Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

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?...

Do you need someone to present at your CFUG? Well, I have been doing a lot of presentations lately, which can be seen over in my Presentations page, which means I have a lot of content I can present on. If you have a specific topic (including CFEclipse of course!) Why not email me with your proposal and I shall see what I can do. I am based in London, England so unless there is a nice budget to fly me out, I can also do remote presentations using Adobe Connect. I am available in the evenings mostly so let me know if you ever need an extra presenter at your CFUG or company.

At CFUnited 2007, I did a couple of presentations showing CFEclipse, which at the end of the presentation I mentioned was actually running on Eclipse 3.3. Not bad going considering that Eclipse 3.3 was released on the day of my first presentation huh? The issue now is getting everything REALLY working, I did a number of smoke tests and even did a whole presentation running Eclipse 3.3 but there are some things I want to tidy and other changes I want to make before I do a release (just doing a compatibility release seems a waste of time at the moment, considering the effort involved!) So, what and when should you expect? Well, I am going to be checking in stuff this week, I only do checkins against an issue so I have to create the right ones (if they are not there). You should see more activity over at the CFEclipse Trac website. Also, if you are planning on adding a ticket to Trac, make sure there isnt one there already, I have spotted a few been adding about Eclipse 3.3 already, there is no need to add more! I want to send out a big thank you to Dean Harmon as he did all the Eclipse 3.3 compatibility including the backwards compatibility stuff. Now, stop saying that Adobe does nothing to contribute!!! So, there it is, a semi-official announcement... saying not much... but at least now you know.

I want to thank Ray Camden, Charlie Arehart and all the people at TeraTech that let me do a preview presentation before CFUnited. You can check out the recording of the presentation over at http://experts.acrobat.com/p70538852/

With CFUnited looming (only a week to go!), the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group have asked me to do a quick (20 mins) preview presentation on my forthcoming CFEclipse session for CFUnited. The description is as follows:

In this 20-30 minute session, Mark Drew will preview his one- hour class, CFEClipse Plus!, presenting how to use some advanced features in CFEclipse, with an in-depth look at modifying the libraries to add your own tags, using ant as part of your development process and demonstrations of the new features in CFEclipse. This presentation is geared towards current users of CFEclipse.

So come one, come all, especially if you cant make it to CFUnited! When: Thursday, June 21, 12:30pm EDT (GMT-4) (What time is that for you? See http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=12&min=30&sec=0&p1=25) Where:http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup/

Oh yes J.R. I shall be donning my best shoulder pads tonight and trying not to get shot (or was it a dream sequence?) and will be presenting for the Dallas/Fort Worth CFUG tonight. It will be a late one for me (about 1am BST) but will be worth it. I shall be going over what CFEclipse is, installation and things you can get done with it as well as some of the new features. If you care to join, you can hook up via Adobe Connect and join the fun! Hopefully the connection will be better and that Dave manages to record it!

How is that for a mouthful of a title? I shall be speaking tonight at 7pm GMT (2pm EST) with Nick Tong from cfframeworks.com about the newly released CF Frameworks Explorer for CFEclipse. Its one of these new fangled Adobe Connect rooms, you can join in by going here: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/frameworksexplorer/ (hopefully it will be recorded so if you cant make it tonight, you can watch it in your own time)

[Read more →]

I am doing a presentation for the Auckland (that's New Zealand!) CFUG on Thursday this week about CFEclipse. If you are interested in getting started using the CFEclipse plugin for Eclipse, this is the presentation for you! Unfortunately I wont be there in person (maybe next time guys!) but it will be in one of these new fangled Adobe Connect rooms, which means you can join if you head to : http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/cfeclipse/ The time for the meeting is 6am GMT, 6pm NZ time, 1am EST, 10pm PST and a whole lot of other times around the world (go on, figure it out!) For those safely tucked up in bed at that time, I am pretty sure they will be recording the presentation so you don't have to be up at some ungodly hour!

So, some news in sequence, I have booked my hotel for cfObjective as well as the flight! So a big thank you to all that have donated, the money has been well spent on the conference "tour" of the summer. Project:U is coming along, those on the prerelease should expect a drop sometime later this week. I am also strangely enough, getting ready the presentation for CFUnited (they have to be in pretty sharpish if I am to go there!) which is also timely as I shall be presenting for the Auckland CFUG this Thursday (at 6:00 am, how is that for dedication to the cause?), I shall post the Connect room URL when I know it. On other, related, presentation news, I just got my little "Monolith" MacBook that will be coming along with me on tour. I am installing it with BootCamp (partitions can be run from Parallels, I also wanted to give it a test before I add too much stuff to this machine) and Parallels as well as ColdFusion, iWork and CFEclipse. All ready to present I hope! At the same time I got the MacBook delivered, I got my PSP returned to me! Well, kinda, the PSP was replaced since it wasn't loading UMDs anymore which defeats the point of having a PSP! But alas it is back and I shall be checking it out tonight. Fun Fun Fun! Plenty of news, more to come this week!