Posted By : Dan Wilson     October 25, 2011 6:31 AM

Mark Mandel posted information about the ColdSpring 2.0 Alpha release and I wanted to make sure it got out to the general public. There is a documentation contest running and your help is requested in trying out the release and helping to identify issues. Make sure you have joined the ColdSpring Users Group as this is the best way to give and get information about ColdSpring.

Mark's Post is below for your reference

ColdSpring 2.0 Alpha 1 is now available for you to download and test!

Major features included in this release:

• Enhanced underlying architecture for greater extensibility
• XML Schema For ColdSpring configuration files
• New BeanDefinition architecture
• BeanFactoryInterceptors for intercepting BeanFactory lifecyle events
• BeanProcessInterceptors for intercepting Bean lifecyle events
• XML Custom Namespaces for defining your own XML dialect for creating and configurating beans
• Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) Custom XML Namespaces
• Greatly extended AOP functionality with AOP expressions
• ColdFusion 9 ORM Integration classes
• Utility Custom XML Namespace for creation of data structures
• Enhanced error reporting
• Multiple Bean Scope support – beans can be prototype (transient), singleton, as well as request or session scope bound

More details can be found in the release notes, and my blog post: https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/coldspring/wiki/NewInColdSpring2.0 http://www.compoundtheory.com/?action=displayPost&ID=537

We are also running a competition to help flesh out the missing pieces of the documentation, with an opportunity to win a copy of ColdFusion Builder!

Details can be found here: http://www.compoundtheory.com/?action=displayPost&ID=538

Happy testing!

Thanks to all have been involved in this release!

Posted By : Dan Wilson     August 16, 2011 7:21 AM

Last year, one of the major tech conferences, CFUnited, closed it's doors for good. This left a hole in the learning and networking opportunities for ColdFusion developers. I gained much from going to CFUnited over the years. It helped me personally and also professionally. The opportunities to learn from the best minds in the business and develop my skills have been some of my fonder memories of my career.

I would like to invite you to take part of a Technology Conference my group is organizing on Sept. 17-18. The price is minimal, only $60 for 40 sessions and 2 hands on classes! This is our third conference and we guarantee you will have a good time.

Space is very limited so register as soon as you can!

The conference will cover a wide variety of web development and design topics including Web and Mobile technologies. See the schedule here: NCDevCon 2011 schedule

Registration for the event will be $60 which includes:

• Entry to the weekend event and all presentations
• Lunch (both days)
• Coffee, drinks and snacks (both days)
• Conference shirt

Also available are 2 hands on sessions. We will walk you through building your first web application and also building your first mobile application. These hands on courses are included in your admission fee.

Registration:

Our EventBrite Registration Link

Can't go? You can still help!

We have a nice NCDevCon flyer for you to forward to your co-workers or hang in your break room. We'd appreciate it!

Posted By : Dan Wilson     April 13, 2011 10:22 AM

I'm posting this job opportunity for a friend. This opportunity is for a mid-level ColdFusion developer who is entrepreneurially minded and wants to be a key member of a growing and exciting team. Slackers need not apply! If you are interested, Contact Me with your resume text and contact info and I'll pass the information on to the right person.

Job Description

We need a mid-level programmer to aid in the development on our Coldfusion platform. The system was developed in 2005 as a Content Management, Ecommerce, and Ticketing system. The Company has been growing very quickly over the past 2 years, with explosive growth in 2010. In order for the Company to continue to grow they must increase their efficiency and build more automated processes into the platform.

This programmer will report to the team lead and will be responsible for delivering well-written, quality software as a team member both on time and within scope.

Responsibilities

• Function both independently as well as within a team, participating in on-going prioritization, management, development, testing and delivery of internal and external-facing web applications
• Consult with management to identify requirements and priorities for web product development, as well as opportunities to improve Paid's performance of this function. Administer, tune and troubleshoot any of the applications in our web applications portfolio
• Estimate, justify, and communicate budget requirements for projects
• Aid in post-project documentation
• Keep abreast of industry trends and developments. Research new technologies and provide recommendations

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• 3+ years experience with ecommerce platforms & content management systems
• Experience dealing with large-scale order processing and manifesting systems a plus
• Direct experience in high-volume, large-scale, web-based applications
• 3+ years building web applications in a code managed, multi-tier development environment with process release management in place
• 1+ years experience with SQL Server specifically, including experience with: Relational Database design, along with creation of stored procedures and user-defined functions
• 3+ years experience with ColdFusion specifically, including experience with: Coldfusion specific development - CFCs, custom tags
• Understanding of ColdFusion Server development environment (mappings, application architecture, variable scoping, client/session management, error handling, transactions, etc.)
• Proficiency with Subversion
• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment
• Position available in our new Westborough, MA offices. While the role will require interaction with the actual day-to-day processes and individuals performing those tasks, we are flexible and allow for day(s) of telecommuting per week.

Direct candidates only at this time. (No agencies please)

Posted By : Dan Wilson     December 23, 2010 8:56 AM

Query of Queries really helped me out this morning. The Model-Glue team is working on a ColdFusion Builder extension and we need to get a list of files to inspect. There could be many types of files in a project that aren't relevant to our purposes and I wanted to filter only the ones I need.

My Directory query contained lots of SVN specific files, which make for a good example of what we want to filter, before doing our inspection work.

Original Directory Query

What we need in this case is to filter anything that isn't a CFM, CFC or XML file. The CFDirectory tag will allow only a single filter, so what do we do?

In ColdFusion, I would use listlast( filename, ".") to look at the file extension but that would mean I'd have to unpack the query and either make a new one, or pack it in another datastructure. Waste of code, I tell ya. I ended up using Query of Queries and a LIKE statement to filter.

New Directory Query

The Code I Used for the Query of Queries

The secret sauce is the lower() function on NAME, and the LIKE conditional with a wildcard % operator. I found this through the Query of Queries documentation and I also learned about a few other wildcard operators as well.

List of Wildcard Operators Supported In Query of Query LIKE conditional

• The underscore (_) represents any single character.
• The percent sign (%) represents zero or more characters.
• Square brackets ([ ]) represents any character in the range.
• Square brackets with a caret [^] represent any character not in the range.
• All other characters represent themselves.

Simple and maintainable. Just how I like it. Thanks #ColdFusion!

Posted By : Dan Wilson     March 29, 2010 8:06 AM

Special Guest, and TACFUG favorite, Josh Adams from Adobe will visit March 30th to present a special session on ColdFusion Builder. Food and drink will be provided and all are welcome.

Directions and RSVP are at the TACFUG Home Page

Make sure to tell your friends and co-workers about this special event!

Posted By : Dan Wilson     March 18, 2010 6:27 AM

If you can join the Online ColdFusion Meetup today (March 18th) at noon EST, we'll talk about code, code quality and show you some techniques to help you make bad code good.

This presentation picks up where my 2009 Making Bad Code Good presentation leaves off. Same great concept with all new code samples and techniques.

If you work on a legacy application, or on code built by lots of developers over the years, you likely laugh your way through this presentation. I promise to be thought provoking and challenge the way you write code. In this session, we'll look at lots of code samples and walk through making incremental changes to speed development, reduce errors and make life easier for everyone involved.

Ideas and concepts in this presentation will help you improve your existing applications and write more maintainable code.

Posted By : Dan Wilson     March 15, 2010 9:18 AM

NCDevCon is a free two day conference on ColdFusion, Flash, Flex, AIR, HTML, Javascript and CSS. We've been building on the success of last year, and making bigger moves to grow the community. We are a victim of our own success.

What I mean by that is, we've taken some big strides to find developers who aren't typically at Adobe conferences. Last year we held a free ColdFusion training day and also a free Flex training day. These training sessions were well received by the audience and much good was done.

This year, the interest for these classes has already quadrupled. We have many more developers who have no exposure to either ColdFusion or Flex. As such, we'd like to ask the community for help.

Many of the speaker submissions for NCDevCon are advanced sessions. We want those sessions to be included in our conference. We also want some good beginner/intermediate content as well.

Of particular interest to us would be sessions that teach newcomers to ColdFusion, how to do common tasks with ColdFusion.

The format for these would be 2 hour hands-on blocks. You provide the content and a step by step process, and we'll provide Teachers Assistants to help you keep the class on track. We'll also take care of making sure the attendees have the right software installed.

This is a great way to help your fellow developers and future developers. We promise to give you the star treatment while you are with us!

Some examples of sessions we'd like to see are:

• How to build a contact form
• How to build a dynamic product list
• Building a data driven JQuery widget with ColdFusion
• Reusing layouts in ColdFusion
• Whatever else you can think of

So, if you would like to take part in this unique opportunity, let us know. We thank you in advance for the consideration.

Posted By : Dan Wilson     January 13, 2010 7:11 AM

ColdFusion 8 and 9 have an autosuggest functionality that just couldn't be simpler. If you want to have an autosuggest input on the screen, you can do it with a single line of code:

That snippet will place an autosuggest box on the screen and allow a choice of english, spanish or french. Snazzy yeah?

If you want, you can bind the autosuggest to a javascript function, or directly to a CFC, making data retrieval and formatting very simple.

You can also make more complex examples, take a look at the ColdFusion 9 Documentation for Autosuggest for some ideas. All this is possible because ColdFusion used the extensive YUI library under the hood. The control used by the ColdFusion Autosuggest is the YUI AutoComplete widget.

Let's say you wanted to do something that the YUI AutoComplete offers, but isn't in the ColdFusion documentation, what do you do?

[More]

Posted By : Dan Wilson     December 29, 2009 3:48 PM

I'm having all my servers upgraded to ColdFusion 9. In the process we ran into a situation where a perfectly valid key was not accepted by the ColdFusion installer.

The serial number that you entered is invalid

After a little troubleshooting, Tim Geist at Viviotech (top notch hosts) found an Adobe KB on Invalid License Keys and Linux:

When installing ColdFusion 9 Standard onto a Linux operating system, you may encounter the issue where the installer does not accept the serial number. When you enter the number into the installer, you will receive a message similar to the following:

* The message 'The serial number that you entered is invalid' * A red cross will appear next to the Serial Number text field

The installer will not let you progress any further.

Read More

Apparently, proceeding with the developer installation, then entering the license key in later fixes the issue. I'm sure this will be remedied in a future point release of ColdFusion.

Posted By : Dan Wilson     November 20, 2009 1:35 PM

Jamie Metcher, one of the wild and talented Aussies, is blogging now at http://lagod.id.au/blog/. If you, (like me), wondered what an lagod is, Jamie explains why he chose lagod on one of his pages.

Happy blogging Jamie.