Blogging bullet-point style tonight: Charlie Arehart's new CF411 site has a MASSIVE amount of links to tools and resources for CFML and web development. Stop what you're doing right now, go to the page, and store it somewhere (your bookmarks, Delicious, wherever). The announcement that ColdFusion 8 Enterprise is now available for free for educational use (in other words, for learning purposes) was made on Monday. You can find out more at https://freeriatools.adobe.

For those folks who aren't regularly following the CFConversations podcast, the latest episode is an interview with Hal Helms. I conducted the interview, but for the most part I stayed out of the way and let Hal do his thing, which is to speak thoughtfully and eloquently about ColdFusion, OO, and application development.

Earlier today, episode 11 of the CFConversations podcast, the 5th roundtable version, was released. Topics of discussion included the upcoming FREE bFusion & bFlex hands-on ColdFusion and Flex training sessions at Indiana University, the challenges of hiring developers, and lingering thoughts regarding ColdFusion 9 and CFUnited.

I've been a little lax in posting about new episodes of the CFConversations podcast (and lax in my blog postings in general), but I wanted to point out that episode #9 (the 5th interview episode) was released today. The reason this episode is being released mid-week is because part of the interview is about the Michigan Flex Camp which will be held on July 30 and 31.

Hey, folks, the first CFConversations interview podcast is now available. Check it out--you can either subscribe to the podcast via iTunes (just search for "CFConversations") or download each episode directly from the CFConversations website.

The fourth episode of the CFConversations podcast, the last of the three episodes recorded at CFUnited, was released early this morning. This episode focuses on some ideas that came out of Brian Meloche's conference session on promoting the use of CFML outside of the ColdFusion community. Check it out!

Now that CFUnited's over (at least for me) and I've had some time to rest and mull over things, I wanted to post a few random thoughts and opinions: The entire L'Enfant Plaza Metro station (columns, walls, even some of the Metro railcars that passed through) was one big ad for Adobe LifeCycle. The message: LifeCycle can help the government manage and distribute PDF forms. Unusual?

Well, CFUnited begins tomorrow, so I'll be getting up a bit earlier than usual so I can drive to the nearest Metro station and head down into D.C. The last time I attended CFUnited was back in 2005, so it'll be interesting to see if the conference has changed any in terms of atmosphere and organization since then. Certainly the venue will be different; hopefully that means the wireless network will be more robust/reliable.

The folks running CFUnited have invited ColdFusion bloggers to answer some questions about the conference on our own blogs. Sounds like a good excuse for an easy blog post, so here goes... "What are you looking forward to most?" While there are a few sessions I'm particularly looking forward to, what I'm looking forward to most is conversing with my fellow developers and sharing ideas. "Which speaker will most likely end up on your camera?

One of the benefits of using the Transfer ORM in your application is that if you define the relationships between your tables in the Transfer XML configuration file, you can retrieve any objects related to your current object through a variety of functions. However, sometimes you need to relate records within the same table.