If you actually need convincing on why you should be using the best editor in the cf market, I have 3 more for you. As always big thanks to Mark for all his hard work. To learn more about CFEclipse visit the link below. SnipEx - SnipEx is a new server side project, written in CF which allows CFEclipse's Snippets View to get snippets from a remote server. ColdFusion 8 Tag Support - Mark has already release an update for ColdFusion 8.

Just a reminder that our CFUG meeting is tonight. This is a reminder that we have our June Cleveland CFUG meeting tonight at 6:30pm, Thursday, June 7th.  After our Ben Forta meeting last month, we'll be talking Scorpio again!  Adam Wayne Lehman, ColdFusion Specialist for the Sales division of Adobe will be LIVE and IN PERSON, and doing a "deeper dive" into ColdFusion 8.  He's visiting Cleveland this week, and was kind enough to do a presentation for us while he's here.

I would like to start talking about some of the new functions in Scorpio. The first one we are going to discuss is the getComponentMetaData function. This function will get meta data about the component for ColdFusion component or Interface. The function takes a path parameter and can me a dot notation or absolute path the component. I know most of you are going to quickly point out that you could do this in the past using the getMetaData function. There is a big difference for me though.

Another great tag in ColdFusion 8 AKA Scorpio is the cfwindow tag. This tag create a popup window in the browser without creating a separate browser instance. While I thought this was a great Idea I wasn't quite sure where I would use this. Once I got to thinking I quickly realized that it would be much easier figuring out where I wouldn't use it. This tag is very useful in so many ways and I would like to point out my first idea. This is just a quick example with a little code.

One of the great new tags in ColdFusion 8 is the CFMenu tag. This tag allows you to create a menu or toolbar that can run horizontal or vertical and can be styled to your liking. To create a menu you need 2 tags, cfmenu & cfmenuItem. The top level cfmenu tag defines the characteristics of the menu while the cfmenuitem tag will define each of your menus. I am not sure how many nested menus you can create but I have already created a 3 level navigation menu. Lets get started on create the menu.

If you have logged in to the new administrator in ColdFusion 8 you will notice that the additional installers links for both the ColdFusion Report builder and eclipse extensions are not working. If you want to download them you can use the following link until the project is out of beta. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?

I am sure many of you know this and I may even posted an entry about this at one time but I felt the need to share it again. I picked this little tip up from Sean Corfield on forum posting. Someone was unsure what version of CF www.myspace.com was running. Sean pointed out that in fact they were not running CF but instead using BlueDragon. How can you find this information out? Just visit the link below and you will see the BlueDragon exception handler template. http://myspace.com/Application.

Just a reminder that Peter Bell will be giving a presentation on Lightwire today at 2pm. If you have not heard about Lightwire or you are interested in learning more I think everyone will benifit from this presentation. This is great new for those of us who missed his last presentation. To get the details about the presentation click here.

Through open source, co workers and other just asking for help I get to see a lot of other peoples code. I believe it is a great learning tool that every developer should utilize. I know that if someone were to look at my code they could easily critique so please do not take this article the wrong way. One thing I see over and over is looping over an array to search for a specific value.

Another great new feature in Scorpio is the ability to use the following JavaScript operators in CFML Expressions: ++ -- % += -= *= /= %= && || ! While I do not think this will add any performance upgrades to me it just gives you a much better feel for coding when using the and / or operators. if number falls between 0 and 10 do this if user has a role of admin or master do this In addition, in you can use the following operators: == !