Nearing the end of the opening keynote at CFUnited Ben Forta announced the codename for the next version of ColdFusion. Current plans for Scorpio are to work from the stable CFMX engine and enhance more features like functionality.

On a side note, Ben also spoke briefly about the upcoming CF7 updater. I forgot to write down some of the features, but Doug Hughes who was sitting near me seemed to get excited when Ben mentioned something about Java being able to talk to CFCs (or something to that effect). So I'm guessing thats a good thing :).

I just finished watching the keynote at CFUnited given by Tim Buntel and Ben Forta. Macromedia plans to officially support CFEclipse. I want to give a special thanks to the CFEclipse project team for their great support and dedication to a great development IDE for ColdFusion. I'm looking forward to their future release of version 2.

I recorded the announcement which you can see in the photo gallery under the June 29th folder. I applogize in advance... my digital camera's video recording features aren't really top notch :).

Well, this was an eventful day. No official events and yet I've met quite a few people. It was great to take a break, have a beer, and be able to chat with people before all the formal events begin tomorrow.

As I sit here typing this I look around the room and see Joe and Scott typing on their laptops as well. Scott was smart enough to bring in a wireless access point for our room. Oh yeah, Joe Rinhart needed a place to crash tonight because his roommate will not be in until tomorrow. So Scott and I stuck him on the floor :).

At the end of the night many of us were found chatting in the local hotel pub (Sean Corfield, Michael Dinowitz, Jared Rypka-Hauer, and several others).

So here are some more pictures that I managed to get in before the day ended. I also attended MiniMax2 and placed a couple photos of that in there as well.

So here we are at pre-day 1 (or is it day zero). I arrived at the hotel this morning at around 10:00am and found my way around. The place was pretty quiet so I decided to take a few photos. They’re not that exciting so far (there’s just not that much happening yet). But if you’re curious, take a look. I made sure to get in a couple quick shots of the hotel (before its walls a brimming with people). I poked my head into the MMUG’s meeting and took a quick photo. I got a few looks and raised eyebrows so I reluctantly stopped at one picture :). Shortly after 1:00pm the CFUnited booth starting setting up and that was the first sign of any CF life (other than a couple small signs on some class & meeting doors).

I walked around town a little and grabbed some lunch. On my way back in I ran into Jeff Houser and the Dinowitz’s. Originally I was going to drive down here with Jeff, but I found round-trip tickets online for $80 bucks and couldn’t pass it up.

So I’ll post more later on if I get a chance. This week looks to be pretty busy but I’m sure I can find a few moments to upload some more.

Steve Rittler gave a good presentation on Farcry (a little taste of what he will be presenting at CFUNITED).

Michael Dinowitz talked briefly about consuming web services and how he'll show examples about using web services with CFMX.

Both Steve's and Michael's full presentation can be seen at the upcoming CFUNITED conference next month.

To view today's recorded Breezo go to http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/p26908922/.

Geoff Snowman gave a good overview of the upcoming MSSQL 2005 and some of its new features.

Robi gave a presentation about "Tuning the Java Virtual Machines" with regards to CFMX.

Both Geoff's and Robi's full presentation can be seen at the upcoming CFUNITED conference next month.

To view today's recorded Breezo go to http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/p51394892/.

I've been using Eclipse 3.0.1 for some time now to develop my Coldfusion applications. Today I decided to upgrade to version 3.1M7.

What a difference in speed. The thing I noticed most right away was that ctrl+m (a feature in the CFEclipse plugin) worked much better (ctrl+m was a feature that worked in CFStudio and Homesite+ where it would bring you to and from the beginning and the end of a tag. Very useful when you are working on a large file). Before the upgrade ctrl+m was taking a long time to respond when clicked more than once (at least this problem existed for me).

Simon gave a great overview of his presentation on "Design Patterns and CFML" and Tim spoke quickly about his favorite new features introduced in Coldfusion MX 7.

Simon's full presentation can be seen at the upcoming CFUNITED conference next month.

To view today's recorded Breezo go to http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/p14693917/.

One of my clients has a feature called Email a Patient where website visitors are allowed to send a virtual greeting card to patients in the hospital.

After the user has filled out their card they can preview it and send it along. At that point I just plug the XHTML straight into <cfmail> tags and sent it along to the volunteer department who then print and hand-deliver it to the patient.

There were two problems though:

1. The email recipient had to use Outlook to view the email (requirement, not my choice)
2. Outlook places a header on the top (Email info: to, from, subject, etc).

I spent a couple hours trying to figure out how to remove the header information. Then it came to me; Why not try the new <cfdocument> tag with CF7 and save it as a PDF? In minutes I was able to solve the problem and possible future problems (like, what if they change email client in the future).

Now I'm sending the PDF as an attachment and using 128-bit encryption on the file as well (That should help calm the HIPAA people. You know who you are! :).

This also convinced the client to upgrade to CF7 (should be devlivered in a few days). Since I've been developing in CF7 anyway I already know the website will function once they upgrade.