This year they had 3 “normal days” and an optional 4th day consisting of repeat sessions from the first 3 days.  The idea is that since you can’t go to all the sessions, they repeated some of the popular sessions so that we attendees get the chance to see as many sessions as possible. 

Last night, I went out with several people and we didn’t get back to our room until after midnight.  I didn’t end up going to sleep until almost 4, so it goes without saying that I slept through most of the morning sessions!  I went to 4 sessions today.  I will review them below.

At 10:30, I attended Charlie Arehart’s “Creating and Consuming Web Services in CFML”.  Wow!  My client is on CF 5, so I haven’t been exposed to CFCs at all yet, and I am really impressed to see the amount of things that can be accomplished very easily and efficiently in ColdFusion 7.  I have used web services in the past working on a personal project interacting with the eBay API using PHP.  The tools provided by CF 7 blow everything else I have seen out of the water!

At 1, I attended Mike Nimer’s “Flex 2.0 & CF Integration”.  This was a great demo of the power of utilizing Flex from ColdFusion.  The CF team has done a great job of integrating Flex and CF.  Mike showed us very easy ways to build quick master/detail applications.  I believe this link is to the same presentation http://stevenerat.breezecentral.com/p97229365/.

At 2:15, I was in Sean Corfield’s “Managing ColdFusion Components with Factories”.  This was a bit over my head since I do not use CFCs at the moment, but I was able to follow most of Sean’s logic.  He was preaching the greatness of ColdSpring, and after seeing demos of Model-Glue Unity, I definately understand why.

At 3:30 I attended the last session of the day for me, Grant Straker’s “Troubleshooting and Optimizing CFMX Performance”.  My client will be moving to CF 7 in the very near future, so any help I can get in the process of optimizing and tuning our new server is great!  He went into some good details of tools and methods of debugging a stressed out server.  Honestly, I hope I never have to use this new knowledge!!!

I definately had a great day today!

After the conference was over for the day, I went with a small group to try to find some decent food and drinks in DC.  Along for the ride were we, my wife Michelle, Rick (mentioned above) and Selma Delgado who is from Houston.  We ended up walking around for 20 minutes looking for a place that looked nice, but wasn’t too expensive.  We finally found a burger joint that was packed, so we settled there assuming that the crowd was a good sign.  The food was ok, but the atmosphere and the service was not that great.  The waitress was obviously over worked, so it took her a while to get back to us sometimes.  Michelle’s order came out wrong and they were quick to replace it.  The manager came over and comped us 3 shots of Tequila for the oversight on Michelle’s order.  Rick and I had already had a shot, and it seemed like the manager wanted to “make things right”…  In my mind, its all good!  By now, poor Michelle is used to having her order messed up…  Its probably a 50/50 chance that they will mess things up on a special order! 

After we finished eating, we went across the street to ESPN Zone and played some games and had dessert.  Dessert was of course occompanied by more drinks!  We didn’t end up getting back to our room until after midnight.  This was a very good day! 

edit – I have fixed the spelling typos below -

I am currently sitting in the Microsoft keynote speech on ‘Atlas’.
So far, today’s presentations have rocked!
I sat in on Joe Rinehart’s “MVC for you & me” and Michael Dinowitz’s “Error Handling in CF”. There were some ‘wow’ moments with a demo of Model-Glue Unity. There were also some great concepts in the error handling class that I plan to implement for my clients soon.

edit – the following was added later when i was back in the room from a laptop, so there shouldn’t be as many mistakes -

The Atlas demo was nice.  I feel sorry for the Microsoft guy on stage because this toolset really is geared towards ASP.NET.  While it does have a huge amount of things it can do easily from CF, its goal is integration with ASP.  Since I am not yet using CFAJAX or AJAXCFC and haven’t yet decided on a single AJAX toolkit, I will give ATLAS a try.

After lunch, I went back to the room to try to get a quick cat nap in, but that didn’t work too well. I ended up being late for the next session I wanted to attend, Shlomy Gantz’s “Version Control 101 w/ Subversion”.  The room was overstuffed, so I went back up to the room… None of the other sessions looked all that interesting, and altho I was bumed for missing the presentation, I at least have a copy of the slides to check out the content.  My client doesn’t currently use Version Control and that is one of my major goals this year.  The next set of classes don’t look that interesting either, so I plan to pass out for an hour.  I need to sleep!

I plan on going to “CFEclipse: A guided tour” @ 4:15 today.  I currently use dreamweaver and textpad for all my coding and i really want to give CFEclipse a shot.

I had a great time.  Lots of networking, and lots of presentations!

We toured the Spy Museum today.  It was neat to see all the old spy tools, but the museum is really geared towards kids, and i found that I learned more watching the discovery channel than I learned in this museum. 

<rant>
I know Austin Powers is a popular hit movie series and all… but it was a spoof of spy movies… i don’t think it deserved the spotlight it got in the section of the museum that delt with spys in film…  They covered all kinds of spy movies and tv series (Get Smart anyone?) but it really seemed to be heavily geared to Austin Powers… you could almost hear the museum screaming “Hey kids, I am cool… See… ‘one million dollars!’… hello? anyone? I AM cool!!!”…
Well… re-reading that… I can garantee that it makes more sense in my head… oh well!
</rant>

We also went to the pre-conference dinner hosted by CFDynamics @ Dave & Busters…  Last year they also had an event at Dave & Busters, but it was a very informal everyone pay for thier own meal then have fun sort of thing…  This year, it was a $30/head thing with food set out and unlimited pool table use… honestly, it was not worth the $30… I think next year i will just order off the menu. 
<rant>
Oh, and to the waiter(s)/waitress(es) that were assigned to our group, I am sure that there was a gratuity included in the fee for our renting of the section of the restaurant… would it have killed you to actually try to EARN it? I had to flag someone down to get a soft drink order in, and we were never able to find anyone to get a refill.  Very not cool.
</rant>

Well…

I am back in the room, and have some work to do, so check back tomorrow. it is the first day of the conference, so I am sure I will have lots to write about!