Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

Tomorrow (Wednesday 31st October), we will be having a great little get together at the UK ColdFusion User Group. Kev and I will be going over what we learned and saw at this years Adobe MAX Europe conference in Barcelona. Spaces are really limited and its at our new venue in Picadilly Circus (actually, its my office!) Register today and there will be some great bits and pieces to win!

If you missed my CFEclipse presentation at Adobe MAX Barcelona, João Fernandes has been kind enough to post up a video of my whole presentation! You can check it out here: http://www.onflexwithcf.org/index.cfm/2007/10/20/Using-Eclipse-for-ColdFusion-Development--Videos I had some problems getting the debugger working, and I realised later that it was simply that I named my project wrong and should have set up the mappings. Hope you enjoy it!

It has been a while since I blogged, basically I have been so busy I forget to breathe sometimes. Anyway, the good news is that I am heading to Adobe MAX Europe in Barcelona on Sunday! I think this is going to be an awesome conference, one that I am very much looking forward to, especially since I am a MAX virgin! Apart from trying to attend as many presentations as possible on Flex and AJAX, I shall (surprise! surprise!) also be a speaker! My presentation is on using Eclipse for ColdFusion development, which is a slightly different take on my usual presentation (ok, ok, you caught me, I will be mentioning CFEclipse) as it will cover a lot more ground that I usually do! One of the important decisions that I have left now is whether I shall be doing the presentation in English or in Spanish, not sure what the rule is here? When in Rome?...

Hello, yes, I am back, from outer space, well, not exactly. I have taken a month or so away from development of CFEclipse and my other projects (including this blog!) which has been great. Of course one of the reasons for this has been that I have been very busy at work, and that kind of takes it out of you. This is normal for me, but the work has been rather oppressive rather than creative so my brain needed a bit of space. Some news: I shall be speaking at Adobe MAX in Barcelona in October! I am very excited about this as I shall be demonstrating not only CFEclipse but the ColdFusion Extensions for CF8 (something I love using by the way) as well as hopefully the debugging capabilities that you now have with CF8. With regards to CFEclipse, I am currently taking a bit of a hard look at features and fixes that will make it into the next version. I am working on a complete re-design of the interface, basically following the rule of making actions available (no more hidden menus etc) so that access stuff easier. Apart from that, I am looking at re-compiling and coding the plugin so its compatible with Java 1.4.x since, even though I much prefer Java 5, it seems that is the most common error that people are getting (by looking at the Trac bugs!) On a final side-note: I have started a course each week in Film Directing! I did my first class last night and its absolutely awesome! We read a number of screenplays (Thelma and Louise and Brazil being the main ones) and dissected them to get a feel for the responsibility of a Director with regards to examining and expanding on the ideas within a script. Don't worry tho, Hollywood is still safe (after all, I only have done one class so far!) Well, that is it for the moment, I hear there has been lots of exciting news in the community whilst I have been away (I havent been reading blogs or news) but I just like to state that I took this vacation away from development without consulting the ColdFusion Weekly guys, it seems they have started up again after the summer!

So, I am all packed, sipping the last of the coffee, about to leave in a few seconds to Gatwick to head to CFUnited 2007! I am really looking forward to this conference, it should be a blast! Those that can't make it this year, I promise, I shall try and blog and take as many photos as possible to keep you all in the loop. (ahh, promises promises!). So without further ado, see you on the other side of the pond!

I want to thank Ray Camden, Charlie Arehart and all the people at TeraTech that let me do a preview presentation before CFUnited. You can check out the recording of the presentation over at http://experts.acrobat.com/p70538852/

With CFUnited looming (only a week to go!), the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group have asked me to do a quick (20 mins) preview presentation on my forthcoming CFEclipse session for CFUnited. The description is as follows:

In this 20-30 minute session, Mark Drew will preview his one- hour class, CFEClipse Plus!, presenting how to use some advanced features in CFEclipse, with an in-depth look at modifying the libraries to add your own tags, using ant as part of your development process and demonstrations of the new features in CFEclipse. This presentation is geared towards current users of CFEclipse.

So come one, come all, especially if you cant make it to CFUnited! When: Thursday, June 21, 12:30pm EDT (GMT-4) (What time is that for you? See http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=12&min=30&sec=0&p1=25) Where:http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/

Finally I have my flights booked to CFUNITED! I am arriving at D.C.'s Ronald Ray-Gun Airport on Tuesday 26th of June at 16:18. Anybody else arriving around the same time? Fancy sharing a bus thingy? Or is it tube-able? (I can't remember if Ray-Gun was on the tube or not) I am very excited about this conference, I think I might be releasing the final project (heh, right) for the summer called Project:C but details still need to be worked out (so if I dont release something, dont kill me ok?)

So its the saturday after the conference and I am sitting here in Starbucks in the Haymarket in Edinburgh mulling over what an excellent conference this was (and nursing a cold. Now I know why I lost my voice on the last day!). Lots of cool people turned up and Andy Allan, Stephen Moretti andKev McCabe did a most excellent job at sorting this out (and a big thank you to Stephen for letting me share a hotel room!) Overall I think this conference was a coming out parade for ColdFusion 8, which is now on Adobe Labs and both of the keynotes and one of my presentations had to do with the new features in the "Highly Anticipated Upcoming Version of ColdFusion" as Tim Buntel put it! Pros of the conference:

• It was a nice and intimate conference, it felt that you could get to talk to everyone there
• Speaker's VIP room. An excellent idea, since it gives speakers a chance to finish off their presentation etc, in peace
• The goodie bags! I love those Fuzzy Oranges!
• The venue (and the garden for us smokers) was excellent, and as a note, did you know that the "European in Scotland" Building used to be Adobe's headquarters in Scotland, and they put the lift in?
• Great to see the Railo guys next to the Adobe guys!

and actually, overall this was a superbly organized conference, I cant complain about much, but some constructive criticism I am sure can be welcomed... Cons:

• Name badges! I am terrible at remembering names (including my own some mornings) so it would have been great to have the delegate/speaker's names on the badges
• Aircon: now, I cant really be nasty about this, since the temperature in Edinburgh went from pretty damn warm to cold, but in one of my sessions (the AJAX one I think) the room got really hot, but they did sort this out the following day

And that is about it!, Well done guys! Presentations that I gave in the end: When I was asked to speak at Scotch, I was going to do my "usual" CFEclipse presentation and that was it, but with a couple of weeks to go I was asked to also do a CF8 AJAX presentation, which went well considering and even I learned a fair amount as I was giving it! Despite some of the changes in the language with the latest release! After talking to a few of the delegates, I asked Andy and Kev if they minded swapping one of the sessions out on the last day so that I could do (not prepared!) session on Coldspring as I thought this would give a lot of benefit to the delegates. Thankfully this went down fairly well (I think!) despite the fact that I was loosing my voice! And I hope people got a lot out of it! So, another great conference done and dusted. Andy can now have a very well earned rest!

Its nearly the end of the day here at Design UK Headquarters in Central London, and on this VERY exciting day I am heading off to Edinburgh to enjoy two days of awesome lectures at Scotch on the Rocks. I am really looking forward to this conference, as apart from myself doing TWO (yep, you heard right) different presentations, it is also the day that Coldfusion 8 finally went public! Mine's a large one!