I am so excited that I will be able to attend CFUnited this year. First off I just want to say what a great cfug meeting we had yesterday. Ben Forta and Adam Lehman gave a presentation on Lesser known goodies in ColdFusion 8. This was my first time meeting Adam and I have to say it was great. If you do not know Adam he is technical evangelist for ColdFusion. Overall I thought they both did a great job with the presentation as well as Q&A with everyone.

After the meeting we had a bunch of prizes to give away. I ended up wining a CFUnited portfolio. One of the big prizes was a free pass to CFUnited. While the first winner declined the pass the next winner was a member of the Adobe User group and her name is Kelly. We were actually sitting at the same table and when she came back to the table she asked me if I wanted to switch. I said what? She said here I know you want this and I am not going to use this. I can not thank Kelly enough for this. She could have easily sold it to the highest bidder but she gave it to me for nothing. I know this may not seem like a big deal to other but in this day and age It really is great to see. Hopefully I can find a way to pay her back!

With that being said I will be attending CFUnited this year and could not be more excited. I am really looking forward to the conference as well as the chance to meet all of you that I talk to all of the time. Two of my resolutions this year were to work more open source proejcts into my time and attend a major conference. So far 2008 is not looking to shabby!

Dan Vega
http://www.danvega.org

This entry was posted on January 14, 2008 at 3:00 PM and has received 2465 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, Dave Gruber & Tim Buntel from the Adobe Flex/AIR product team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and help prepare us for this exciting launch.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability) and a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium at this event!

Jan 21

8:30 - 9:00 AM Breakfast & Networking

9:00 - 11:00 AM Presentation

Fig Leaf Software

1400 16th Street, NW

Washington DC 20036

www.useadobe.com

This entry was posted on January 14, 2008 at 2:13 PM and has received 2749 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Anyone who registered before the early bird date for CFUnited Europe and CFUnited USA 2008 was entered in a raffle to win an iPod Touch.

Winner for CFUnited Europe: Simon Wallace-Jones

Winner for CFUnited: Rob Langston

Congratulations! Look in your mail box for your prize!

Boy am I jealous. I'd love an iPod Touch, who wouldn't. More opportunities to win an iPod Touch or Nintendo Wii will be announced later. Don't miss out!

This entry was posted on January 11, 2008 at 2:21 PM and has received 3542 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

If you are near Cleveland, Orlando or Atlanta, be sure not to miss the Flex 3 / AIR Pre-Release Tour. Ben Forta will be speaking at the following User groups shortly.

Cleveland Adobe User Group Jan 10, 2008

Orlando Adobe User Group Jan 21, 2008

Atlanta Adobe User Group Jan 22, 2008

There will be lots of excitement, networking, and prizes being given away including CFUnited swag & a free pass to CFUnited 2008! Be sure to RSVP if you plan to go because seating is limited.

This entry was posted on January 10, 2008 at 12:40 PM and has received 3844 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

The following are topics being given by our Gold Sponsor, Adobe Systems:

NEW!!! March 12-13th 2008 in London

On Wednesday 1:30:

"Taking Web Applications to the Desktop: Intro to Adobe AIR 1.0"

On Thursday at 9:45:

"Adobe Flex 3 Overview: Latest features"

On Thursday at 3:20:

"Enterprise RIAs: LiveCycle Data Services / BlazeDS"

Full Descriptions and Speaker names will be listed soon at

http://europe.cfunited.com

This entry was posted on January 9, 2008 at 5:21 PM and has received 4362 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Last chance to take advantage of the special price of $849.00 USD (approximately 429.51 GBP, 577.49 EUR)

Register for CFUnited Europe by Jan 10th 2008 and save $100 off the base registration rate. Also as a group discount, register 3 for the price of 2, for more details contact [email protected]

When you register by Jan 10th you are also automatically entered into a raffle to win one of two 8gb iPod touch!

Discover the latest techniques in ColdFusion and Flex at CFUnited Europe conference. Network with industry leaders, speakers and others in CF and FX community. For more information on topics and speakers visit http://europe.cfunited.com/go/topics

CFUnited Europe
March 12- 13, 2008
Novotel London West

This entry was posted on January 8, 2008 at 1:34 PM and has received 3767 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

CFUnited Podcast: Sandy Clark - CSS: Back to Basics

Hosted by Christian Ready

With more people jumping on the CSS bandwagon and with Internet Explorer 7 finally released, its always good to review the basics. This session will cover semantic and structural HTML with an eye toward how to use the DOM to create simple HTML and put the complexity of selectors into the Cascading Style Sheet. It will cover all selectors that are now available in all browsers and how to use them effectively.

Podcast link: http://podcast.cfunited.com/index.php?post_id=290309

This entry was posted on January 8, 2008 at 1:12 PM and has received 3341 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel will be running the new and improved NYCFUG.

I'm sure NYC is looking forward to great things from these new co-managers. Clark and Ben, Good luck in 2008!

See the full announcement here: http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1116-The-Fresh-Face-Of-The-New-York-ColdFusion-User-Group-NYCFUG-.htm

This entry was posted on January 7, 2008 at 4:14 PM and has received 3861 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I'm sure everyone's received at least one of TeraTech's newsletters at some point. Ok, maybe a few more than one...

The biggest suggestions to improve were:

- Make the e newsletter HTML, better to look at than just text

- Add more useful content

- Less is more

We've taken these suggestions and modified our newsletters starting in 2008. You probably just received our newest version via email (Thursday 1/03/08), "Why Should You Attend CFUnited?"

If you didn't receive the email (because it some how got caught in your spam filter), feel free to view it at http://cfunited.com/cfunitednewsletter/cfunitednewsletter.html

We will continue to send CFUnited Newsletters only ONCE a week, usually on Wednesdays. Nafisa is the new manager of the newsletter and is taking charge of the content. She's calling out to writers, bloggers, interviewers, and anyone else willing to allow us to repost their message to the public. Not only do we want to bring useful content, but we want to keep everyone up-to-date of conference dates, changes, and big news.

So if you removed yourself from our newsletter in the past, Nafisa promises you'll be pleased from now on.

If you would like to add yourself to receive the newsletter, please go to http://cfunited.com/go/newslettersignup

If you are interested in writing for the newsletter or would like to have selected blog entries reposted, send an email to nafisa (at)teratech.com

Here are some resources we pull our content from:
Christian Ready's Podcast
Charlie Arehart's CFMeetup
House of Fusion
TeraTech's Blog
Community MX
Speaker Blogs
Attendee Reviews
CFUnited Blog
Sponsor news
CFUnited Speaker Interviews

This entry was posted on January 3, 2008 at 5:33 PM and has received 1867 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

CFUnited Podcast: John Paul Ashenfelter - Testing CF Applications

Hosted by Christian Ready

Test-driven development is very popular in the Java and Ruby worlds and becoming moreso in the ColdFusion world. This session covers the tools that are available to test ColdFusion applications and discusses how to implement them into your existing workflow. We'll specifically cover:

* CFCUnit/CFUnit for testing ColdFusion code

* Selenium for testing web pages

* DBUnit for managing the database during testing

* Grinder (and similar) load-testing tools

Together, these tools can provide unit, functional, regression, and load tests for your applications. Finally, we'll touch on automating these tests so you can ensure that you are delivering higher-quality, well-tested code.

Podcast link: http://podcast.cfunited.com/index.php?post_id=288428

This entry was posted on January 1, 2008 at 9:33 PM and has received 3187 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.