At Ensemble we develop for a wide variety of platforms using a wide variety of tools, some of which we develop ourselves. This means that we also are .NET developers, who use and love Visual Studio and .NET. Based on our experience with clients, we realized that there are many developers out there who are likewise committed to developing .NET-based systems for various reasons: historical, business, available skill sets, personal preferences, etc. These developers are used to the support of a sophisticated suite of integrated tools from Microsoft. For back-end subsystems there is no reason for them to consider anything else.

When .NET developers see and appreciate the advantages of the Flash platform for the client UI of Web applications, however, they may be filled with a sense of frustration if they think that they either have to use a second IDE, or have to abandon the use of an IDE and integrated debugger. It is for such developers that Ensemble developed Tofino—the means to continue enjoying the benefits of familiar and powerful development tools, while opening the door to all the benefits of the Flash platform we also know and love:

• Flash players have “ubiquitous” distribution over a wide and growing variety of devices.
• Flash provides powerful features and programming modes, enabling application and game designers to achieve whatever they can imagine.
• Flash development is supported directly by powerful and sophisticated tools from Adobe for visual designers and programmers. The Flex framework of MXML and ActionScript components (available as free open source in the SDK) significantly reduces the effort of creating applications with sophisticated features.

We were faced with the dilemma that the Adobe tools are simply not suitable for developing .NET server applications. Initially we were forced to use two IDEs: one for the UI, and one for the back end. Flash Builder's Eclipse-based development tends to be Java-centric. Although the Flex SDK can be used without the Adobe tools, being limited to command line interaction makes usage significantly more complex, especially with regards to code navigation and debugging. Ensemble created Tofino in 2008 as a plugin to Visual Studio that enables .NET developers to create Flex front ends for their applications in the same IDE that they normally use. Tofino allows the full development experience within Visual Studio. All Flex source content is syntax-colored appropriately (e.g. MXML, ActionScript, CSS), and full code navigation and auto-completion is available as one edits code (i.e. Intellisense). Perhaps the single biggest element of developer bliss that Tofino adds to the tool mix is the ability to step an integrated debugger from the ActionScript in the UI into the .NET CLR code in the server.

Tofino supports the development of both Flash (browser-based) and AIR (standalone or desktop) client UI applications. Tofino has supported the use of the Flex 4 since January 2010. Further enhancements are ongoing, and are related to the migration of default content with new projects to use the new Spark component libraries.

Ensemble is committed to growing the Flash and Flex development community. Ensemble consistently demonstrates engaged responses to any issues with rapid turn-around times for fixes. We undertook the effort of developing Tofino since we believe it is a worthwhile technology to invest in. Tofino demonstrates this belief in a very concrete and direct way.