CFDEVCON rundown ( in no particular order)

Firsty of all I must say thanks to Russ Michaels and Niklas for putting together a great day!

The day started off with Ben Forta showing us what we had missed at Max! He demoed adobe life cycle (I didn't realise it could do so much) and some features of ColdFusion 8 namely the server monitoring and diagnostic tools. One really cool thing was the tags for creating breeze (sorry Adobe connect) presentations.

Following that was basically a sales spiel from one of the guys from Adobe on Flex - in my case he was preaching to the converted so I will skip that.

Next up was Nick Tong with a presentation on public APIs. Cool presentation in which Nick took us through the value of creating a publicly accessible API and demoed some of the more publicly available APIs which make Mash ups possible.

Following on was Alex Skinner of Pixl8 - many of those in the UK and on the UK cfdeveloper list will recognise Alex's name. Alex gave a good presentation - not just on his Preside CMS but also on ColdFusion on BlueDragon and demoed some of the cool features of their CMS which seemed to include ColdFusion code and asp .net code in the same page.

Mark Drew then went on to show some of the latest features of CFEclipse - but stopped short of showing the feature I was really interested in which was the built in unit testing generating but none the less it was good to see CFEclipse in action and even though I've been using it for over a couple of years I still learned a couple of things.

Next up was Kevin Roche - who walked us through some of the enhancements in Fusebox 5 and how it differed to Fusebox 4.1. He also explained Custom Lexicons which allow you to extend fusebox and create your own fusebox verbs. I'm not personally convinced this is a good thing but nice to finally understand how it all worked.

Vince Bonfati of New Atlanta discussed some of the new features of BlueDragon such as Abstract cfcs, interfaces and cfthread. As someone who has worked with Java there was something nice about being able to create an interface in ColdFusion (despite the debate). He also showed the syntax for the cfthread tag. This is one time that I hope Adobe do follow New Atlantas lead and include their cfthread tag in CF8 - while it probably doesn't benefit them adopting BlueDragon features - it ultimately benefits developers.

Finally Charlie Arehart ran us through both fusion debug and fusion reactor - I'm not sure what version of fusion reactor he was working with but it seemed a bit more polished and advanced than the version I had looked at a while ago. I've never been big on debugging - I prefer logging but watching Charlie step through cf components/ColdFusion pages with the debugger definitely peaked my interest.

All in all a good day and a chance to meet some of the other UK bloggers such as  John Benyon , Andy Jarret , Neil Middleton et. al.

And I actually won something! An Enterprise Fusion reactor license! 

Looking forward to next year!

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