Well, MAX is coming up in just a tiny little bit now, just a tad bit over a week actually (Sept 30 - Oct 3). Ben made sure we had all of our materials in really early this year (well, from past years anyways), which was a good thing. I started out making the content for my hands on with enough time to make sure it will all work properly. The content ended up being more than 70 pages long (73 pages to be exact) for just the hand out... That's a lot of content.

We found an issue right after sending the images to manufacturing with Eclipse 3.3 and the CF Extensions. Apparently somewhere between M3 and M7 they changed something internally which caused the RDS Query Viewer to not work properly. We fixed this as soon as we found it, but by then it was too late to get on the DVD's for CF8. But some of you, and I know you're out there, will be using Eclipse 3.3. So... if you download this version, you can use the Query Viewer in 3.3 as well.

At the upcomming MAX 2007 conference I will be giving the Hands On: Advanced ColdFusion Reporting session (no link yet, sorry). And I want to make it worth anyones while who attends. The text blurb on the MAX site says: Reporting is one of the most important features in ColdFusion, and reporting capabilities have been significantly enhanced in ColdFusion 8. This session will reveal the considerable power behind these surprisingly easy-to-use features.

You can now download the CF8 beta from Adobe Labs. WooHoo! So what does this mean for reporting? Quite a lot actually. I know it's been quiet around here lately, but that's because we've been working on doing all kinds of fixes and enhancements to both the reporting engine as well as the report builder. In the beta, you'll be able to play with cool things like using CSS within a report, passing in queries to sub-reports, and page breaks.

it's coming

I'm sure by now some of you have installed IE7 on your computer. Maybe not a lot of you, but I'm sure there's a person here and there. Somewhere along the line between IE6 SP2 and IE7, Microsoft tried to make things more secure, and in turn screwed up (in my opinion anyways). They made it so that legitimate programs, such as the ColdFusion Report Builder, could no longer do their job. What-chu-talkin-about Dean? you may ask yourself. Well, let me explain.

For those who were interested, the demo files that I used for the MAX Advanced reporting session can be found here. If they use a database, (not all of them do use a database) it's the cfartgallery that ships with ColdFusion 7.

I know this is not reporting related, but I think it's pretty darn important. At CFUnited this year, the CFEclipse team announced their beta version 1.3. It included a lot of cool new things, bug fixes, and the like. But there was a problem: it didn't work on Eclipse 3.1 (the core of FlexBuilder). And the flex builder stuff didn't work on 3.2. So you were stuck working in two different environments *again*. Have no fear, my friends, the answer to your troubles has arrived.

  MAX 2006 – Adobe User Conference October 23-26, 2006 Last Chance for Early Bird Discount Join us for MAX 2006 this October 23-26 at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, and be among the first to see the latest developments with Adobe LiveCycle®, Acrobat®, Photoshop®, Macromedia® Flash® Professional 8, Dreamweaver®, ColdFusion®, Flex™, and more.

The Adobe download page has been updated with the Report Builder fixes mentioned in the previous post. Namely, parameter errors going into and out of the Query Builder and the Query Builder losing information you had typed in when you came back into the Query Builder "SQL" mode. You can download the updated version from here (build number 144677): http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads.