Hi Robert,
Thank you for the link to the Enhanced Search widget. Unfortunately, the search function is just one piece of functionality that I needed in the widget I am creating. The other functional requirements were a call to a WCF service and a feature creation workflow both of which were very specific to the application (and already complete).
I did discover that the exception was related to the WCF service declaration in my .mxml page. I had originally declared an instance of the service inside of the <fx:Declarations></fx:Declarations> tags as I had seen in several examples.When I changed the approach to declare an instance of the service inside of a function in the script portion of my widget I no longer encountered the exception.
Unless the exception is related to the scope of variable that holds my service instance, I am not sure why this is fixing my problem. In any case, it seems to be working well now so I will continue with this approach.
Thank you,
Jay