Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

Its time again for the fantastic cfObjective in Minneapolis! I am heading off tomorrow morning and should be in town by mid afternoon (all going well) If you want to follow the adventures of people at the conference check out the following link http://twitter.com/cfobjective/with_friends See you all there!

As some of you might realise, the cfObjective conference is round the corner in May... I have decided that we should have a bit of a Moustache Competition (for those people that can grow them, I am not sexist!) Who's with me?

I have been back from the cfObjective conference in Minnesota for a few days and it has allowed me to reflect a bit on how awesome a conference it was. Everything was spot on, the speakers, the venue, the food, the Jack Daniels (thanks to the ColdFusion Weekly guys for the bottle of Gentleman Jack!)! The CFEclipse presentation had a great turn out too, so much so that Jared had to move us into the main presentation room. I was astounded when I asked how many people used CFEclipse and nearly everyone put up their hands! Finally being able to show the world the CF Frameworks Explorer was the highlight of my presentation. I am over the moon with the positive feedback, and for those that are experiencing bugs with it, don't worry, its in VERY active development! You can download it from the CFEclipse Update Site (http://www.cfeclipse.org/update) but also remember that you need to update your copy of CFEclipse too. If you are just getting started with it, I have updated the CFEclipse TV section of the CFEclipse website with a quick introduction to the frameworks explorer. With Scotch on the Rocks round the corner, I wanted to announce that Project:X will be demonstrated at Scotch on the Rocks. This is the only place that you will be able to see the unveiling of what I must say is going to be a fantastic addition to the CFEclipse project. It will REALLY speed up your development and is a perfect companion to the CF Frameworks Explorer. If that wasn't enough, I have just been informed by Andy Allan that there will be FREE Beer ("free as in beer" beer) at a conference that is a must if you are anywhere near Europe. It is very inexpensive for a conference with the quality of speakers that you would get at something double the size. If you haven't booked a place yet, get to it! I cannot stress enough about how much a conference of this quality goes to make you a better developer. If you think a couple of days away from work is too much to gain this kind of knowledge, then you don't deserve a pay raise.

On the first day of cfObjective() 2007 I released the top secret project called Project Unity. This project is easily described as a plugin for CFEclipse which displays an overview of any ColdFusion framework you happen to be using. It is highly configurable in that you can define your own framework if need be and add actions and labels to each of the nodes of a tree. I shall be releasing more information over the coming days, but you can give it a try with your framework by updating cfeclipse and adding the CF Frameworks plugin from the extras directory. Its in Alpha so dont complain too much! Also, a new version of CFeclipse has been released, which should solve some of the errors that you guys have been having. I shall be doing more release docs over the next few days when I get back from cfObjective()!

Here is my schedule for cfObjective for which I am nearly ready! Thursday:

• Arrive at the airport at 15:25 (depending on the airlines, but who knows!)
• Reception

Friday

• Gym
• Finishing Presentation and Project: U
• Breakfast
• Jason Delmore: Top Secret Scorpio
• Chris Scott: Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programing with ColdSpring
• David Keith from Adobe
• Finishing off presentation and Project: U
• PRESENTING CFECLIPSE AND PROJECT: U
• Jack Daniels and Coke

Saturday

• Gym (need to get over hangover somehow)
• Breakfast
• Hal Helms: Large Scale Application Architecture
• Jason Delmore: Scorpio: Diagnostic Server Monitoring and Realtime Performance Alerts
• Matt Woodward: Building Sustainable Software With Frameworks
• Simeon Bateman (what is he presenting... but I gotta catch the guy!)
• Peter Farrell: Mach-II 1.5

Sunday

• Gym
• Breakfast
• Keynote: Ben Forta: Top Secret Scorpio!
• Mark Mandel: Advanced Transfer ORM Techniques (probably knows more about Project:U than anyone!)
• Kevin Schmidt: ColdFusion Flex Integration (Remoting or FDS)
• Joe Rinehart (he talks as fast as I do)
• Maxim Porges: Maximizing Your CF/Flex Applications With Java
• Peter Farrell: Mach-II 1.5

Damn, I am looking forward to this conference!

If you are attending the cfObjective conference tomorrow (GAH! Tomorrow already?!!) then you might like to add cfObjective to your twitter friends or followers! then you can see who is going and doing what. Enjoy! And see you there!

Well, not quite, but I shall be heading out tomorrow morning. I wanted to know if any other people are arriving at the Minneapolis/St Pauls airport around 15:30 (or 3:30 pm, whichever is easiest) and we can share a taxi (or shuttle bus if I phone *NOW*)? Any brits going? Would hate to be on the same flight as another candidate and not say hello at least! (or get drunk before taking off, cause havoc on the plane and be arrested on landing, you know, the usual) That 8 hour plane ride should give me some time to finish off some code on Project U at least!

Finally the sessions are up for all the conferences, which for me, gives me an idea of when I shall be presenting, and more importantly who I shall be following onto the stage, which having looked at this years conferences, is a very scary proposition! Firstly at cfObjective I am following Mark Mandel, another Mark, and I am sure everyone is going to confuse his Australian accent for my London accent and thing we are either both from the same country, or the same person (just notice the difference in space I take up compared to him, that will let you know who-is-who), but at least I shall be pulling Project:U out of the bag then! What I feared the most come true, I am following Ben Forta onto the stage on the first day of Scotch on the Rocks. How can I follow that? Project:X is going to have to be really damned amazing to follow Ben "The Force" Forta! Then at CFUnited I seem to be presenting on the last day. The issue will be not so much following someone onto the stage but who else is presenting at the same time, and I have devastating opposition, Joe Rinehart doing a great AJAX presentation and John Paul Ashenfelter talking about Build, Test, Deploy, I doubt I will get anyone coming over to see what is happening with CFEclipse and Project:C !!! Nonetheless, I am really looking forward to the summer!

Did you know you can suggest topics for this years Adobe Max? I don't know about you, but I think the people's favourite free IDE for ColdFusion should be there, don't you think? Not saying anything but *hint* *hint*, Barcelona isn't that far from London, and I think I might know someone that knows a bit about CFEclipse that could go and talk. Up to you really, but you could go and suggest a topic. Now, what comes to mind eh? Did I also mention, that at each conference, I shall be unveiling a MAJOR new feature of the product? I am sure I did. So the first feature, called Project:U will be...

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I have just booked my flight to cfObjective in May. I am both full of trepidation as this will be my first time speaking at a US conference but overly excited at unveiling the results of the top secret, Project:U. I am still working on this, and probably will be working on it non-stop till the eve of the conference but even in its current (broken? err.. feature incomplete?) state I still think it will cause quite a hit (hopefully not a hit of rotten tomatoes hitting me!) Does anybody else get nervous when they spend ?379.31 ($744.889) on a flight and check and re-check everything like 100 times? This also brings me to hotel bookings, why is the world mad on Visa cards? I don't posses one and I am happy with that. It just makes me nervous to think that a foreign government (yes Mr Bush, I am looking at you) is allowed to get all my private details including being able to look into my bank accounts just when I visit their country! Illegal? I think so! (rant over, sorry, back to normal service)