Ever need to tell your ColdFusion app to run select queries against a different set of tables while you do something to the original set (like perform a batch update)? I did. Here's how I did it.

Yep: CFUnited will now be June 18 - June 21 at the DC Convention Center. E-mail just went out to all the attendees. Figures I'd go through the trouble of making countdown timers for the two conferences I'm attending and then have one of them go and change the date on me. :) Fortunately it's just a matter of updating the date value in the code. More importantly, I can still make it to CFUnited. Had they moved it up an additional week...that would have been a problem for me.

I think I've mentioned Dzone (www.dzone.com) in previous posts: it's a site where users submit links to articles and blog posts about web design and web software development, and these links are then voted and commented on. It's kind of like a subject-focused version of Digg.

In any web application, if the user submits information to be stored in a database using a form, you always want to validate that information before it's stored in the database. The majority of users have JavaScript enabled in their web browser, allowing you to use JavaScript functions to validate the data on the client-side before the submission is allowed to proceed.

It's now been a week since I joined the ColdFusion Community, so here are my thoughts on the experience so far. First off, I must like it, because I keep checking on it to see what's going on. This is my first social network (I don't really count LinkedIn), so I wasn't sure if it would appeal to me. But I'm finding that it's a much easier way to get to know folks and converse with them than posting on blogs and exchanging e-mails. I think part of it is that it's a different dynamic.

I just heard about this site today: http://www.coldfusioncommunity.org Nick Tong did an excellent job with this site, and it has the potential to be a true ColdFusion social/professional networking site. If you're a ColdFusion developer, you need to at least check out the site, but I encourage you to go ahead and join.

On DZone today, I saw two posts today about how to generate PDF files. One technique used a Java library called iText to create the PDF, the other looks like it uses Python. ColdFusion developers don't need to worry about choosing a library or a 3rd-party application to generate PDF files: CF comes with functions/tags for creating PDF documents out of HTML, concatenating several PDF files into a single file, and writing information to and from PDF form files.

Adobe released the much anticipated ColdFusion 8 yesterday. Most of the new features of CF 8 were announced in various presentations and analyzed in numerous blogs, so the biggest news besides the announcement itself was the pricing of the Standard and Enterprise editions (U.S. pricing): $1,299 for Standard ($649 if upgrading), $7,499 for Enterprise ($3,750 if upgrading).

What, you want to know where you can get it? Off of Adobe Labs, of course: http://labs.adobe.

(WARNING: Long post!) I was at the Scorpio presentation in Washington D.C. last night.