Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to rely heavily on FDT for my Actionscript development work. An excellent plugin for the Eclipse IDE, FDT provides developers with a rich set of editing and refactoring tools unavailable in the Flash IDE. Back in the AS2 days, one can bypass the Flash IDE altogether and compile his or her SWF directly in FDT using the MTASC compiler. With the release of Flex Builder 2 (and now 3), one can compile AS3 projects directly using the Flex SDK.

Now, if you’re a fan of FDT, there’s no need to worry that you need to switch over to Flex Builder for your AS3 projects. The latest version of FDT (ver. 3), provides a way to compile your AS3 projects using the open source Flex SDK via the fcsh script. Instructions for doing so are available on the FDT forums. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to do so step-by-step. (more…)