I have to apologize for not blogging here lately. As you might imagine, my first few weeks at Broadchoice have been utterly packed with learning and coding. You know that scene in The Matrix, where Neo lays down in a chair and has the cable plugged into his brain socket? Neo: Ju-Jitsu? I'm going to learn Ju-Jitsu? (Tank pushes a button. Neo convulses in the chair, then gasps for air.) Tank: Hey Mikey, I think he likes it. How about some more? Neo: Hell yes. Hell yes.

I'm honored and very happy to announce that I've accepted a position at Broadchoice, Inc. as a Systems Architect. I'll be working alongside Ray Camden, Sean Corfield, Joe Rinehart, and Nicholas Lierman, which is going to be an amazing experience. A big part of the decision to join is that the company looks great and has some very interesting projects in the works. But the bigger part may be the unshakable belief that this team is going to create some of the best software ever written!

Paul Marcotte sent me over a small test case that demonstrated an issue with the BeanInjector CFC. I went through his test and discovered a bug in the BeanInjector that stopped recursion up the inheritance hierarchy in certain cases. This has been fixed and pushed out to the ColdSpring Bean Utilities RIAForge project. Thanks to Paul for helping me to spot this, as well as sending over a very small test case to help me reproduce the problem. I can't overstate how valuable this sort of thing is.

During my recent presentation to the IECFUG, one of the parts we didn't really have time to touch on was a diagram I created of my general model architecture. The diagram is below, and contains a good number of comments to explain the different pieces. Given the recent discussions going on in the blogosphere and on the lists, I thought this might be interesting to some folks. If anyone has questions, please feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer. Comments are welcome as well, of course.

Many of you probably saw Ray Camden's Lemonade Stand Contest Results. I had fun creating a function to enter into that contest, but I lost! Congrats to Geoffrey K. Bentz as the winner. I was curious, though, to see how the functions would perform in a slightly more realistic simulation. Ray's selling simulation basically treated each function in a vacuum, and the main factor was in making the most cups that you could and selling them for the most money, based on the weather and temperature.

Jason asks: Brian, I'd like to ask a question about Beans and Validation. Feel free to use it is a blog post. So a lot of people have been telling me that Beans could/should have a validate() method to validate their own data. My issue with this is, how can a bean validate it's own data if it is throwing errors in get() methods because you are trying to insert invalid data. Since I cannot insert "Jason" into a date var or a numeric var, what good is my bean's validate() method gonna do me.

Last Friday I gave a presentation to the Inland Empire ColdFusion User Group. It covered a range of topics: MXUnit, ColdMock, and elements of my RIAForge FormUtilities and ColdSpring Bean Utilities projects. The presentation went well, I think. There are a few technical issues towards the end when they were trying to set up a microphone to get a Q&A going, but they are minor. I've linked to the files and the recording below in case anyone is interested in having a look.

Late last night I updated the ColdSpring Bean Utilities RIAForge project. The updates include: Added DynamicXMLBeanFactory: This extends the standard DefaultXMLBeanFactory but allows the ability to replace dynamic properties anywhere in the XML file, as well as in imported XML files.

Better late than never, I wanted to post some quick thoughts on last week's CFUnited conference in Washington D.C. As always, TeraTech put on a great conference. There were a few issues. The conference center was a good distance (15-20 minute walk) from the conference rooms themselves, which became a bit of a pain if one wanted to return to the hotel for some reason.

It's already making the rounds in the community, but the first podcast episode of CFConversations is out. With the sad but understandable departure of CFWeekly, this looks set to become the primary ColdFusion-oriented podcast. I'd also like to give a quick thanks to Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell for all the great work they did with CFWeekly! We'll miss it.