I just left the first technical session of the morning. Ray Camden presented on the CF7 Application Framework, focusing on the new Application.cfc (replaces the application.cfm in CF7).

Towards the end Ray demoed a profiling tool he built (partly last night) that replaces the standard debugging selection in the CF Admin. Once replaced, future page hits save page statistics to some form of log. Nothing (including debug info) is sent to the browser. When you go into the CF Admin however there is a new link at the bottom titled Profiler Click and you see a flashform tabbed interface with CFC, CFM and some other tab. The tabs show a grid with per page statistics, i.e. whatever.cfc ran 47 times, average duration of the pages was x seconds. Clicking on an individual file will display a small graph at the bottom of the page. This is not intended (nor is any debugging) for a live application, however, while debugging your application in Dev you can turn off normal errors and capture runtime performance information on a per CFC/CFM basis. Sure, the projector was blurry and this was an early beta attempt, but very impressive. It should be available on Ray's blog sometime, hopefully soon...Ray doesn't tend to charge for features like this, but asks you buy him something from his wish list (Amazon, etc.)

Ray discussed the application.cfm at length and mentioned that the new .cfc version gets priority over the .cfm, only one will run, usually the .cfc. Check out a starter file for the application.cfc as a way to get your bearing.

(big picture attached as download)

I'm in an Object Oriented Actionscript session now and it is clear my Flash skills are nonexistent...way over my head. In case I forget to mention this in other blog entries (sorry, I am running behind), it is quite clear that MM sees Flash as the future of all things godly and Web based. Flex has been pushed continuously this week. I feel sorry for standard Flash designers who have artistic skills but minimal coding skill, Flex and Actionscript 3 will make their lives harder (i.e. finding jobs that don't require coding).

Next up, Advanced CF Printing & Reporting...

Dean Harmon, the brain behind the curtain of the report builder presented for an hour on tricks in the report builder and printing in CF.

It was a great presentation!

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PARTY!

Three thousand or so of us stood in a long line outside the conference center to board buses for the brief trip to Disney's California Adventure. Sadly, we could have walked the 1 mile in less than the 30+ minutes in line (plus the around the block drive). At least there were plenty of fellow coders to talk to. The standard "so what do you do" line when you meet people isn't quite so useful in a situation where 90% use one of 3 products (DW, FL, CF).

We arrived at the amusement park and less than eager to be there staff pointed our way through part of the park (it must take more than 3 thousand to get the whole place) to the Midway area. I think they call it the Pier. There were tables everywhere with a good size meal (clam chowder in bread bowls, pasta, salad, chicken of some kind, bbq beef) and dessert (mickey mouse shaped rice crispy treats with chocolate, creme brule, tarts, brownies, etc.). Scattered slightly farther appart were large trailers with beer taps (4-5 varieties), tables with win and soft drinks. My bus load was not the first to arrive and it was quite clear that my peers were practicing their drinking skills, recently honed at other open bar events. It was humorous to see a manager (in a suit with Disney pin) watching his cell phone intently at 11pm and when it changed to 11 he quickly shut down the beer taps. MM calls the shots and the beer was shut down within seconds at the tap I was near.

There was 1 large roller coaster, the air launched ride and a number of smaller rides available. I didn't do them all, some are not stomach friendly. People appeared to be equally spread between the rides, midway games, dancing and hanging out. I did not hear any complaints the whole evening.

Unfortunately, the pictures of Simon Horwith drunk and looking stupid didn't turn out. Here is something to tide you over until you find another blog with incriminating pictures.

There were quite a few midway games open for play, we didn't have to pay. I waited in line briefly for the first one, a ball throw into wicker baskets. Prize, a stuffed dragon/animal. 5 sets of throws later and I knew why I was an engineer/programmer and not a ball player. I tried to bribe the Disney employee and got a cold shoulder. Another game panned out (stuffed Nemo fish) but only after a 2nd failed bribe attempt. Apparently, even with no cameras visible and no charge to play the game the Disney staff still values their job and/or respect. I went back to the dragon game, intent on winning a dragon (some people had a bag of stuffed items they had won) and met a woman who is a c++ coder on the Captivate team (remember, the RoboDemo application that Macromedia bought, great app by the way!). She suggested that I put a back spin on the ball and target the rim. I listened, she had 3 dragons! Sure enough, she was right, second ball and I was good to go!

Ryan on the left! The one who APPEARS to be balding...its the flash, really...oh wait, I had the flash off...never mind! This was a pretty good size metal roller coaster with 1 loop. It was not nearly as rough on the body as most coasters I have been on.

Overall the evening was a lot of fun and my only complaint was that I would have liked to have had another hour to try out the other rides.

Thank you Macromedia for a great time!

The sneak peak on day 2 was less management focused and more product centric. The theme revolved around the 'crocodile hunter' TV show. Each presenter wore an outfit similar to the show and attempted (sometimes inconsistently) to use an Australian accent

Silka (from MM) presented on Captivate. She showed a number of cool new features they are working on including a simulation based tool with branching decision capability for training purposes.

Matt & Todd presented an example of integration between Flex and Mercury Quick TestPro They recorded a series of mouse/keyboard selections in flex as a sort of motion script. They replayed it through Mercury and it ran fine. They then slightly altered the data the application was using and when the script was ru again an error was generated. Nice feature that would be helpful with regression testing and loading possibly

James, a rep from ESRI, one of the sponsors showed a very cool mapping application in Flex

Damon Cooper showed new features they are working on for ColdFusion including RDS support in Eclipse, a visual query builder in Eclipse as well as RTMP gateway between CF & Flash Media Server 2...

We were shown how one can build Ajax applications in Dreamweaver 8

Contribute will have a way for you to view an IE page in the browser, click a single browser based button to edit the page, Contribute will open it code up, allow you to edit, publish and refresh the page immediatly.

Monday, Oct 17 (pm) - Ryan

CFCs as Objects with Jeff Peters

Advanced CF7 Features Exposed

Using CSS Box Model

Community Event, user group managers

Seefusion.com?

I walked into the CSS Hands On session about 30 minutes late after attending most of the Advanced CF class. There were 4-5 rows of 2 computers per side. Each computer had 2 people tapping away at a keyboard and large LCD screen. The instructor, from MM I believe was running through the process of creating a CSS based

Walking out of a presentation I took note of this guy, sadly, I couldn't seem to get a good photo of him. Is it just me, or does he remind you of the quirky mad scientist in Independence Day.

I'm hoping to get a better view/picture of the funky looking terror ride building at California Adventure (a Disney park)

Ed Sullivan, the user group coordinator/relations at MM played baseball pitcher with t-shirts to promote the user groups.

For an hour plus during the social, user group managers walked around in a baseball type jersy handing out raffle tickets. In theory, people were to approach us, inquire about user groups or our shirts and after a brief overview receive a ticket. We used the opportunity to shmooze and promote our user groups (and the program as a whole). Most people don't realize that the user groups give customers/users a great, inexpensive way of networking with fellow designers and coders while enhancing their skills and receiving tech support. User Groups are spread out around the country and in many other countries around the world. For those of you interested in joining or starting one, check out the website and give Ed a ring or send an email to your local user group manager.

This is one of the lucky 2 winners of a full boxed copy of Studio 8! ($999 US!)

I had dinner with Jared from Kentucky, Mike from Connecticut and Troy from Minneapolis. We had a nice long CF discussion over dinner at the Outback Steakhouse. Towards the end of our 15 minute late evening walk back to the hotels we talked about an application, SeeFusion? That has been mentioned once or twice so far. It helps to diagnose CF server (or is it Java specific) crashes and performance problems. Troy had heard about it and Daryl Bantarri who used to be active in the KC CFUG before he moved back to Minneapolis and left Allaire Consulting is a frequent advocate of it. I will definitely have to check the app out when I am online.

Monday, October 17 (am) - Ryan (more coming Monday late night)

Breakfast was simple pastries and bagels. The orange juice cups were clear dixie type cups, max capacity of 2.5 or 3 ounces...way too small, even the wait staff agreed.

Post breakfast there were 2 - 60 minute sessions. I have been happy to see drinks available most of the time and lunch was better than I expected. No skimping on the chicken dish or very chocolaty cake (nice presentation too).

Southern California has a lot of flowers, or at least the tourist packed areas near Disneyland has them everywhere.

(see the conference center behind the flowers)

Keynote - day 1

The first day's keynote was close to 2 hours long. Usergroup managers were given prime seating...only surpassed by what appeared to be special invitees (bankers, press, corporate bigwigs), they sat in the center in the first few rows, we were off to the side.

The chairs were setup for the presentation to hold 3,000 people...we were roughly at capacity. Three large screens in front with the stage, 2 massive screens 1/2 way back for those in the nose bleed section.

Take a look at Simon's badge. Unlike most of us managers who have 2 ribbons (User Group Manager & Certified Professional), Simon has 10 or 11 (speaker, press, etc.) quite impressive!

Macromedia CEO Elop mentioned ColdFusion in his presentation. The mention was brief at best and I assume it will come up again in the 2nd day's keynote.

A quick dig at Microsoft's attempts to build a good interface and user tools, still trying.... ...TRY AGAIN!...

Adobe CEO Chizan also mentioned ColdFusion I think

Another speaker talked about new architectures, notice CF at the bottom next to Java and .Net...see, they haven't forgotten about us!

Sunday, Oct 16 (late night) - Ryan

The user group managers in attendance were treated to dinner, drinks and fun at Dave & Busters. We loaded onto 2 buses for the short drive.

Here I am playing the hockey type game with sand and a heavy metal puck.

Stephanie Sullivan showing off her pool table skils.

Justin (Phonenix ?) and Lisa Wilson

Post party, on the early bus, Simon Horwith and Ed sitting down for a quick break before the ride back. Notice that slightly blurry look on Simon's face? I'm not entirely sure this was caused by me moving my camera. Simon is the editor for the ColdFusion Developer's Journal and quite skilled in CF. Ed Sullivan, our user group support staff at Macromedia is a great guy. We have 1-2 others who are helping but I haven't met them yet.

Simon posing with the door bouncer

This is above the entrance to the Mariot Hotel. I guess the locals are thrilled, or at least full of pride.

Sunday, Oct 16 (pm) - Ryan

Towards the end of the Community College (for user group managers and possibly team mm people) we had a long breakout session with key staffers at MM. We separated into 5 or 6 groups based on product lines. I moved into the adjoining room to have a chat with Damon Cooper and Mike Niemer. About 20 of us pulled up chairs and chatted, gave feedback and asked questions about CF.

Mike stressed how helpful it is if we vote on bugs (for those in official betas) so that they knew which bugs were important to the user base. Michael Smith (of Teratech, CFUnited and the Maryland CFUG) suggested we also go to www.cfbughunt.org to vote on bugs. Mike wants us also to make suggestions for features and enhancement requests via the official Wish Lists.

A brief discussion on Verity and a request for a Spider feature was made.

Mike attempted to politely refer to accumulated code as a 'repository',

and Damon chimed in 'cesspool!'. MM has gigabytes of code they use for regression testing, counting frequency of tag usage over time, etc. They appreciate more code if you have applications available. The cesspool includes apps from 100+ customers, most of which are huge.

Debugging was chatted about and a reference to seefusion.com was made.

We talked about the documentation on the MM site, database drivers, etc.

The content was ad-hoc in nature and we enjoyed the group discussion. More time would have been nice, but there should be ample opportunity to cover this in the next few days.

Notice the nice black/orange/gray back packs at our feets? All Max attendees received a backpack with handouts, a folder and pen inside. The user group managers also received a very nice, high end duffel bag! It is a good thing I brought a medium size suitcase and hanging bag, enough space for the extras. (I'm staying in LA an additional week)

It is definately nice getting direct face time in a small group with engineering staff at Macromedia. I hope this contact continues once the borg...er...Adobe completes the acquisition.

Partial view of the conference center. The Hilton & Mariot hotels are next door and the lessor hotels are down the street. Mine, a Days Inn is just down the street and around the corner, 7 minute walk. I hope it stops raining by 7:30 or so when the sessions end! If not, I might have to hang around here and by someone a beer and ask questions about pet projects and coding problems.

I had a choice. Either I could be at MAX this year and run a kicking community suite or I can fulfil my religious obligations . Obviously, the holidays won. On the other hand I still want to make sure that people are taken care of so I set up Blog of Fusion to allow everyone and anyone to blog about MAX, ColdFusion or any other topic of interest to the ColdFusion community.

The base code was Raymond's BlogCFC package but I've had to alter it some to begin with and a lot more as feature requests from authors come in (yes, all changes will be sent to Raymond).

I'll speak more on the alterations and other things as soon as I get an hour or 3 of sleep. For those at MAX, Enjoy and let me know what I'm missing. :)

Sunday (pm), Oct 16 - Ryan

Take a look at the cool store I found on my way to lunch

Ed Sullivan briefly opened up the Community College (1/2 day special program with meeting and socialization for user group managers and possibly Team MM members).

Our first presenter is Christian Cantrell who is giving us a presentation on Flex 2 and the new frameworks. The presentation is a little marketing heavy (which I suspect most presentations from MM staff will be) with an introduction to the history and growth of Flash IDE and Flashplayer.

The new virtual machine in FP8.5 will be faster and will include the old runtime for AS2 for backwards compatibility. It will also support AJAX. We are watching Christian build a sample Flex 2 app. He showed in 20 lines and a few tags a combo box with detail text beneath, click/scroll through items in the combo box and data beneath it instantly. No AS, just mxml.

Per Mike Chambers, to load flex framework 2 apps you will need FP 8.5 to run. You will run into problems if you have some AS2 components that run in the AS2 runtime with flex2 apps in AS3 runtime. Current builds (available tomorrow) won't let you have an app running between the 2. You could however use local connections to communicate between them. This is something they are looking into tweaking, no decision has been set.

Blaze is the codename for the next full version of the Flash Authoring environment, not an update to Flash 8. Expect a public alpha in the spring.

There will be a new area called Macromedia Labs that will have early betas of emerging products, toolkits, etc. FUD is the name of the game. Through simple registration there will be tutorials, release notes, documentation, forums, Wikis, public source control, etc. Sounds like MSDN to me. Tomorrow morning this should be availabe at macromedia , though it sounds like the Wiki may not be ready. We are looking at a staging site with pieces of it in place though changing on the fly every time Christian pulls it up.

Mike Perry, manager of mobile Flash 'stuff' (hey, I don't remember!) is talking to us about mobile support with Flash on Nokia and other phones and wireless devices/handsets. The Flash Lite 2.0 upgrade with authoring capability and FP7 support should be available in January. We are watching some demos of Flash Lite 2 and the quality of animation on the handsets is impressive. The animations are fairly smooth with decent color. There is a Samsung phone being sold in South Korea is smaller than the Nokia and expands. The wallpaper with moving shore line (of an ocean) is animated and looks much more lifelike than the icon based US models.

-Ryan

Sat, Oct 15 - Ryan

Jared (Rypka-Hauer) led a group discussion on cleanliness is next to godliness in code writing, i.e. tidy code.

Michael Smith discussed application security, how to prevent hacking and write better applications. The attendees discussed different ways to protect their applications and write better applications. Michael challenged us to spend 10 minutes writing down ways we can tweak our apps. I have a number of them that I need to focus on, including writing test cases.

Simon Horwith is discussing with us how our applications should be more object like. Treat all actions/events as nouns and objects. Typically any event that has more than one method should be treated as an object. A shopping cart would have a 'check out' object. Personify the object, 'I do this, I do that', put yourself in the place of the object, what properties do I have. Put things in the most specific object, 'for example, if you want to know how many things are in the cart, the user wants to know. The cart is more detailed than the user in what is in the cart and should be used to determine how many items are in it.

Simon estimates that he spends 30% of his project time on preparing, thinking and planning the application model. After completing it he will spend significant amounts of the time building the objects.

Streamlined Object Model ? - a book that Simon praises. Model the objects, build the objects, then do the use cases. Jared & Simon both like this idea because it causes you to think of use cases that you may not otherwise think of, however, Simon has not actively tried this yet.

"I am the object that holds product purchasing. I am aware of (the items that are inside me, the user I belong to), I can do (I can take items out of myself)." Write a brief description on a piece of paper for each object.

Here, we examine some of the note cards created

Michael was caught affixing his cool CF tatoos onto his arm.

Notice the nice glasses in the picture? Attendees received a Teratech logoed glass with a large 'cf underground' rune and the following tag:

<CF_BEER

FROM = "(imported/domestic)"

Color = "(light/dark)"

FERMENT = "(lager/ale/bock)"

FLAVOR = "(porter/stout)"

AUTOREFILL = "(on/off)">

Jared suggested two Windows based UML tools, Together (www.borland.com/us/products/together/index.html) by Borland

and Poseidon (www.gentleware.com).

Simon added in his recommendation for UML Sculptor (free) (www.sourceforge.net/projects/umlsculptor) (link fixed, thanks!)

We finished up CF_Underground with a Q&A session. A number of us headed downstairs for a drink and to go our separate ways for dinner. I had Indian with Michael (Teratech.com) and another user group manager.

-Ryan