CFDevCon over (for this time)

Namedropping, report and rant by Trond Ulseth (the guy in the black CF caps).

<namedropping>
Disclaimer: First I'd like to say that I'm not very good at remembering names. So if I chatted with you, and you are not mentioned here, I'm sorry about that (also the writing on the name tags was to small to read unless I would have been more intimate than you'd apprechiate). It was an amazing group of cool people, and the ones I remember names of are mainly the ones I knew the names of from before.

I managed to get myself from Crouch End and down to the Croydon area on time, and was approaching Fairfield Halls, when I saw a familiar looking face, looking about as confused as I felt (there were no signs or posters telling with CFDevCon announced). He disapeared into the building before I got all the way there, and I followed in as I got there. Inside that man had already met a couple of other people and after I joined them the conclusion was made that if we all had come there, we must indeed be at the right place. We then introduced our selves, and my suspicion was confirmed. The first fellow CF developer I saw was indeed Ben Forta (what had confused me slightly was that he looked younger than I had imagined).

One of the other guys there, who I chatted pretty much with during the day, and evening (more about that later), was Tom Chiverton. It's a bit late telling you now, but Tom was live-blogging from the event the whole day - from his mobile phone. How cool is that?

We were in the right location, and after a little while registration started. It crowded up a bit around the registration table, and I chatted with several people including Charle Arehart. Being early in the morning I felt a bit "out of synch" and needed some stimuli to get me on the right track. I was not the only one, so Kevin Roche and I walked down to a nearby Starbucks before the event started.
</namedropping>

<report>
Disclaimer: I took notes on my mobile phone, and can hardly recognice my own handwriting. Also it was pretty much information for my poor brain to digest. So if I got/remember something wrong, please correct me in the comments.

The program started with Russ Michaels giving a short opening speach, before giving the word to Ben Forta who introduced some of the new stuff we're going to see in ColdFusion 8 aka Scorpio. But first Ben gave us an introduction to pdf's and pdf forms. I've never paid much attention to pdfs'. It's just a format I've used to send documents when I want to be sure look the same for the one receiving it. If you are like me, think again! The stuff Ben showed was awesome, and this is going to be tightly intergrated with CF8. Cool! Some of the other stuff Ben showed was the (long sought after) native image manipulation, automatic Breeze (which they now want us to call Adobe Presentation Platform or something stupid like that) presentation generation (awesome), CF server monitoring in the CF admin interface, having multiple users with different privileges for the admin interface, and some of the Flex intergration stuff. Ben had to take of right after his presentation, so that was the last we saw of him.

Next was Steve Allison from Adobe giving a "Top 10 reasons to use Flex" presentation. Not to exciting, we're all converted from before right? More exciting was some of the functionality he presented on what we can expect in Flex 3.

Then it was Nick Tong giving a presentation on "Programing with API's". He presented a cool bunch of examples of publicaly available API's and the mash-ups that these make possible (I think he might have been mentioning Yahoo once or twice). He also mentioned reasons why you should consider making publicaly or internaly available API's.

Alex Skinner from Pixl8 gave an overview over their PresideCMS, how they had made this a cross platform application, much thanks to BlueDragon.net. He also told how they used xml for the tree structured navigation systems and relational databases for the other data. He also touched upon integration with Microsoft Sharepoint. It was pretty interesting, but had a little bit of "sales pitch" feel to it (for me personaly at least - others might not think this).

Now it was lunchtime. I was pretty happy to be able to get up, as the chairs in the conference hall was not very compatible with my butt. The food was pretty good, and I got to chat with more people, including trying to convince Marcel from awanda that FarCry is well worth looking into.

After lunch it was Kevin Roches turn to talk about "what's new in FuseBox5 and Reactor". Now I've never used FuseBox (and probably never will), so most of the talk about lexicons and custom lexicons etc. made little sence to me, but I'm sure that for those using FB this was an interesting presentation.

Now it was time for Mark Drew's presentation on CFEclipse. In my humble opinion the best presentation of the day. I think the topic is very interesting and the stuff Mark showed made it even more so, but most importantly was Mark's way of presenting. He managed the balance between being informative, funny and entertaining that makes up a really good presenter. And the fact that his Mac totally rocked when it came to presenting stuff on the big screen did not make it worse. And I know that all those there will never forget his imidiate response to the question from the audience "Does it have a design view?": "No, it's for developers". Personaly I'd not mind a whole day with Mark and CFEclipse.

Then Vince Bonfanti did a presentation on BlueDragon. Some really interesting stuff there. What I would love to hear more about is interfaces (I know I can read about it, but it's just different having someone explaining it).

The last presentation of the day was Charlie Arehart presenting FusionDebug and FusionReactor. Slightly more about these products in the day 2 report.

After all the presentations there were drawings of different prices. Congratulations to all winners!
</report>

<rant>
There was some time left over before the evenings party, so I decided to head down to the Fairfield Hotel and check in for the night. No WiFi (or other internet access), TV with 4 channels with picture quality as if the broadcast came from Mars and no remote controll, no light (or lightswitch) close to the beds, not real duvet, just wollen blankets on top of extra bed sheets, no shower in the morning as the showerhead came of when I tried to move it, an extremly limited selection of breakfast items... (if I did not already supress the memory I could probably mention more). All in all I have to say; If you ever need a hotel in Croydon, be happy to pay a couple of pounds more to stay somewhere else.
</rant>

<report>
In the evening it was party time. For entertainment there was a DJ (who no-one paid any attention to - poor guy), a tequila slammer girl (which probably got to much attention) and a magician mingling with the groups of people doing the most amazing tricks.

The party was probably the most important part of the whole conference. Here I got the chanse to chat with many of my fellow CF'ers. Way to many to mention (or remember - I'm sorry), but some deserves mentioning. Kola is one cool guy, friendly and full of funny stories. Mark (yes the CFEclipse guy) is one rocking and rolling and just all around great dude. And one that I had hoped to meet, and did Andy - laid back, easy-going and cool (hmm - already used that word about Kola - what can I say - my english vocabulary is limited). After a long night chatting with these and many others, we started to get really hungry, as we had not been eating since lunch. Unfortunately Kola had to head home, but the Mark, Andy, before mentioned Tom Chiverton and I headed out for something to eat (It took us a couple of hours from we started talking about it, until we got going. Mainly due to Marks uncountable dates with a glass of Jack Daniels).

Finding a place to eat past 23:00 proved to be a challenge though. Mark even offered to check in to a hotel, if they could provide room-service there, but it was to late. They could not. We then headed down to Fairfield Hotel, where Andy and Tom also had rooms, to see if they could provide, but it was to late here also. We stumbeled out again, and after a while we finaly found an open KFC. I did not have any money with me so the other guys paid for the two full bags of food we brought with us from there to the hotel (I owe you guys). We then spend a good few hours in Tom's room eating and chatting. I'm ashamed to say that I was the first one to quit - and headed to bed (I think it was around 2am), but the excuse must be that I was the only one of us going for the day 2 training. Mark, Andy and Tom - thank you for a fantastic end to a fantastic day. Hope to see you all again sometime.

As a side note. I think promised Mark that I would blog that I have witnessed him fall flat on his face on a Croydon sidewalk on the way from KFC to the hotel. So now I have. I'm a man who keeps his promises.
</report>

<sleep/>

<report>
Day 2 little less than 20 people were gathered for training on FusionDebug and FusionReactor by Charlie Arehart. Man this is some really usefull products that every CF development shop should have and use. Charlie, together with Darren from Intergral (the company that have made these two programs), did a great job of demostrating the powers of these programs. I'm not going to try and retell what was demoed, but will sufice to say that if you have not, you SHOULD check out these programs if you are serious with CF development or adminestering CF servers. You can find a lot of information on the product websites and on Charlies blog.

I was delighted to meet Kola again this day, and also chat more with others, including Marcel and Niklas (who was Russ' right hand in arranging CFDevCon). And not the least to talk more with Charlie (hope you made it well back to the states).
</report>

<conclution>
A fabolous conference and following training day. But the best and most important was meeting you people who where there. Thank you all for making these two day what they where.
</conclution>