We had a surprisingly good turnout for the CFUG meeting last night! I was fearing the worst due to some last minute location scrambles. but as usual the community came through and put on a strong showing for our guest speaker Adam Lehman from Adobe.

Adam's talk on building CF-powered Flex apps was very well received. Many of the folks in the room hadn't touched Flex at all. For them. this was a great intro. For the rest of us. it was a worthwhile refresher - and still educational!

While we sorta knew that using Flash Remoting for data retrieval was probably faster (and empirically proven as well). until last night I hadn't seen an outright statement from Adobe to "Use Flash Remoting." It's faster. easier. more efficient...all those good things. Good news: that's what we've been using all along! Might as well stick with what works.

Adam was good about showing us all of the CF Extensions for Flex Builder too. I had completely forgotten to install them into FB. but that oversight will be addressed later today. The query browser. service browser. and a few other tools that should be very familiar to the "old school" devs who used to live and die by CF Studio are in there. Still. it's a bit of a mindbender for CF folks to get used to the "project" orientation of Flex Builder (Eclipse). but trust me...once you get used to it. it's quite simple to work with. We've structured our local dev environment to work seamlessly with this concept and it's made our subversion repositories simple to work with as well.

I liked the app generator tool. but I doubt I'd use it for anything but the most simple sites. It's a great way to learn a lot though!

We also got a little taste of what it takes to create a custom item renderer. It struck me as being extremely similar to a custom tag in both concept and execution. but Adam stayed well clear of calling it so.

All in all. it feels odd to be a newbie all over again. But just like back in 99 when I was learning CF. it's exhilarating to get something working and then build on top of that knowledge.

Good stuff...well presented. Adam's a very approachable speaker and that makes for a very comfortable presentation environment. Thanks. Adam! I look forward to your return with Tim Buntel in May on the Scorpio tour!