CFUnited Day 1

Lots of excitement at the opening of CFUN 05 (now known as CFUnited).  After surviving a tedious opening video, Michael Smith got the festivities underway.  Early on the speakers were introduced (including yours truly), and gave a quick summation of the sessions they would be giving.  Seems there will be lots of great content.

Next, Ben Forta and Tim Buntel gave the morning Keynote, with Ben talking about lots of the cool new features in CFMX7.  Note to self, I wish I knew about the new CFNTAuthenticate tag when I wrote "Interacting with Directory Services" chapter for bens book.  This tag allows for authentication against an active directory, without a separate LDAP call. Ah well, live and learn.

I had to sneak out while Amit Yathirajadasan of Georgetown was demoing the CF Forms app he wrote to answer a clients call, and missed the rest of the session.  Evidently at the end, there were a few glimpses of new stuff to come, such as official Macromedia support of the CF Eclipse project, Merrimack, the code name for CFMX7 updater (which promises to include a few new features as well as lots of bug fixes), and Scorpio – the code name for the next version (CFMX8?) of ColdFusion.

After I got off the phone with my client, I attended Ray Camdens talk on Verity in CFMX 7.  There are a lot of great new features, unfortunately, Ray didn’t have enough time to cover them in more detail, as he spent the first half hour reviewing verity basics, and answering questions.  He did get to show us some code samples of using Categories, Suggestions and Context  marking as new features.  Squeezed in the last few minutes were quick samples on Subsearches and Natural Language searches.

Joel Spolsky, of "Joel On Software" fame, gave a hilarious and poignant keynote around lunch time, with insight into why people like what they do (be it mp3 players, actors, software, etc).  He also managed a few great lines such as "He’s so stupid, he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot, even if the instructions were printed on the heel." to describe a popular yet clue-free actor.  Seems we like things to be "happy, comfortable and pretty."  When it doubt, make it more boob like, and add cup holders.  As I said, it was an odd yet interesting talk.

Some interesting things to be found in Nate Nelsons "Undocumented CFMX" although, one should try to avoid using undocumented features.

Simon Horwith had some interesting thoughts on Design Patterns in CF, although, as you might expect, there wasnt time for any code samples, which was sad.

There was an open bar from 7-8, which was great, until they ran out of Bass.  A few people even wanted me to sign a book!

More tomorrow, including my presentation.