The last days I was playing around with the Flex Metadata Tag “Frame” to implement a preloader in an AS3 project. You might have read Keith Peters post concerning this issue. This method is working fine, except of the fact that I can’t get rid of the flex framework classes in my compiled SWF, which blows up the size of an nearly empty SWF to 120kb.

If you check out the comments in his post, you’ll find a few solutions, but none of them worked for me. So I generated a XML exclude File, that excludes the whole flex framework. You might want to give it a try: flex_framework_exclude.xml (compile with the option -load-externs+=flex_framework_exclude.xml). It’s still not satisfying, but it’s working…