I'm here at CF.Objective and have seen some great presentations so far today.

The keynote session was presented by Adobe's Tom Jordahl who demonstrated some really cool features and interaction that the new soon-to-be Eclipse plugin for RDS support will be offering. He also slipped in that a beta of the plugin will be available on Adobe Labs when the Flex 2.0 Beta 2 is released. When asked when the beta would be released to the public he of course avoided the question, but eventually hinted that Adobe is trying to get it out within the next 2 to 3 weeks.

So, this was my first look at the RDS plugin and I have to admit I was pretty impressed. Tom also gave us a quick sneak-peak at what looked like another Eclipse plugin (or it could have been part of the RDS plugin, I'm not sure) for ColdFusion code wizards (specifically a CFC creator).

Apparently Sean Corfield and Ray Camden have been harassing Mike Nimer for some specific features in this wizard tool (for our benefit).

From what I saw real quick, I was pretty impressed. Tom gave an example where he right-clicked on a table in a DB table and choose a CFC creator wizard. There were several really useful options in there. The one that caught my eye was an option for creating the CFC type. It had options to create an "Active Record CFC", a "Bean CFC, & DAO CFC", and "Flex Data Services Assembly CFS".

Well, I'm shutting down my system for the night and leaving for CF.Objective() early tomorrow morning.

If you're going to the conference and you see me there, make sure to say Hi. My plane arrives around 1:30pm, so I'll likely be at the hotel by 2:30pm. And make sure to check out my session (FarCry 3.0 - CMS in the Real World) at 2:30pm on Sunday.

Okay, so I'm not sure why this is happening, but a friend of mine was having trouble using Simon Horwith's "Simple SOAP Example".

The error he was getting was the following:

I tried the same example code and got the same error. The odd thing was that the error wouldn't happen when using ColdFusion 6.1 (we tested it on CF7.01 Standard running on both IIS and Apache).

After playing with it for a while, I found that if I renamed the CFC file to "anything" other than soapexample.cfc the code ran without fail.

If anyone has any further input on this I'd be happy to hear suggestions.

Note: When renaming the CFC file, you'll need to update a couple variable values at the top of the index.cfm file within the <cfscript/> block.

Update 1: Jared Rypka-Hauer and I spent some time trying to figure this out. We tried updating the Apache AXIS to v1.3, we tried using the latest Cumulative Hotfit for ColdFusion 7, and several other ideas. So far, what we've discovered is that the problem has to do with the displayname attribute set in the <cfcomponent/> tag. For some reason if you leave it to the default setting of "SOAP Exmaple" (or delete the space) the error happens. If, you rename it to anything else it seems to work. Its late, and I'm tired. I'll tackle this another time when I can spare some of it (good luck with that :)).

I haven't actually announced it yet, but I'll be speaking next month at the Coldfusion conference cf.objective. My topic will be about using the open source Farcry CMS as a content management system for building websites.

This morning I got an email from Judith Dinowitz (the PR manager for cf.objective 2006 and well-known author for many articles on House of Fusion) that the cf.objective conference made the news today on PRWeb and Google News.

Here's a snippet from the article:

cf.Objective() (http://www.cfobjective.com), the first ColdFusion conference of 2006, is the only conference to focus solely on advanced ColdFusion topics and object oriented concepts. On March 11-12, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ColdFusion programmers from all over the world will gather to learn to incorporate sophisticated techniques and Enterprise-level concepts into their ColdFusion programming.

I see this question again and again, "How can I get the latest bleeding edge release of Farcry CMS?"

Many people don't have access to using a CVS client, don't know how to use one, or just don't want to. Well, now you can download the Farcry CMS nightly builds from my website.

The system checks the CVS server daily at 5:00 AM EST. If new file(s) exist the server gets them and adds them to the zip file. If no new files exist, it leaves the ZIP file alone. So you can just check the file date (shown on the website) to see if a newer version exists.

Please note that these are not officially released by Daemon as stable releases and you use them at your own risk. As always, if you are using these files to upgrade over an existing version of Farcry make sure to backup your database and farcry files first.

Download page

A client of mine has an immediate opening for a full time ColdFusion developer in West Hartford Connecticut. This is not through me. You'd be working directly for the client. This is an onsite position (you must be able to be onsite daily).

The client uses ColdFusion 7 and MS SQL server (and some MSAccess) on a Windows platform.

If interested, send me an email and I can discuss further details.

Bryan and Michael have done it again. The authors and DJs of www.coldfusionpodcast.com have once again delivered a well-spoken ColdFusion podcast chockfull of CF goodness.

In episode 9 they breakdown the intricacies of application.cfc and discuss some of its finer details. This is really helpful for CF developers who have not yet delved into using application.cfc to replace the old (but still supported) application.cfm file.

Go check it out and make sure to listen to their older episodes if you haven't yet.

I was just reading a post on Seth Duffey's blog about using ColdFusion custom tags to output common headers and footers.

Although I don't disagree using custom tags for reusable logic (and layout), I don't totally agree with his method for the situation he setup.

In his example he wanted to express that using an include tag to output his header and footer did not allow him to pass variables to the included file (not without setting some global variables). So his solution was to make a custom tag and to output it using the following format:

The problem I have with this is that in order to call the file I have to either have it in my global custom tags folder (or one that I have setup in the ColdFusion administrator) or I need to have the file in the same folder as the calling file.

Using the traditional format <CF_myTag> does solve many needs; however CFMX has two tags that can help alleviate many headaches when using custom tags.

[more]

Last month I mentioned a website award I received for a website I worked on earlier this year (Middlesex Hospital). Well that website has once again won an award.

This time the award is from Strategic Health Care Communications (SHCC) in the category of Best Site Design.