I had a meeting today with a new client who has been through the ringer. Over and over again. Several years ago he had an idea. And the idea was a good one. So, he spent not- insignificant money to pay a developer to turn the idea into a real website. That worked for a while, but eventually that developer quit working for him. So, he found another guy in a basement somewhere who said he could do the work. And, again, that worked for a while. But eventually that guy quit too.

We are in the process of reviewing some of our project management processes here at Alagad in search (as always) of ways to better manage and track projects. Currently, we use a combination of Trac sites, SVN repositories, and a handful of other tools for our projects, but I have often found this collection of individual tools can be burdensome and I don't have a great love for Trac as it is not the most flexible system in the world. So, here is the question - how do you manage projects?

This issue has plagued me since moving to SQL Server 2005. I find the diagram tools help me visualize my data and relationships. The problem is that with SQL 2005 sometimes you get this error when you try to create a new diagram: You can follow the instructions in the error message till the cows come home and still not be able to successfully create a diagram. This is true even if you set the owner to SA or some other administrator.

Alagad is proud to sponsor and participate in the community of Adobe developers. It’s good for the community and it’s good for business. The more we all grow, the better we all do. To that extent, Alagad will be sponsoring two conferences this year and at least one Alagad representative will be attending a few others. Here’s a quick outulne as it stands now: 360|Flex Conference (Now) Ok, Alagad isn’t technically attending Flex 360.

A while back, I started working on a custom Flex component that would allow for easy pagination of data in an array collection. I am happy to announce that I have made quite a few updates, the most obvious being that the PagableArrayCollection now supports sorting and filtering. For more information, go to the project site on RIA Forge.

I have blogged and presented on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and how it is in my opinion "The Heart Of The Matter". Those presentations emphasize that at the heart of ColdFusion MX-8 and JRun is the JVM but there's more. Adobe has a range of Server products that run with a JVM at the heart of there operations; here they are.

I am working on a small application that can be used to demonstrate some of the AJAX capabilities of ColdFusion 8. It is a simple master/detail application for managing information about users. The main page uses <cfgrid> to display the list of users. When you want to edit a user, or create a new one, I use the ColdFusion.navigate() JavaScript method to load a URL into a <cfwindow>. This page contains the user form. Whenever I created or edited a user, it would work as expected...

Tonight, Wednesday February 20, 2008, I will be presenting to the San Diego Adobe-ColdFusion User Group on all things relating to the JVM and in particular the Sun JVM that ships with CF. I realize this may sound unappealing and lacking some of the zap that other items might have, such as the Flex-Air Roadshow but the JVM is not just at the heart of ColdFusion, but many other Adobe products such as FlexDS, BlazeDS, Connect, Jrun etc.

We are asked to help clients with various issues at various stages. Sometimes we are brought in when an application is simply being planned, sometimes just before launch or enhancement. This blog piece covers the times when we are brought in to pinpoint application slow-downs or failures. As I have mentioned in previous blog postings, the first thing I always want to do when trying to help a client with application slow-downs or failures is to see the recent Production ColdFusion and JRun logs.

Today is my first day back in the office after four intense days of teaching my Enterprise Model-Glue with ColdFusion class in Arlington, Virginia. This was the first time I gave the class in front of a general audience, but not the first time I’ve given the class. Overall, I was pleased with how it went and I think the participants were too. The group of attendees had a wide range of experience, expectations, and intentions.