Adam posted the January 2010 meeting announcement to the CFUG website today -- I'll be doing a presentation on the "powerful simplicity" that is CFSpreadsheet (and associated functions) on the 14th at Penn.

I'm especially excited about this topic because of the frequency with which I generally have to work with(against) Excel. Pretty much every project of ours uses Excel as a report output format and we've tried everything from building tabular data in HTML and "faking it" to saving Excel files in XML format and rebuilding on the server side. Both of these options had limitations (the first being stylistic, the second being fragility), so now that ColdFusion has a simple way to build them I'm a happy camper. I didn't really want to get in to messing with POI.

Long story short: we will always have to work with spreadsheets because that's what "business users" understand (read: as flat as possible). ColdFusion 9 has built-in features that make reading and creating spreadsheets much easier than it's ever been. I'm excited about this and think you should come out to the next meeting on January 14, 2010 to learn more!

Or. why it's worth getting out of your geek shell and attending something totally different.

I've been at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Account Planning conference in Miami for the last couple days. Until now. I had only ever attended tech conferences - CFun. CFUnited. DEVCON/MAX. WebManiacs. etc. While I am technically here to support a client. I have been poking around and listening in on various conversations and learning a lot about a field that we can't help but to come in to contact with every single day. Serendipitous learning - the best kind!

For example. there was one workshop yesterday on learning from information architects. The IA field has absorbed ideas from many others and applied them quite successfully to the new problems created by technology. Now these attendees (account planners) are trying to siphon off the same concept and apply it to their field. Very cool! What does that do for advertising and what does it mean for the future of quantitative benchmarking for the effectiveness of advertising? Huge question. generates a ton more -- just great food for thought.

Also surprising (to me. anyway) was the use of Twitter [conference feed] and Flickr [pics]. I got lots of questions about what Twitter is and (more urgently) why anyone would ever want to use it both socially and professionally. Fortunately enough there were some recent tweets that I received that were great examples of both. It's fun. simple to use and (as i'm sure you've noticed) really cuts down on full-fledged blog activity. The less-relevant or elaborate thoughts now go to Twitter. leaving the soapbox effort for the blog world. Some folks had a hard time understanding that Twitter is fun. not nearly as important as oxygen. and we're all still figuring out just how it can be used most effectively. I guess the over-hyped talk about blogs made them somewhat skeptical about 1:many tech-initiated conversation. I have no idea how they'll use this to their advantage. but as long as we still have to approve follwers we'll be just fine!

So what have I really learned? The people I'm surrounded by down here are all frantically competing for my attention - and each others - in an increasingly saturated environment and want to use not only technology but the seriously old-school fields of psychology. mathematics and language to get it. Look at this picture for an example of where their heads are. One-many and many-many communication paths are still being explored with new edges and boundaries becoming the "next great thing." As a technologist. I'm using Twitter as a yardstick for who's really paying attention - if they know what it is. they're doing ok - even if they have zero intention of using it at all. You've got to look at this slide to see that the techies have created a monster that they're aware of and plan on using against us sooner rather than later. Their event horizon is 2010 - only a short 18 months away!

Anyway. this has been tremendously educational and has inspired me to find other conferences that are in some way driven by (but not ruled by) technology. Think about it: these people are technology and tech services consumers (aka potential customers). Where will you find more business. in a room full of people who do what you do or a room full of people who use the services you can provide while speaking their language?

I thought you'd say that. Happy surfing.

Here's the slide deck from the ColdFusion Security presentation I gave at the Philly CFUG meeting on November 13.

We had a fairly advanced group turn out for our meeting - I was afraid that they wouldn't get anything out of it. Fortunately enough all of them learned at least one thing!

Freely reusable however you wish. but a shout out would be appreciated!

• PPTX
• PDF

I would also like to tip my hat to Terry Ryan for not only arranging a room for our meeting but also presenting on Squidhead. It's amazing how much stuff his tool can do!

Just a couple quick notes on the CFUG meeting last night.

1) Terry's presentation on code reviews was excellent - most of the folks who go through the process at Wharton were in attendance. so we know he wasn't making stuff up :-) Great pointers throughout his talk. which he'll be posting on his blog soon. Many thanks to Terry for volunteering to present!

Random thought: What if we were to do a mock code review at a CFUG meeting? Would that be a valuable use of your time? Would you attend such an event?

2) My talk on the Flex toolkit for Salesforce.com was well received and is posted along with all of the sample apps at http://www.countermarch.com/salesforce. If you run into a wall or have a question. please don't hesitate to contact me. Contact info in the PPT. or just leave a comment on my blog. Happy to help!

Just an FYI...two great presentations will be given at the PhillyCFUG meeting this afternoon.

Terry Ryan will speak about code reviews - how to structure and execute them to maximize success and minimize bruised egos ;-)

I'll also be giving my talk on the Flex toolkit for Salesforce.com. Sure. it's not exactly a CF topic but I couldn't get official Scorpio presentations ready in less than a week - we do actually work around here!

Hope to see you there!

We fed the Philadelphia ColdFusion User Group last night at the meeting covering the next major version of ColdFusion. What a great meeting it was - the content was enough to fill two meetings. and that wasn't even all of it!

I highly recommend you read the recap on the CFUG site. Phil Duba's recap and plan on attending an upcoming meeting to keep expanding your knowledge of the CF universe. I'm really excited about what I saw and can't wait to get it installed and running in production!

Just a reminder...

The Philadelphia CFUG will be hosting Adam Lehman and Tim Buntel to talk about ColdFusion "Scorpio" on the 15th of May. Additional information is here and you should definitely. definitely show up!

I launched the 4th iteration of the PhillyCFUG website today. BlogCFC has reached the point where it's fully capable of supporting our user group's communications. so I figured "what the hey" and pushed it out.

If you've got time. or an interest in all things CF in the Philadelphia area. swing by and check it out. And maybe just maybe subscribe to the RSS feed.

Available for your viewing pleasure at http://www.phillycfug.org/

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!

Don't miss it! Adam Lehman (Adobe) will be visiting us to talk about building ColdFusion powered Flex apps...a "don't miss" preso that will jumpstart your Flex development!

Visit the Philly CFUG site to register so I order the right amount of pizza!