• TeraTech Keynote – I felt this was kind of slow… but that could just be because it was early, and I was very, very tired. and it was the first session. Anyway, Micheal gave a presentation on best practices, or at least that is what I think it was about. It was a question and answer format, and it seemed the group was still asleep, so there wasn’t much participation.
• Adobe Keynote – Interesting feature sneak peaks for CF 9… I am sure the blog world is already lit-up with details and a thorough analysis…
• RAD OO [Peter Bell] – This was a great session…
• Ajax and CF with Spry [Ray Camden] – Very good session with Ray Camden. I got more out of this in regard to how to use CFCs most efficiently with AJAX than I did with the Spry pieces. I don’t actually remember him going into great detail at all on Spry. He did mention (as he has said on his blog) that he has played with JQuery a bit recently and is liking some of the things he has used.
• OO Best Practices [Hal Helms] – Wow. I really enjoy Hal’s presentations. I always learn a lot in his sessions and this was no exception.
• BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services for CF 8 [Tom Jordahl] – Very good overview of what each product does/does not do…
• BOF – Improving Quality thru Code Reviews and Mentoring [Adam something...] – Great chat session. Lots of open group discussion.

I will go into a greater detail on each of these sessions tomorrow.

Seth Bienek (Manager of the HOUCFUG) and I decided to save a bit of cash and share a Hotel for the trip. Seth saved us a lot of money by finding a great little apartment a couple blocks from the conference for half of what we were going to pay at the conference hotel. Woot! It turned out really well so far; we are actually closer to the conference than the designated conference hotel!

After arriving and getting settled in yesterday, we spent most of the day walking around downtown. The weather was perfect, and it is a great town for sight-seeing. We couldn’t decide on where to eat lunch, so we ended up in a small little place. I forget the name, but the food was okay. For supper, we found Elephant & Castle pub and restaurant. The fish and chips was pretty good, as was my girly drink. I know, I know… I went to a pub and had a mixed drink instead of a pint, what was I thinking? lol.

We also went to MiniMAX last night, but I wrote about that in a separate post.

Ok, time to leave to get breakfast and head out to the conference.

CFUNITED Keynote

• Taratech

• Wiki’s – The future is in apps that allow users to add content and interact…
• Fusebox
• Spiral web & Spiral Dynamics 

 

• Ben Forta & Tim Buntel

• 8 Reasons you want it now

1. Making Apps is easier 
• Eclipse plugins & wizards
• Server Monitor
2. Confidence in production apps
• Server Monitor & API
• Multiple Instances
• Stable & backwards compatible
3. Runs in more places (environments)
4. Happy Users
• Flex & AJAX
• Reporting
• PDF Apps
• On-Demand presos
• Images
5. Secure
• Multiple Admin accounts & RDS
• Strong encryption
6. CFML evolution
• JS operators
• Argument collections
• CFC interfaces
• File handling functions
• Array & Struct creation
• CFC Serialization
7. Plays well with others
• .NET
• Exchange Server
• RSS & ATOM
• LC DS ES (life cycle, etc)
• Flash Media Server
8. Fast!
• Overall performance
• CFCs
• List Functions
• Stats for improvements (see Ben’s notes which make more sense than mine!)
• functionality, improvement
• Structs, double
• Lists, triple
• Switch, triple
• Cfparam, hundred
• Dates, five
• Regex, double
• Isdefined, double
• CFC, tens
• BlogCFC, 1.25
• Adobe.com, 1.25
1. new features like CFTHREAD

CF8 Release date (D8)… SOON

• Flex, Today & Tomorrow
• Examples of FLEX usage
• Yahoo Maps
• Scraplog, Buzzword, Sherwin Williams, adobe cycle tracking, piknic
• Adobe Media Player
• Adobe Premiere Express (video remixer)
• CF 8 Server Monitor
2. Flex going open source
• We can probably look for Flex 3, AIR, CF8 @ MAX
3. AIR
• Html,flash,flex
• Drag & drop
• On/offline
• Local filesystem
• Multi-window
• Local db
• Html rendering
• memory and performance profiling
• Source code refactoring
• JS/AJAX wrappers
• Deep linking – address bar, bookmark

Oh, and a little birdie says that CF8 will have event gateways in the standard edition!

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/27/cfunited-07-keynote/feed/ 1 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/#comments Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:46:46 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/ Ok, I just wanted to join the ranks of other bloggers and mention that I arrived in DC today for the CFUNITED conference!

I had a long morning, waking up @ 5am and not arriving at the hotel until 2pm. :(

This evening I met up with a friend, Rick Root, who I first met here @ CFUNITED in ’05.  We seem to get together every year and catch up on our current lives both personally and professionally.  We ended up eating @ P.F. Chang’s.  Great food and great company!  Unfortunately I wasn’t hungry enough to finish the meal… If you know me, you know that means something!  The waiter left a lot to be desired, but the overall experience was a good one. 

Anyway, if you are still reading this far in, I just wanted to say that I plan to blog a note for the major sessions I attend every day while here @ CFUNITED. 

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2007/06/26/at-cfunited-07/feed/ 0 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/interesting-flight/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/interesting-flight/#comments Wed, 05 Jul 2006 03:02:47 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/interesting-flight/ You ever get on a plane and settle in to your seat and hear the captain over the intercom say “we seem to be having a problem with our back door not closing properly, so we will have an airplane mechanic come on board and slam it or something”?  Well… Now I have!

Actually, altho that wierdness delayed us by 30 minutes, the flight was great.  The plane was only about 50% full, so Michelle and I were able to spread out over 3 seats.  I wish all my flights were that comfortable.  After landing, Michelle’s Aunt Shelia and Uncle Ron picked us up at the airport and took us out to eat.  The meal was ok, but it was really great to visit with them.

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/04/interesting-flight/feed/ 0 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/03/going-home/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/03/going-home/#comments Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:24:54 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/03/going-home/ Well, today is our last day in DC. We have had a great trip and are looking forward to taking a vacation from our vacation. We are currently in the second leg of our subway trip, after which we board a bus to bring us to the airport. Our flight isn’t until 4:30, so we will be idle at the airport for a long time…
I plan to write more later.
]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/03/going-home/feed/ 1 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/02/another-touristy-day/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/02/another-touristy-day/#comments Sun, 02 Jul 2006 22:41:27 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/02/another-touristy-day/ Well, today was our last full day in the DC area, and the day after my conference, so we decided to take it easy.

We slept in until lunch!
We decided to check out a couple of IMAX movies at the Natural History Museum. We saw “Wild Safari 3D”, which takes a tour of Africa looking for “the big 5″, Africa’s big game animals. We also saw “Aliens of the Deep 3D”, which is a James Cameron film about the strange life at the bottom of our ocean, and how scientistss are studying there to know what to look for when we search other planets for life.
Both shows were really great. We had a good time.

If you are reading this Chuck, and are cringing because we ate at Chilis twice so far on this trip; do you have any suggestions, because we are running out of ideas!!

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/02/another-touristy-day/feed/ 1 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/01/cfunited-repeat-day/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/01/cfunited-repeat-day/#comments Sat, 01 Jul 2006 21:30:57 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/01/cfunited-repeat-day/ Today was the final day of CFUNITED 2006.

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!

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/07/01/cfunited-repeat-day/feed/ 0 http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/06/30/cfunited-last-full-day/ http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/06/30/cfunited-last-full-day/#comments Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:58:55 +0000 Ken http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/06/30/cfunited-last-full-day/ Well, so far this has been a good day.
I ended up skipping the morning sessions so I could catchup on sleep and get a great breakfast (expensive, tho)…
I got to hang out a bit with Rick Root, who I met at last years conference. The rest of my day has been in sessions on Bluedragon and AJAX.
Since I am on my cell right now, I will come back later and put some more details.

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! 

]]> http://ken.auenson.com/blog/2006/06/30/cfunited-last-full-day/feed/ 0