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!

Ha, made you look!

Seriously, Jim Priest and I have been kicking around the idea of hosting a 1 day ColdFusion conference in the Triangle area. We've had good support from the Universities in the area about lending us some space as well as good response from other sponsors. What we want to know is how many attendees we could realistically get.

So figure a 1 day conference with 6 sessions and a lunch. All this for 50$. Would you come? Please answer why or why not in the comments below. Anonymous answers are ok. We just wanna know the word on the street.

Scotch On The Road is bringing the conference to you! The European tour makes Scotch the most affordable way to get your annual intake of all things CFML, Flex and AIR.

Adam Lehman, Terrance Ryan, Andy Allan, Sean Corfield & Serge Jespers are some of the fantastic speakers lined up to present interesting topics for developers of all levels.

Price includes Lunch and 2 drinks, plus up to 7 session. Don't miss the Lighting Sessions where anyone can present anything they want for short amount time.

The folks behind Scotch are committed to making this an event for Developers by Developers. The fun, laid back environment the best and truly only way to learn the SotR way.

Dates:

June 1st: London, The Sway Bar
June 3rd: Manchester, TigerTiger
June 5th: Edinburgh, The Caves

Munich, Brussels and Amsterdam to be confirmed!

Prices:

£ 49 - 1 event ($72)
£ 89 - 2 events ($130)
£129 - 3 events ($190)
(+UK VAT @ 15%)
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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!

The fine folks at Stellr have put together a list of all the proposed presentations for CFUnited 09. You are invited to help choose the presentations you'd be most interested in watching.

The CFUnited 09 presentation survey will take less than 10 minutes and will help make sure the conference content is relevant, timely and in line with audience expectations.

I think this is a great idea and will help make sure the conference is tuned for the audience. Vote Today!

I am back home now after a very lovely and stimulating weekend at the BFusion/BFlex conference. BFusion and BFlex are back to back 1 day training/conference events held in Bloomington Indiana on the grounds of Indiana University. While some poor misguided souls might think any conference in Indiana would be nothing more than a projector pointed at a sheet hanging in a cornfield, I assure you this was not the case. Far from it.

The BFusion/BFlex event was awesome. Hands Down. The hallmark of a good conference is good organization and the promoters of this conference really put a lot of time into sorting out details. The moment we checked into the hotel we were handed colour coded maps showing important town features like the nearest grocery store, local restaurants, local watering holes and of course, directions to the conference facilities. Registration was simple and efficient. All of us there as Presenters, Instructors and Assistants were given branded polo shirts to wear so students knew who to ask for help. Lunch choices were color coded with the name tag to make finding ones particular choice a little easier. It was clear that our hosts had thought of everything.

The presenters had all the latest equipment at their disposal from dual monster projection screens to the Crestron powered audio/video equipment. The training sessions were stocked with quality instructors and had plenty of helpful assistants floating around the room to help keep the pace. To facilitate the learning environment, each of the rooms had power ports and ethernet jacks available for every seat which means we avoided the typical conference double wammy of running low on batteries and cramming everyone on an overloaded wifi router. Not least to mention, the campus of Indiana University is just simply beautiful!

So frankly, the quality of the event was on par with some of the best run conferences in the business. I am still a little shocked that the crew was able to provide all of the coordination, service and giveaways for free. Oh, thats right, giveaways. I need to talk about the giveaways.

Thanks to the awesome sponsors, there was an immense amount of giveaways. Everyone likes to get ColdFusion and Flex stickers, hats emblazoned with CF and technology themed t-shirts and those things were in good supply. More interesting were the tons of tech books, learning CDs, Lynda subscriptions and the like that were also raffled off to the attendees. The theme of this conference was learning and that means even the giveaways were there to help facilitate the learning. I brought my friend Tim Montgomery from Dayton, OH. He has been designing and implementing websites for many years now and wanted to get some good ColdFusion and Flex training. He left the conference with:

• a CF hat
• a new copy of John Farrar's book "ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial"
• a really snazzy CF8 tag poster set
• some free software
• a new laptop bag
• an Adobe Air with Ajax book
• a Flex shirt
• 16 new friends

...and 4 job offers. Everyone would have to agree that is some awesome conference loot!

All in all, the BFusion/BFlex series is impressive and of tremendous benefit to the community. Many people gained their first exposure to ColdFusion and Flex, others gained new skills and a good time was had by all. A big NoDans.com thank you to Bob Flynn, Prem Radhakrishnan, Michelle Buddie and the rest of the super cool staff for putting on a quality memorable show.

Note: This post was updated. I am not speaking at noon, Ray is. I speak at 6:00PM.

August 21 at high noon, the illustrious Ray Camden will be speaking to the Online ColdFusion Meetup about CFC201. Hot on his heels, I'll present at 6:00. We'll be talking about ColdSpring, installation, Dependency Injection, Factories, Configuration, Dynamic Properties, Complex DI Strategies and also look at practical usage inside of production applications.

You are invited to join, all you need is a web browser and an Internet connection. More info here: http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/calendar/8569952/

Oh, and if you haven't heard of the Online ColdFusion Meetup, it is the largest CFUG on the planet, with well over 1500 members. All Presentations are delivered online, often on Thursdays, at 12:00PM and at 6:00PM. You'll need to buy your own Pizza :)

I don't know what they put in the water in Bloomington, Indiana, but the people there are CRAZY. The excellent leadership over at the Bloomington Flex User Group, the Indiana University Flash User Group, and the Indiana University Multimedia User Group have put together a 2 day training/conference event on Flex and ColdFusion for free. That's right, 200 lucky people will get their skills expanded on the hottest technology powering the web today, and won't pay a dime for it.

The event organizers booked leading experts in Flex and ColdFusion to run the sessions. And when they ran out of leading experts, they send me an email asking if I'd help out. I'll present 2 CF sessions and assist in the Flex Hands On. Here are the descriptions:

Refactoring In Coldfusion - From Procedural to OO

If you would like to know how to migrate an existing procedurally programmed application into an object oriented one, grab a chair and sit for a while. We'll discuss some sensible guidelines designed to help you make incremental changes towards OO nirvana.
We'll also look at lots of code samples, we all like code samples, right?

Fun With ColdSpring

The secret ingredient to modular and maintainable OO applications in ColdFusion is the ColdSpring framework. Efficient and practical use of ColdSpring is easy. In this source code based presentation, we'll cover installation, Dependency Injection, Factories, Configuration, Dynamic Properties, Complex DI Strategies and also look at practical usage inside of production applications.

So if you can make it to Bloomington, IN, Sept 6-7, and want targeted training on Flex and ColdFusion, Sign Up for BFusion/BFlex today!

I recently interviewed John Wilker. We talked about a variety of topics, his long ColdFusion career. His migration to Flex, His migration to Conference Co-Superstar... Snoop Dogg even gets a mention somewhere in there.

We even go behind the scenes at the 360Conferences series and hear some of the funnier things that go on in producing a top-notch technical conference. Even though he is busy preparing for the 360|Flex conference in San Jose, CA (August 18 - 20). John made time to talk with us. John is really fun to talk to and makes for a great interviewee. Listen to the John Wilker CFConversations Interview and let us know what you think.