Well, I'm about 3 weeks late but I finally got around to getting my presentations files from NCDevCon online. You can download the files here.

I have to say that I had a blast at NCDevCon! This was the first conference that I'd been to in a couple of years, and I really enjoyed it. This was also my first time speaking at a conference. I used to teach ColdFusion at a local tech college a few years ago, so I guess I've had a little experience in that area (although I'll admit I'm rusty!). I had forgotten just how much I enjoy it!

I'll definitely be heading back to NCDevCon next year!

I guess I'll have to get a box of these in October. :)

I just came across this blog post and wanted to share it. For me, it's always interesting to hear from someone coming to ColdFusion from another language/background and get their thoughts on it. As he openly admits, when he started working at a ColdFusion shop two years ago, he didn't think much of CF. His exact quote is, "With more than 15 years of development experience, primarily as a Java, ActionScript, and Ruby developer, I had a relatively low opinion of ColdFusion."

Read the whole post here

This is just a quick a note to announce that I'll be teaching one of the 2 hour Hands On ColdFusion labs at NCDevCon next weekend. Specifically, I'll be teaching Session 1 from 10:00-12:00 on Saturday morning. I'm super excited about this and can't wait to get to Raleigh!

For those that don't know, NCDevCon is a free developers conference put on by the Triangle Area ColdFusion User Group. It is held at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and consists of general web development sessions, web design, Javascript, Ajax, ColdFusion, Flex, AIR and more. In addition to all of that, this year they are also offering two days of free hands-on training for ColdFusion.

So make plans to be in Raleigh for two days of FREE CF Goodness!

This is a neat little tip that a coworker of mine discovered this morning, and it's going to really come in handy on my new laptop. If you don't like the size of the desktop icons in Windows 7, you can easily make them larger or smaller. Simply hover over an icon, click ctrl, and with your mouse wheel scroll up or down. The icon sizes will change as you scroll.

Don't have a wheel mouse? There are other methods for doing this as well, as shown here: http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-resize-desktop-icon-in-windows-vista/

Did you know that Windows 7 has a built in tool that can record every step you take during a process, and document the entire process in both screenshots and step-by-step details? It's called the Problem Steps Recorder, and it just made the world of tech support a whole lot easier. It even saves the information as an HTML file and packages it up in a ZIP file for you!

This is going to be great for us because now whenever our QA team finds a bug, they can send us a file that has step-by-step instructions (with screenshots) of how to replicate the problem. Yay! Not to mention the fact that now every time a friend or family member has a computer problem I can just send them a file called "this is how you fix it."

More »

The more I use IIS 7 on my local development machine, the more I like it (compared to previous versions of IIS). I have to say that Microsoft really did a good job on fixing some of the problems that made IIS a hindrance to local web development. The two most notable features that I've discovered in the last few weeks are the ability for it to have multiple local websites (unlimited websites, actually), and built in local self-signed SSL certificates.

More »

This is pretty cool. I really had no idea that you could do this. (Now why you would want to do this is another story!)

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been spending a lot of time lately working on porting a legacy ColdFusion application over to Application.cfc. Everything has been going pretty well, until I started getting into sub-directories that have their own Application.cfm files in them. There's not a whole lot going on in these Application.cfm files, but each one of them is required and each one of them has a different name in its cfapplication tag.

More »

I've been spending a lot of time lately working on porting a legacy ColdFusion application over from Application.cfm to Application.cfc on ColdFusion 8. One of the things I'm paying close attention to is what gets put into the variables scope inside of my Application.cfc. I don't want to accidentally have stuff floating around in there and causing problems. So, my constantly checking the variables scope of various methods is how I found this little gem.

Did you know that, even if a query name is var scoped in Application.cfc, you'll still get CFQUERY.EXECUTIONTIME stored in the variables scope of your CFC?

More »

Today I was working on parsing through a CSV file, when I came across the all too familiar "ColdFusion ignores blank list elements" situation. This is nothing new, it has been around forever, and there's even an excellent udf on cflib that does a great job of handling this. But, I was feeling a little creative and decided to see if I could tap into Java and accomplish the same thing.

As it turns out, it was actually pretty easy to do.

More »