Planning for the NC ColdFusion conference is in high gear. We got excellent feedback on the conference dates/details from both speakers and from attendees. Most importantly, we realized our proposed date accidentally collided with the BFusion/BFlex conference. The Bfusion/BFlex conference is our inspiration for the NC conference. Bob Flynn, conference organizer, and others, have been very supportive of the NC Conference and we want to show our respect by not scheduling on the same day as them. Thus, after much discussion, consultation of calendars and the like, the new proposed schedule is Oct. 17-18th.

If we can make Oct. 17-18th work for the community, then we'll move ahead with that. Our next chance would be to do something in the Spring. (Or raise the price and do it in the Bahamas in winter :) )

The other option on the table is whether to provide a second day of training on the Adobe Flex framework. We propose a 6 hour Bring Your Own Laptop session targeted at beginner level Hands On Flex training. If you have some programming experience and want a hand making your first (or second) Flex application, this is for you. We're looking for responses from the community of whether or not this is interesting.

So if you are considering attending/speaking, please let us know how you feel on the following:

• Does Oct. 17th - 18th work for your schedule?
• Are you interested in attending/speaking/teacher assisting the Oct. 18th 6 hour Bring Your Own Laptop session targeted at beginner level Hands On Flex training?
• Are you interested in more ColdFusion sessions on Oct 18th instead of Flex training?

Thanks for sharing your opinions and helping us tune this conference for the good of the community.

North Carolina Conference?

Hi Folks, we've been working pretty hard to line up a good ColdFusion conference for North Carolina and the surrounding areas. The original idea was to have a 1 day conference with 6 sessions and a lunch. All this for 50$.

Tell me more...

Thanks to some generous sponsors, we may even be able to drop the price a little, offer a conference T-Shirt and let the State employees attend for free, since they work so hard to keep this state going.

Where/When would the conference be held?

We propose to hold the conference in Raleigh, North Carolina on Oct 24th. We'd like to get an idea of the number of attendees and the number of interested speakers for this date/location combination.

If you are interested, please leave a comment below and let us know whether you are interested in any of the following:

• State Employee
• Attendee
• Speaker

Thanks for reading and thanks to all the people who have helped us get this far in planning. We appreciate the support!

I was emailing back and forth with a very smart group of people this morning and had a thought that seemed worth repeating. ColdFusion is the most elegant language to express business solutions.

Need charts for your dashboard? No problem.

Want to export a report to PDF? No problem.

Want to intake data via PDF forms and generate Presentations with the data? No problem.

Want to write a Flex application that adds meetings to Microsoft Exchange servers? No problem.

The list goes on and on and on and on and on.

ColdFusion is often lumped in with PHP and other general web scripting languages, and it can certainly fit there. However, the ColdFusion team over the years has worked very hard to put useful, relevant functionality for business applications. As a result, ColdFusion is the most elegant expression of business solutions on the market today!

I'm putting the finishing touches on my upcoming presentation, Build a ColdFusion powered AIR application, for CF.Objective() and wanted to pass on some interesting news.

A couple of weeks ago, Terry Ryan, invited me to expand my presentation to cover AIR+ColdFusion functionality to be released in CF 9 Centaur. I'm totally thrilled to present a few CF9 features and am busy redoing the presentation so we can all get a better look at what CF9 brings to Rich Internet Applications. The illustrious Dan 'Big Pipes' Vega was also tapped to present some CF9 content at CF.Objective() so I'm pretty interested to see what he's going to show.

The upcoming CF9 brings many game-changing features to the table and adds a lot to the ColdFusion+RIA equasion. CF.objective() 09 is turning out to be the first public discussion on CF9 Centaur features and you don't want to miss these sessions, do you?

What? You've not registered for CF.Objective() yet? You can still take advantage of historically low airfare and the extended Early Bird Special, just do it before March 31st, ok? Check the sessions if you still need more convincing!

You Got Your ColdFusion In My Adobe Air!

Meeting: 3/19/09 6:00 PM SRA International

Come see how to use ColdFusion to power an Adobe AIR desktop application.

Adobe AIR is quickly gaining momentum as a pioneer of the Rich Desktop. ColdFusion is a rapid development platform providing rich services and timely functionality for business applications.

When the two come together, it is the greatest combination since Reeses Peanut Butter Cups...

More info at TACFUG

At 6:00 EST this Thursday, March 5th, I present Making Bad Code, Good to the Online ColdFusion Meetup. You can attend this presentation virtually, by visiting the Online ColdFusion Meeting Room at 6:00 EST.

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.

The recorded presentation can be watched now!

A word on SQL Injection

SQL Injection is a pervasive problem in the Web Application World. A quick search for URLS that use raw SQL brings up hundreds of thousands of dangerously formed URLS. Any developer worth his salt knows to clean user input before using it.

Defend Against SQL Injection in ColdFusion

CFQueryparam is a recommended tag that helps to keep your queries safe from SQL Injection. Any ColdFusion worth his salt uses CFQueryparam to help keep malicious parameters from being executed by the database engine. I ran across some code today that used CFQueryparam in most cases, but there was a particular, recurring use case that used raw parameters.

Example 1

Note the use of the list. It is a common paradigm to pass a delimited list of data to an SQL statement. In this case, the developer chose not to use CFQueryparam because he/she was under the impression that the result would be a single parameter, not a chain of parameters.

However, CFQueryparam can be used successfully in this case by setting the optional attribute 'list' to true. This is a supported attribute on all database engines.

Example 2

The resulting query will be parametrized in such a way as to render the list as a list and the results of the second query are equal to the first. Except for the case of an SQL Injection attack.

In the case of an SQL Injection attack, the developer of the first code sample would have a lot of explaining to do...

We work fairly hard at TACFUG to keep our members informed and engaged in key information about programming and ColdFusion. Recently, Jim and I, put out a request for topics and we found some challenges in meeting the need. Some of our members have a long history of programming in ColdFusion and want to branch out into Object Oriented programming, but for one reason or another just haven't. Jim and I came up with an OO Code Camp concept and floated it out to our group to gauge interest.

Here was our announcement:

The fine folks at TACFUG (me and Jim) are seriously considering doing an OO camp starting in January. OO Camp will be a crash course on OO in ColdFusion. Ideally, we'd cover the topic in 3 or 4 evenings spread over a couple of months.

This crash course will be designed to teach OO concepts and how to efficiently work with ColdFusion components. If you are new to OO or do not think you are using OO effectively, this crash course is for you.

There will be no cost for this event though we may take up a donation for Pizza. Who would be ready to commit to coming to 3 or 4 evenings of OO camp?

Please use this email thread for comments, questions and such about the proposed OO Camp. Feel free to extend this offer to others in your company, organization, Facebook Network, etc that would find this helpful as well.

We got a good bit of interest, certainly more than enough to justify running OO Code Camp in RTP.

Jim and I will be teaching the class and while we are pretty darned good at what we do, we've never run an organized class on this topic before. To make sure we cover all the bases and deliver appropriate, encompassing training, I thought it would be a good idea to ask the multitude of talented readers of this blog for their advice. We want to deliver the core concepts of Object Oriented Programming in a practical, hands-on fashion. Please offer, by commenting below, any constructive advice, suggestions, key topics that you feel we should cover.

Thanks in advance!

I've recently signed up to go on RIA Adventure. By now, everyone knows RIA Adventure is a fun filled cruise containing all of your favorite Adobe Geeks. I totally dig the networking at conferences so I'll really like hanging out with a bunch of fun people that know the difference between coldfusion and ColdFusion. Can Ya Dig?

I don't mind getting away to the tropics in February. In February, I'm usually ready for a little sun anyways. I also don't mind my girlfriend Shannon getting to know some of the people I'm prattling on about. She's heard enough stories, that's for sure.

Last I heard, this RIA Adventure cruise was filling up pretty fast. If you've been on the fence about participating, time to whip out the visa and book some February Fun in the Sun.

I've been working on The Health Challenge over the last month and ran into a usability issue using my CFChart implementation. Apparently with enough data points, the labels would all jam into each other and become an unreadable mess. Have a look...

CFChart is actually a wrapped up implementation of WebCharts 3D, a full featured charting engine. ColdFusion ships with a Chart Stylizer that adds significant functionality to the generated charts. I've been using this Chart Stylizer for years now. However, I couldn't find an option to help me out with this X Axis Traffic Jam. Through a bit of google magic, I ended up on a blog I'd not seen before called CFSearching which addressed this issue for the Y Axis and after digging around the stylizer, I found a similar option for the X Axis.

Problem solved! See:

CFSearching has a number of very nicely written articles about CFChart, iText, Coldfusion and other important topics. For example, have you ever wanted to Create a Gantt Chart with CFChart or what about Calling ColdFusion functions from PDFPageEvents in iText? There are some very good articles up at CFSearching, go take a look!