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If you want to start testing the new features of  Flex 4 (Gumbo), the upcoming version of Flex, you can find here the steps to follow to set up the development environment for Flex Builder. These are simplified instructions for Windows, you can find more details and instructions for other platforms on the following Setup page.

From the Nightly Builds

This is the easiest method as you don't need to build the SDK. Just grab the latest nightly build from the Gumbo download page and unpack it on your disk. Now you can jump directly to "Flex Builder Project Setup".

From Source

This procedure is a bit more complicated but has the advantage that you can better follow the development of Gumbo, it requires much less bandwidth if you want to stay up to date and the sources are the best documentation for now.

To compile the SDK from the source, you will need to install Cygwin, J2SDK 1.5.0_13 and Ant 1.7.0. Just install everything with the default settings. For simplicity, make sure that the J2SDK will be installed in "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_13" and Ant in "C:\apache-ant-1.7.0".

Now grab the latest development sources from the Subversion repository on Adobe Open Source. Use your favorite client and check out the trunk folder at: http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/trunk.

The next step is to compile the SDK. Open a Cygwin shell, go to the directory where you checked out the sources and type:

source setup.sh
ant -q main

If the compilation succeeded, you should see the following lines at the end:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

At this point the latest Flex 4 SDK is ready and we can start (mis)using it!

Flex Builder Project Setup

Adding the Flex 4 SDK to Flex Builder

To add the fresh copy of your Flex 4 SDK to Flex Builder, open the "Preferences" window under "Window > Preferences..." and select the "Flex > Installed Flex SDKs" section. You should see a list of the SDKs shipped with Flex Builder. Click the "Add..." button to open the "Add Flex SDK" window, then click the "Browse..." button and select the Flex 4 folder. The "Flex SDK name" field should be automatically filled with "Flex 4". Now close all windows by clicking on "OK".

Creating and Testing a Flex 4 Project

The only differences between the configurations of a Flex 3 and a Flex 4 projects are the SDK they use and the required Flash Player version.

Let's start by creating a standard Flex project for a "Web application". When the project is created, open its properties window and go to the "Flex Compiler" section. Under "Flex SDK version" select the option "Use a specific SDK" and choose "Flex 4" from the list, then set the "Require Flash Player version" under "HTML wrapper" to "10.0.0".

To test the project settings and the Flex 4 SDK, paste the following code in the main MXML application file of the project you just configured:

If the project compiles then you have successfully configured your development environment for Flex 4. To test the application, you have to run it with Flash Player 10 which you can find under "<Flex 4 sources>\in\player\10\win".