ok, let's just dive right into it.

what did i do so far?

downloaded FlashDevelop environement - current version is 3.0.0 b7
http://www.flashdevelop.org/downloads/releases/FlashDevelop-3.0.0-Beta7.exe
quite reasonable installation process, good'ol next, next, next.

and the Flex 3.0 sdk, which is also necessary:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3
notice this is a zip file, all that is required is to save it as a directory somewhere in my
HardDrive.

A few additional prerequisites:
1. The flex sdk is built in Java, I have Java runtime environment 6 update 5, they seem to get along just fine.
2. FlashDevelop is built using .Net framework 2.0.

I run FlashDevelop - nice and familiar IDE. seem to be stable and cousy. great!

next what i had to do (read it somewhere) was to let the IDE know where the SDK is:
just hit F10 (tools->Program settings), selected "AS3Context" and set the property "Flex SDK location" to the directory i saved the SDK to.

that's it. I'm all set up, lets try to create a test project.

created a new project, and a new class - test1.as
one thing to notice - naming the class differently than the file name is forbidden.
additionally, I had to right click that new class in the project tree and mark the "Always compile", otherwise, the class is simply ignored.

now it's time for some syntax and language building blocks.
another thing that bugs me is how do we debug in Flash...

more to come.
-n/