Join dataTV's Adam Bell, Ludicus Corporation and Community MX's Chaz Chumley, and ZoobieSoft's Yancy Wharton at MiniMax8, Tuesday Evening, June 17th at 8PM ET at the Lafayette Room at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Washington, DC.

MiniMax8, hosted by Adam Bell, is a FREE event that is a prelude to the main CFUnited conference. It hosts a series of 15 minute tutorials provided by some of the best experts in the web, print, broadcast and interactive design and development community in the Greater Washington DC and Capitol Region area and across North America. Expect to see sessions on ColdFusion, Flash, After Effects, AIR, Flex, Photoshop, Dreamweaver as well as other Adobe related applications mixed in for good pleasure.

Don't miss out on this free event, visit http://www.minimaxconference.com/ to learn more and register.

This entry was posted on May 14, 2008 at 2:50 PM and has received 2404 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Hello Attendees. We will be closing the room block on Thursday the 15th. The Grand Hyatt has about handful of rooms left. The over flow is Metro Center Marriott, about 1 block from the Grand Hyatt. We can only hold 15 rooms per night at the Marriott without being fully responsible for them. And they are requiring that we expire the room hold by the 15th.

There are other hotels in the area that are reasonable.

More details about Grand Hyatt and the Overflow hotel at http://cfunited.com/go/travel

This entry was posted on May 13, 2008 at 8:15 PM and has received 2924 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Raymond Camden did a contest to see what his fans would like to see as a new topic as CFUnited. Last week Ray revealed that Hal Helms and Clark Valberg will be speaking on "Prototyping for Smarties".

Presentation begins 8:15am on Thursday

Description: Quick! You are been put in charge of a mission-critical project by a particularly sadistic genie (aka "your boss") who will hold you solely responsible for the project's success. Of course, you will still be expected to perform your other responsibilities as well. You've seen other, similar projects fail. Now it's your turn at the dock.

What single action on your part will do the most to ensure a successful project? In this session, Hal Helms and Clark Valberg explain and explore prototyping as the key to project success. We know that when projects go awry, they very often do so because of a mismatch between what users want and what we build. Why the mismatch? Because users can't tell us what they want until they see it.

Drawing on their experience with both successful and failed projects, Hal and Clark offer the lessons they've learned about the right and wrong ways to prototype.

This entry was posted on May 13, 2008 at 6:17 PM and has received 2730 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We are almost full on assigning new topics. Here are a few of the last to announce.

"Building your first RIA app with CF & Flex" by Adam Wayne Lehman
Adam Lehman is the ColdFusion Specialist at Adobe Systems Incorporated based out of Washington, DC. Prior to joining Adobe, Adam was the Senior Web Engineer for the U.S. Department of State where he managed a team of developers and architected enterprise ColdFusion-based applications. Adam also founded and managed the Department of State Adobe Developer User Group for over two years. His background also includes several years designing and programming e-learning applications for Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Adam has been developing web applications specializing in ColdFusion for over a decade. His work has been featured in Macromedia's DRK (Developer Resource Kit) and his other areas of expertise include application security and Oracle database development.

"BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services for ColdFusion 8" by Tom Jordahl
Tom Jordahl is a Senior Computer Scientist at Adobe and the architect for ColdFusion. As part of the original ColdFusion team, he has implemented a wide variety of tags, functions, and features in both the original (C++) and MX (Java) releases of ColdFusion. He is one of the primary implementers of the Apache Axis SOAP engine, and is the Adobe representative on the W3C WSDL 2.0 working group. Before diving into web services, Tom was the technical lead for ColdFusion on UNIX, leading the efforts to bring ColdFusion to Solaris and Linux. Prior to joining Allaire in 1997, he worked at the Open Software Foundation (OSF) on the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) and the OSF/1 UNIX operating system. Tom is currently hard at work on the next major release of ColdFusion.

Descriptions coming soon.

This entry was posted on May 13, 2008 at 6:10 PM and has received 2434 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We asked a few questions to find out what our speakers are up to prior to their trip to CFUnited.

*********************

Joe Gautreau

Question: What are you looking forward to?

Joe: The experience of the entire trip, also hot model-glue, and coldspring tips and tricks.

Question: Has your presentation changed?

Joe: My presentation hasn't changed, but will change a bit.

*********************

Raymond Camden

Question: What are you looking forward to?

Raymond: Talking with others about where ColdFusion is going.

Question: A recent hot topic?

Raymond: Not sure if this is "hot", but for me, anything related to ColdSpring and Transfer is on my hot list.

Question: Beer of choice if someone wants to buy you a drink.

Raymond: Anything by Sam Adams, Newcastle, or anything I haven't tried before.

*********************

Marc Esher

Question: What are you looking forward to?

Marc: The sessions, naturally, especially the ones on frameworks and better OO programming. I'm also looking forward to meeting Luis Majano, who writes more code in a week than most people do in a year. And I'm looking forward to smoking a good stogie with anyone who will join me!

Question: A recent hot topic?

Marc: One that doesn't get much press but which is on the minds of many is whether Adobe's going to come out with a CF IDE. It's been hinted at in blogs but in typical fashion is carried out with the same degree of teasing that 8th grade girls use. It's frustrating for some of us who would choose to contribute to CFEclipse if we thought that product had a long life. I believe Adobe's hurting the CF community by not either a) committing to building an IDE or b) stopping the chatter entirely and getting behind CFEclipse. After working with FlexBuilder and seeing the productivity gains you get from it with Flex, you can't help but feel that we're crippled, productivity-wise, by lack of an enterprise-class IDE for CF.

Question: Has your presentation changed?

Marc: As I prepared the presentation, I learned a lot more about ANT, and so I'll be peppering in more tips and tricks. In addition, I've added a new section on ScriptDef... showing how to use javascript to do CF-like programming right in your ANT files

Question: Beer of choice if someone wants to buy you a drink.

Marc: Ohhhh, so many. I'm partial lately to Belgian abbey style beers like Stoudts Abbey Triple and Weyerbacher Merry Monks. And I love a good strong IPA.

************************

Liz Frederick

Question: What are you looking forward to?

Liz: Seeing the Exhibit Showroom come alive. We are going to have webcams all around so people can see the crowd online. I'm also looking forward to the evening event.... I know I haven't released the location but it will be so much fun its a "crime"...

Question: A recent hot topic?

Liz: I have too many secrets that I can't tell, so when they come out at CFUnited, I'm sure they will be hot topics. Question: Beer of choice if someone wants to buy you a drink.

Liz: Well seeing how I'm the one buy you all a drink, I'd better get a corona or two. Flowers work much better in my case.

This entry was posted on May 13, 2008 at 11:07 AM and has received 4481 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Adobe just announced to me that they are bringing two more individuals from India to present on CF8. We are so excited to give our attendees a first hand experience directly from the core team behind creating this great technology.

"Working with PDF Documents and Forms in ColdFusion 8" by Chandan Kumar
Chandan is part of the core development team of ColdFusion for last two years and has been instrumental in building PDF manipulation features with cfpdf tag, server monitoring, cffeed and looks after several others including cfprint. Currently he is working on adding some very exciting features to ColdFusion language for Centaur. He is a graduate from Indian Institute of Technology.

"Taking advantage of 64-bit support in ColdFusion 8" by Manju Kiran P Pacchhipulusu

With more than 6 years of experience in the Software Industry, I now work as a Lead Software Engineer in the ColdFusion Product team and am the senior-most member of the ColdFusion QE team. I am involved with ColdFusion from its 7.0 release. I have worked on various features of ColdFusion like CFThread, .Net Integration, Exchange Integration, ColdFusion Interfaces, ColdFusion Performance, etc. Before joining Adobe, I worked as Software Design Engineer for Test (SDET) at Microsoft. In Microsoft, I have worked on various teams such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Pocket Word and WISP. I blog on ColdFusion at www.manjukiran.net. In my free-time, I get involved in various social activities that promote the betterment of the community.

This entry was posted on May 9, 2008 at 10:18 AM and has received 9835 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Some people have been asking what the CFUnited bookbag is this year. We ordered this one. 100% Recycled material. It is a nice quality bag that we think everyone will enjoy.

We will let you know next week what the t-shirt will look like. Everyone will be picking up their t-shirts and bags at the conference. Nothing will be shipped prior to the event. An online version of the registration package will be sent next week as well. Thanks and hope you like all the swag this year!

This entry was posted on May 7, 2008 at 4:13 PM and has received 4340 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Hello Attendees!

The CFUnited Wiki has some share a ride and room listings for this year's event. So if you are looking to save money, visit: http://wiki.cfunited.com/

The Grand Hyatt has a handful of rooms left that we added. Don't delay!

Also on the CFUnited Wiki you can list your favorite places to eat, or plan a party, or things to do. Enjoy and use the Wiki for whatever you think would benefit attendees!

This entry was posted on May 7, 2008 at 2:08 PM and has received 4011 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Tom de Manincor talks about his CFUnited presentation on CFQUERY versus the DB.

Is this your first time speaking at CFUnited?

Tom: Yes, this is my first time speaking at CFUnited. It is also the first time I will be attending the event, as well. I have heard great things about the conference and I am excited to be there, and to be a part of it this year.

Why should people attend your session?

Tom: My session, CF versus the DB, covers one of the grey areas in CF development.

This grey area stems from an evolution process most CF developers go through. Being that CF is failry easy to pick up, it leaves alot of power at any level of developer's fingertips. One of the CF's strong points is its ability to interface with databases. Commonly done with CFQUERY, CF's native approach. As your application grows, and demands more, there are things to consider in order to maximize performance. Using CF to do all your database work, while possible, may not be the best approach. In this session, we will examine what CF is doing, and what the database can do. We will discover the process in depth. Analyzing scenarios where it is appropriate to use CF, and when it is not. The goal here is to gain an understanding of how to balance the power of ColdFusion and the database to benefit you as a developer, and your applications.

This entry was posted on May 7, 2008 at 11:31 AM and has received 2614 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

CF Meetup: ColdFusion and Flex, with Dale Fraser

Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 6:00 PM

Meeting URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/

Organized by Charlie Arehart

Description: So how hard is it to write Flex applications that utilise ColdFusion components? It?s actually very easy, easier than you might think. One of the reasons for giving this talk is that I initially found it hard to get my head around how it would work, how to configure it all and looked at it and then put it aside a few times. >From doing this I have learnt what I think is the easiest way to get ColdFusion & Flex configured to work together, this is what I will be demonstrating.

I?ll show the basics of configuration (Flex Builder and some setup of CF), then will show and discuss several forms of integration: remote objects, remoting & binding, and using queries, arrays, structures, and objects/CFCs.

To learn more visit: http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/7876941/

This entry was posted on May 6, 2008 at 5:38 PM and has received 3868 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.