Another thing not to do

When creating your own data-bound components, don't set the value of the text field (for a data bound textfield) in the commitProperties() method, as proper as that might seem.

I just spent an hour debugging a problem where for (still unknown) reasons, my data bound control would display the text of the previous bound object, not the one that was currently bound - even though I traced all through the code and every bit of it had the right text in the text property.

Flex.