Setting up a Flash testing environment with several versions of the Flash 9 and 10 plugins

When you're developing a Flash application, you usually want to be reasonably certain that it'll work with the various versions of the Flash plugin which your users might have. The best way to be certain is to see for yourself.

Alas, the Flash plugin was designed to be installed only once per PC, and Adobe wants you as a consumer to always have only the newest version of the plugin installed.

Adobe, however, have provided us with all the tools we need to build a Firefox installation which contains all of the Flash 9 and Flash 10 plugins in separate profiles, so that we can even run the various versions simultaneously.

IE, as usual, is a different kettle of fish altogether, and generates extra customer costs even here.

Let's start by visiting Adobe's page "Archived Flash Players available for testing purposes" at http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_14266.

From there, download the files http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp10_archive.zip and http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp9_archive.zip. If the filenames have changed since writing this blog post, you'll probably be able to find the correct files from the Adobe KB page referenced earlier.

These .ZIP files contain all of the .EXE installation files needed to get to the actual plugin files we'll be needing. Create a working directory, and unzip the fp*_archive.zip-files there.

Here's a small shell script you can run under Linux to extract the plugin files from the installation executables, using Wine:

export WINEPREFIX=$PWD/wine
mkdir $WINEPREFIX
mkdir flash_plugins

for file in fp*archive/*/flashplayer*_win.exe
do
  version=`echo $file | awk -F/ '{print $2}'`
  echo $file $version
  wineconsole $file /S /D=C:\\flash\\$version
  cp -r wine/drive_c/flash/$version flash_plugins/
done

... to be continued!