Cannot add an action after I select my "Button" Symbol

Question

Ok, I have been following a whole bunch of tutorials, and a
lot of the tutorials I've found are using Flash 8. I downloaded the
trial for Flash CS3 and when I'm following the tutorial on adding
an action, or link, to a button, they say...
"Click the button"
"Hit F9, to open the actions panel"
Then for them, the action panel opens up and gives them the
ability to add an action to their button, and in the upper left
corner tab, they say to MAKE SURE IT SAYS "Actions - Button" and
NOT "Actions - Frame"
Well, in Adobe CS3 and actionscript, if I click on the button
and hit F9, the action panel opens up, but I can't add an action to
the button for some reason. I can only add it to "Action - Frame".
Am I doing something wrong or what because I follow the
tutorial exactly, but it seems like something changed in
Actionscript 3.0 verses 2.0.
If I Open a new file using Actionscript 2.0, everything works
ok with the tutorial, but if I open a file withh 3.0 and try adding
an action to a button, it doesn't work. Could anyone help me please
or tell me what I'm doing wrong, thanks.

Answer 1

AS3 no longer supports the attachment of code to Object
instances, and requires code to be placed on the timeline, which is
proper. Additionally, you will need to use the eventDispatcher
model to 'connect' a responding function to the event and add an
'event listener' to the Object. So basically the format for AS3
code is something like:
function stopTheThing(event:MouseEvent) {
stop();
my_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,
stopTheThing);