Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

After the summer hiatus which is essentially the conference season, the UKCFUG is back! And its better than ever!
We have got a new site up, in blog format so you can easily subscribe to news of meetings and other events. There is also an awesome meeting planned for the 6th of November.

We are testing the waters with a new format, we have a new segment at each meeting called "CF Docs" (like CF Doctors, gettit?) in which you can ask the panel of myself, Niklas Richardson, Neil Middleton and Big Mad Kev any CF based questions (and some Flex ones!). 

Hopefully if no technical issues happen we shall be recording the segment and turn it into a podcast, something like a "Gardener's Question Time" for CF. 

So whether you are planning on attending or will catch up via the podcast, send us your questions via email and we shall read them out. The email for the questions is or leave a comment here or on the UK CFUG website. 

Neil will also be giving us a preview of his Adobe MAX Conference talk "Structuring your development team and getting the work done" which should be awesome! 

So whether you can make it on the 6th, or just want some answers to your questions, get registered on the UKCFUG website! 

It's going to be a great season!

Tomorrow (Wednesday 31st October), we will be having a great little get together at the UK ColdFusion User Group. Kev and I will be going over what we learned and saw at this years Adobe MAX Europe conference in Barcelona. Spaces are really limited and its at our new venue in Picadilly Circus (actually, its my office!) Register today and there will be some great bits and pieces to win!

If you missed my CFEclipse presentation at Adobe MAX Barcelona, João Fernandes has been kind enough to post up a video of my whole presentation! You can check it out here: http://www.onflexwithcf.org/index.cfm/2007/10/20/Using-Eclipse-for-ColdFusion-Development--Videos I had some problems getting the debugger working, and I realised later that it was simply that I named my project wrong and should have set up the mappings. Hope you enjoy it!

Its 6:50 am before the first day of Adobe Max and I am sitting in my hotel room, without internet connection (they say that it will be fixed in the hotel today, pah!) and just getting ready to head to the Barcelona Inernational Conference Center. If I manage to get a good internet connection over at the conference center, I shall try to be Twittering my progress as much as I can. You can follow my progress on my twitter page

It has been a while since I blogged, basically I have been so busy I forget to breathe sometimes. Anyway, the good news is that I am heading to Adobe MAX Europe in Barcelona on Sunday! I think this is going to be an awesome conference, one that I am very much looking forward to, especially since I am a MAX virgin! Apart from trying to attend as many presentations as possible on Flex and AJAX, I shall (surprise! surprise!) also be a speaker! My presentation is on using Eclipse for ColdFusion development, which is a slightly different take on my usual presentation (ok, ok, you caught me, I will be mentioning CFEclipse) as it will cover a lot more ground that I usually do! One of the important decisions that I have left now is whether I shall be doing the presentation in English or in Spanish, not sure what the rule is here? When in Rome?...

Hello, yes, I am back, from outer space, well, not exactly. I have taken a month or so away from development of CFEclipse and my other projects (including this blog!) which has been great. Of course one of the reasons for this has been that I have been very busy at work, and that kind of takes it out of you. This is normal for me, but the work has been rather oppressive rather than creative so my brain needed a bit of space. Some news: I shall be speaking at Adobe MAX in Barcelona in October! I am very excited about this as I shall be demonstrating not only CFEclipse but the ColdFusion Extensions for CF8 (something I love using by the way) as well as hopefully the debugging capabilities that you now have with CF8. With regards to CFEclipse, I am currently taking a bit of a hard look at features and fixes that will make it into the next version. I am working on a complete re-design of the interface, basically following the rule of making actions available (no more hidden menus etc) so that access stuff easier. Apart from that, I am looking at re-compiling and coding the plugin so its compatible with Java 1.4.x since, even though I much prefer Java 5, it seems that is the most common error that people are getting (by looking at the Trac bugs!) On a final side-note: I have started a course each week in Film Directing! I did my first class last night and its absolutely awesome! We read a number of screenplays (Thelma and Louise and Brazil being the main ones) and dissected them to get a feel for the responsibility of a Director with regards to examining and expanding on the ideas within a script. Don't worry tho, Hollywood is still safe (after all, I only have done one class so far!) Well, that is it for the moment, I hear there has been lots of exciting news in the community whilst I have been away (I havent been reading blogs or news) but I just like to state that I took this vacation away from development without consulting the ColdFusion Weekly guys, it seems they have started up again after the summer!

Did you know you can suggest topics for this years Adobe Max? I don't know about you, but I think the people's favourite free IDE for ColdFusion should be there, don't you think? Not saying anything but *hint* *hint*, Barcelona isn't that far from London, and I think I might know someone that knows a bit about CFEclipse that could go and talk. Up to you really, but you could go and suggest a topic. Now, what comes to mind eh? Did I also mention, that at each conference, I shall be unveiling a MAJOR new feature of the product? I am sure I did. So the first feature, called Project:U will be...

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I know this must be late, but I am just getting back into the swing of things after my holiday in San Francisco (great city! photos coming soon!) but I see that they have finally put up info on the MAX conference in Las Vegas over at the Adobe site. After CFUnited and the buzz I got from going to such a gathering I would love to go to MAX, but alas, it is out of my reach, a bit of maths tells me that: Ticket for Max: $1,095 Travel : $2,565.78 Hotel : $2,145.00 So, we are talking at a base-line $5805.78 (or 3,162.00 GBP) for me to go to MAX. As much as I would love to, and apart from any "expenses" that I might incur (I hear JD might be a bit expensive in Vegas), it looks like for me its a no-no. Ho hum. Its crap in London at the end of October but I am sure I can manage it.