I received confirmation this morning from the Adobe crew that Ben will be coming to visit our CFUG on April 30, 2007. In addition to demoing new features of the forthcoming release of ColdFusion "Scorpio", we will be raffling off one copy of the next release of ColdFusion to one lucky attendee! If you are in the general vicinity of Dallas/Ft.Worth, please count on coming out and joining us that evening! Feel free to contact me with any questions about the event.

As I vaguely mentioned in my blog post the other day about our integration of codeShare into InstantSpot, the EverFro guys (Ryan Everhart and Robert Froehling have some other cool things in the works for their codeShare project.   They now have a project site set up, and as Mark Drew announced on his blog this morning (or evening for Mark I suppose), and there is a new plug-in for the Eclipse platform.

Someone posted the following on our CFUG email list today looking for a way to trim a string to 250 characters, but if that 250 fell in the middle of a word, to exclude that last word and end the string at the preceding space. I created a simple little method for doing this named leftWord(), which accepts the two arguments "InputString" and "CharacterLimit". Feel free to better-fy it all you want!

Of the countless quality posts that I have read from the ColdFusion community over the past several years, one sticks out as an entry that I find myself needing to come back to time and time again, as I apparently can't seem to ever commit it to memory!  Last April, Mark Kruger made a really great post on configuring multiserver instances in ColdFusion with their own custom JVM settings, and adding them as Windows services.

I have a big box of Adobe swag to giveaway at tonight's CFUG meeting.   I considered doing some type of code-related contest, but with the varying skill sets in the group, I have decided against this.  I have been trying to think of a fair way to give the stuff out and I thought it would be fun to do trivia game. I have come up with a handful of questions, but there is a *lot* of stuff in the box.   This is where you come in!

If you are reading this blog, I would *hope* you that you are aware of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast, produced by Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell. They consistently put out very informative and entertaining "versions" (aka episodes), and really have their finger on the pulse of the ColdFusion development community. They have also been very kind to us in keeping tabs on our InstantSpot project and giving us the opportunity to share some of the things that we have going on.

OK, I really don't mean to obsess on this, but since I have had to work with it for multiple days, I have earned the right... believe me! I am not sure I have *ever* seen a better example of what not to do. It is truly just bizarre. Here is the scenario: In this app, a Loan Application can have multiple Borrowers. Each Borrower can have multiple Dependents. Now, you are probably thinking that there would be at least 3 tables involved in that equation. Think again.

I have spent the last 10 hours of my day working over some legacy code that was originally built about 7 years ago by two PowerBuilder developers who where tasked with taking their first shot at ColdFusion on a mortgage loan application underwriting system. Below is a small sample of the 2,875 line pile of horse crap that I have been wallowing through all day. There were over 100 queries in this single template.

Ryan Everhart posted instructions on how to add the attribute 'dbvarname' to the cfprocparam tag in CFEclipse, which he states was courtesy of Teddy Payne.  I have personally never noticed that bug, but the fix is a great example of how easy it is to customize tag attributes in CFEclipse.    I don't believe that Ryan has yet been added to the main ColdFusion aggregators, so for you CF blog junkies, make sure to add his RSS to your feed reader of choice.

Today, Gert Franz announce the launch of the Railo blog.  In emails he was asking for suggestions on content that people would like to see, so if you are inclined you might want to send him/them and email with your thoughts.