CF_Underground has been held annually as a prelude to Adobe's MAX conference for 9 years. It is geared to bring together the ColdFusion community of developers and gurus in a day of fun and engaging talks from some of the industry%u219s leading CF speakers. CF_Underground will be held on Sunday, November 16th 2008 from 1pm - 5pm at the Adobe headquarters in San Francisco, and then will resume from 5:30pm - 9pm across the street from the Moscone Center at Cheiftain's Irish Pub with free beer and food.

The speakers for CF_Underground include Raymond Camden, Adam Wayne Lehman, Joe Rinehart and Jeff Tapper. Visit the CF_Underground 2008 Website for updates on session topics and news, and information to register.

Register before October 31, 2008 to qualify for the early bird discount. First 20 attendees to register receive a CF_Underground beer mug, and all registered attendees receive a free ColdFusion 8 tag poster.

This entry was posted on September 30, 2008 at 5:59 PM and has received 4734 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

BFusion/BFusion Awesomeness

I had the pleasure of speaking at the BFlex/BFusion conference this year, and wow, what a great conference!

After missing my flight Friday (Doh!) due to some scheduling conflicts, I finally arrived at the Bloomington Courtyard Marriott around 1am on Saturday. Thoroughly exhausted, I was pleased to find that the hotel rooms were massive. It honestly felt like a tiny apartment it was so large.

They had a shuttle that ran from the hotel to the university which made it really easy to get to the conference in the morning. When I got there I was quite pleasantly surprised at the huge turn out they had.

BFusion

All three of my presentations went pretty smoothly. It was really nice having the conference at a business school since that meant every room had several monitors for watching my own slides, two projects, two white boards and plenty of seating with power outlets.

I was quite happy I got a chance to attend a few advanced sessions in between my own. Unfortunately, I didn't ever have a chance to wander over to the other side of the school to see what the beginner and intermediate sessions were like.

Adam Haskell - Opensource CFML Engines

I learned a lot about the history of the "Other" CF engines in this presentation. I'd never realized quite how the TagServlet, New Atlanta, OpenBD thing had come about, and this was quite informative. It was also interesting to hear about various implementation quirks between the implementations. Hopefully we'll have a documented CF specification eventually.

Adam Haskell - Head First TDD w/MxUnit (hands on)

I didn't get to attend this entire presentation, but it started out really well. Adam approached TDD in a really nice, non-scary way for beginners. He made an interesting point about only testing what's necessary at each phase and building up the code iteratively. Not sure if I completely agree with that, since I usually like to work out one complete function at a time, and then map out the test cases based on the final product, but I certainly plan to give this approach a try.

Adam Lehman - ColdFusion Application Security

This was actually quite a fun presentation that I really enjoyed. Adam went through a huge number of security holes people leave in their applications and how the issues have changed over the years. I'd definitely recommend this presentation to everyone. Even if you think you know every possible exploit, or have your CSSP, having someone beat the points over your head for an hour makes you think.

Overall the sessions were quite good, though, looking back, it's quite hilarious that every session I went to was done by an "Adam"! Lunch the first day was some kind of burrito sandwiches which were amazing.

BFun

That night Bob Flynn took all the speakers out to a nice Fusion (cute eh?) restaurant. After which several of the speakers and myself all hit up a bar and met up with several attendees. This was quite a lot of fun, but it made me incredibly tired for Sunday when I needed to help with the hands on Flex sessions.

I especially want to thank Adam Lehman for talking with me about the future of ColdFusion, licensing, marketing, product features and all kinds of other things. I know I can be quite the pain with my barrage of questions and opinions, but Adam took it in stride and hopefully wasn't too terribly annoyed.

BFlex

Sunday started off alright, spare the super tiredness. The beginner hands on Flex session was fun to help with, and Zach Stepek is a great teacher for an intro class like this was. It takes quite a bit of patience and a different teaching style, and he was quite good at it.

The pizza served for lunch Sunday, unfortunately, was pretty disappointing. I'm also biased though, as being a student I end up consuming copious amounts of pizza throughout the semester, which makes me want more variety when I go out.

After lunch several of the speakers and I headed out to the airport, and back at home I had to hit the books and read up on scheduling algorithms and quadtrees. Oh well, the fun can't last forever, right?

Conclusion

Overall this was a really incredible conference. And, considering the price, I'd hessitate to not recommend it to anyone who'd like the conference experience. It was really great, and I can't thank Bob Flynn, Prem Radhakrishnan, Michelle Buddie enough for inviting me out there.

Hopefully I'll get to go next year! Maybe you can too? ;)

This entry was posted on September 24, 2008 at 1:20 PM and has received 4204 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

We are happy to announce that the Adobe ColdFusion 8 tag posters are being shipped out to a CFUG near you.

You will want to get your hands on one soon.... as you can see the CF8 tag posters are a great addition to office decor ;)

The User Groups have been sent a limited number of tag posters, so we are offering to send you your very own for free!

Just fill out the following survey and you get your tag poster in the mail.

http://cfunited.com/go/survey/cf8-tag-poster

Due to cost of shipping we are only mailing free tag poster to US residents only. If you reside outside of the US and would like a tag poster just send us a request to nafisa(at)teratech.com and we can figure something out.

The posters were created with the joint efforts of TeraTech and Adobe.

This entry was posted on September 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM and has received 7674 views. There are currently 24 comments. Print this entry.

The team behind CFUnited is proud to sponsor BFusion & BFlex '08.

http://bflex.info/

This is a two day FREE event with a CF on one day and Flex on the other. ColdFusion - Saturday, September 6th, 2008 Flex - Sunday, September 7th, 2008

HIGHLIGHTS
3 Reasons to attend

1. We are donating 200 Tag Posters for attendees of this event. We will also bring tag posters for every CFUnited Event and Sponsored Events, Including CFUnderground!

2. Attendees of BFusion will receive awesome discounts to several of our events.

3. One of our very own team members is an amazing speaker, Elliott Sprehn.

Elliott is a software engineer at TeraTech, Inc. and the lead developer for the Conferences department. He has worked on a variety of projects that include network services, realtime messaging systems, survey processors and most commonly web applications. As a strong advocate of web standards and accessibility he volunteers his free time to help new developers learn standards and best practices. He is also proponent of design patterns and draws his vision about application design from experience with many languages that include ColdFusion, Java, ruby and php.

This entry was posted on August 17, 2008 at 10:51 PM and has received 2229 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

We've been working with Adobe on releasing a CF8 Tag Poster. The CFUnited Team along with TeraTech's development team spent the last 6 months to put together this fresh new poster.

The plan is that Adobe will send a number of copies to user groups. More details about when these will be delivered will come from Rachel Luxemburg shortly.

The CFUnited team has received copies and will be distributing them during CFUnited Express and other sponsored events. More details soon about which cities we will be visiting next! Including CFUnderground in San Francisco CA November 16th. We are doing a call for speakers now! Email [email protected] to apply. Website for this event will be released soon.

This entry was posted on August 13, 2008 at 12:55 PM and has received 6099 views. There are currently 13 comments. Print this entry.

I received this message from a fellow TeraTech employee and thought I'd forward it along to the public.

On July 26 - 27, AboutWeb LLC (and other friends) will be hosting a Extreme Website Makeover code-a-thon for the Pan American Medical Society (PAMS) charity. PAMS is a non-profit group that facilitates the donation of medical equipment, resources, and medical personnel to disadvantaged communities locally, as well as in Latin America and the Carribean. Locally, the PAMS doctors are continuously volunteering throughout the community. And just in the past three years, the Pan American Medical Society provided assistance of intense medical-surgical activities in Northern Peru, Eastern Ecuador, and Quito. The application we are building is a social networking app with all the bells and whistles, including payment processing, photos, blogs, forums, etc. The technologies we are utilizing are mainly ColdFusion, Flex, Ajax, and YUI. The main goal of the application will be to act as a hub for PAMS members and companion groups and organizations to share resources, raise funds, and coordinate activities. Please let us know if you are able to attend! Feel free to contact us with any further questions at 301-468-9246 x104. Again, the dates for the the code-a-thon is July 26 (9:00AM) - July 27 (6:00PM) at the AboutWeb office (6177 Executive Blvd, Rockville, MD 20852). You are more than invited to come and donate your talents and whatever time your schedule allows!

Note: The work is going to be 90% ColdFusion, but I know a lot of Flex people also do ColdFusion so I thought it was appropriate for the user group.

This entry was posted on July 24, 2008 at 4:50 PM and has received 3560 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

CF Meetup: "Database Patterns for Unit Testing", with Bill Shelton

Thursday, July 17, 12:00pm

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

Organized by Charlie Arehart

Description: Testing code that touches databases needs to be done, but it's hard. Databases can be large, complex, and the data can be changing frequently. To make matters worse, there are numerous vendor-specific database implementations that make it difficult to provide unified solutions to testing. In this talk, we will discuss some approaches to these challenges. We will show you how you can design your code so that you can isolate and test CF code that interacts with databases, we will show you how you can test database logic independently of your cf application, and we will discuss some Database Sandbox approaches developers can use to create a local test lab.

To learn more visit http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/8344536/

This entry was posted on July 16, 2008 at 3:06 PM and has received 4385 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Those who attended CFUnited 2008 can now login at cfunited.com

Click "topics" and view "video recording" next to each presenters topics.

We were able to capture a good number of presentations on Adobe's Connect due to the cooperation and excitement of most speakers. For those who did not get recorded, we are working to provide the slides.

Big thanks to Ryan Monger and the Etech Av crew for making this available and an easy process. We hope to continue this kind of recording in the future and provide it for free to all CFUnited attendees. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on July 11, 2008 at 12:28 PM and has received 2456 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Thank you Brian Meloche for putting together these interviews and round tables. We enjoyed talking with you. I know we will do more in the future.

http://www.cfconversations.com/index.cfm/2008/

Michael Smith Interview http://www.cfconversations.com/index.cfm/2008/7/5/006_Michael_Smith

Liz Frederick and Nafisa Sabu http://www.cfconversations.com/index.cfm/2008/6/28/Episode5_Liz_Frederick_Nafisa_Sabu_Teratech

Round Table: Brian Meloche, Rick Mason, John Farrar, Dana Tierney, Ken Auenson, Chris Hough, Seth Bienek, Timothy Farrar, Adam Tuttle, and Adam Haskell http://www.cfconversations.com/index.cfm/2008/6/24/Day3-At-CFUnited

Round Table: Brian Meloche, Adam Haskell, Rick Mason, Judith Dinowitz, Brian Swartzfager, Dee Sadler and Bill Shelton http://www.cfconversations.com/index.cfm/2008/6/20/Day2AtCFUnited

This entry was posted on July 7, 2008 at 2:54 PM and has received 4203 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I've posted the code samples from my presentation on the Internals of the Adobe ColdFusion Server.

You'll need to login to download them here, but I'll have them mirrored on my blog shortly :)

- Elliott

This entry was posted on July 7, 2008 at 2:05 AM and has received 2171 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.