By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
The 30 day trial for Flex Builder 2 just ended on my laptop. I am still in the process of trying to convince my company to buy me a license.
If you have the standalone version of Flex Builder 2, and were curious what happen when the trial ends, here is what I have observed. Flex Builder 2 is built on the Eclipse IDE platform. I was using Eclipse before I started using Flex 2, but I decided to download the standalone version because of some behaviors that are different between the plugin and the standalone version. The differences were mainly how Eclipse builds and launches apps and some keyboard shortcuts.
When my trial ended, I went to the Manage Flex licenses... menu option under the help menu. Before the trial ended it gave the option of entering in the key or continuing on. Now it lets you enter in the license key or you can just quit.
If you try to open a Flex MXML file, you have the same option of entering the key or quiting the application.
You can use Flex Builder for more than just working with Flex. You can also use Flex Builder with CFEclipse and Java development. After the trial license ends, you can still use Flex Builder with these other plugins, but as soon as you try to work with Flex specific files, the IDE quits.
In the mean time, I am going to reinstall Eclipse until I can get the license key for Flex.