for Dummies, which was an ordeal to write but great to have completed. Doug has spoken at conferences such as 360|Flex, CFUnited, FOTB (in 2008), and RIAdventure.
Session
Decompiling Flex And Flash
In this session we'll learn how to decompile ActionScript 3 SWF files and peek inside other people's code. Decompiling a SWF is often seen as an evil tactic that should be punishable by death, but regardless of your moral opinion, every SWF you create can be decompiled into often beautifully readable source code. If you've produced something cool, chances are someone has decompiled it (hell, chances are I've decompiled it myself).
In this session you'll learn what you get when you decompile a SWF and what you don't. We'll cover how far you can get piecing a decompiled application back together and I'll share a few real-world stories of how decompiling has proven invaluable in my development career.
This session will focus on ripping apart some large-scale Flex applications and diving into the source (we'll see if I can get sued by the end of the session). I'll cover some Flex-specifics that are important when you decompile a Flex app (Flex framework classes, generated MXML code, data binding code, etc). But decompiling AS3 SWFs is just as applicable for SWFs produced in Flash Authoring as well, so there should be plenty of information for everyone.
And for all the paranoid folks out there, in addition to decompiling code, I'll also cover a few techniques to protect your source code to make it harder for people to steal.