I work as a flash developer and in the course of my job I learn to improve my work process. I hope to share my insights and discoveries here. I have no doubt that whatever I say here is repeated somewhere else on the web so I'll try not to duplicate the same information and include links to where you might find solutions to your problem. Although I'll include a rating system so hopefully you wont waste too much of your time. The tips section allows you post quick hints on some common pitfalls. In conclusion I hope this proves a valuable resource for you.
Work Method
I tend to work using eclipse with Actioscript Development tools. This article on actionscript.com describes this open source work process, although I still have to read it. I would also recommend having a trawl through OSFlash which has numerous useful flash tools. Remember to put all your classes into the src folder of eclipse ASDT project or else you wont received the benefit of code completion and method drop downs.
MTASC seems excellent apart from you tend to have to rewrite some of your classes. However I have tended not to use it right now because most flash projects will involve some sort of tweening. I tend to use MC Tween for any tweening in a project but when you use MTASC to complile the project it tends to strip out the tweening elements because they are included through the use of "#include". I have yet to find good actionscript 2 tweening classes.
Most large flash websites will have to retrieve content from some external source. The format of the content could either be XML or AMF. I have only had a brief foray into AMF using AMFPHP and it seemed excellent. However in work all out new projects are being created using Ruby so I will be unlikely to use it much. There seems to be a atempt at creating AMF for Ruby but it hasn't been worked on for two years so I think that's knocked on the head.
XML is retrived though the loadXML() method. When working with XML I tend to use Sephiroth's XML2bject. Although watch out for the potential glitch where xml node could be changed into a Object instead of an array. If there is only one element it changes into an Object else into an Array. If you use MTASC Rudolf Vavruch has modified the XML2Object to be complient.
Flash Chat
A recent project at work has had me building a flash chat application. Should any one else be attempting to do a similar chat system or any other multi-user flash application for that matter should be aware that flash does not listen. The flash application is not aware of any changes that happen to other clients. So if one client enters a message the other clients will not be aware of this. There is no way to get them to listen for these changes, not without using another language. When using another language it can listen for changes in one client and then tell all the other clients.
An alternative to this might be to use polling, this is were repeated calls are made to retrieve information that may or may not have changed. I haven't tried this myself but I imagine it places a serious strain on the server.
We decided to use moock's Unity project to do the application. I did get a basic ruby server set up but given time constraints I really think we made the right choice, after all Unity is tried and tested.
Comment on Page
If anything is unclear or just plain wrong let us know and should ammend it pretty sharpish. If you visited the page with a particular question leave it and if it's flash related I'll try to answer it.