Robert Penner

"[Flash CS3 has a] lack of documentation on how to develop custom components ... Hopefully our screams for help will be heard."
-- Posted by SmackMe

Scream no more, Sir SmackMe. You just been smuck'd with an epic mini-series on component creation, now up on Adobe's Developer Center. My colleague Jeff Kamerer, engineer on the Flash Authoring team, has written basically a thesis, a small book on how to make your own AS3 components with the Flash CS3 framework. When Jeff sent me a draft six weeks ago, it was 32,000 words and 102 pages. He's not kidding around.

Here's the summary of what's covered:

Creating ActionScript 3.0 components in Flash

After following along with this series, you will learn how to do the following:

• Set up the layers and frames in your component movie clip symbol
• Implement Live Preview for your component
• Dispatch events
• Support styles and easily editable skins
• Manage drawing with the invalidation model
• Manage focus
• Handle keyboard input
• Create a compiled clip shim for your ActionScript definitions
• Deploy your component to the Components panel

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/creating_as3_components.html