For the most part, migrating your ColdFusion site from Microsoft's SQL 2000 server to SQL 2005 is a snap. Import the databases from 2000 to 2005, re-point your data sources to the new instance using the ColdFusion Administrator and you are done. No muss, no fuss. There is very little query code that you will need to change. Sometimes you needn't change anything in your ColdFusion code at all.

If you are like the muse you keep your eye on the log files in the /runtime/logs/ directory. There's some good information in there if you care to poke around. You might notice one item that appears in the *.events.log from time to time - usually in a long list of similar errors.

I'm a big fan of ColdFusion on Linux. Not that I know half as much about Linux as I do about Windows. Still, we have a good number of Linux servers here at CF Webtools and CF Linux Guru Ryan Stille keeps them all humming a happy tune. I think both platforms have advantages. If you have ever tried to write ColdFusion code that is able to run on both Linux and Windows you will know there a few differences. One difference is case sensitivity for file names.

Mike Henke reminded me of this slick little tool called varscoper. Pass in a directory and it will ferret out all the places where variables are not correctly scoped. For example, it will sshow where you have not correctly var'ed variables in a function. The project was produced by Mike Schierberl who's blog has some excellent goodies and tips. varscoper won't catch the cfhttp scope, but it would catch a variable declared as a result attribute.

Over the past few days on CF Talk Ian Skinner has been struggling tuning an application that makes use of CFTHREAD. In his application a process spawns threads for creating report files. Ian Reports that the process would spawn the threads, but the threads themselves would neither complete gracefully nor respond to a "terminate" action (<cfthread action="terminate" ...>). No suggestions from the muse or anyone else seemed to help. Finally he upgraded to ColdFusion 8.0.

It's pretty common to use the application scope to cache components. If your component is a collection of methods or data access functions it's often faster to put them into the application scope than it is to create an instance with each request. Now you probably know that you should quality all of the variables in a function with the "var" key word. This insures that the variable exists inside the "scope" of the function call.

Here's a quick public service announcement for all the muse readers. Apparently Coldfusion Weekly (a popular podcast) is ending its run. To pick up the slack, community member and CF Guru Brian Meloche has started a new podcast called CF Conversations. His first release is a round table discussion with Rick Mason, Adam Haskell, Aaron West, and Jeff Coughlin. There is also an i Tunes link.

Recently on CF Talk Bobby Hartsfield presented an interesting problem. A vendor required a submission of data as an XML packet. Since the data all came from a form post Bobby wanted to simply loop through the form fields to build his XML file. Each of the form field names would become a node in his XML doc. Sounds simple right? Actually there is a problem with this approach. XML is typically case sensitive.

On Tuesday I took in a workshop on Cryptography by Dean Saxe. Dean is an impressive character with a head stuffed full of knowledge and spilling out everywhere. He obviously knew what he was talking about. As a topic, cryptography is so impossibly complicated and intricate that he could not do it justice in a 50 minute session. Most discussions about cryptography center around keys, algorithms and best practices - and this was no exception.

CF Optimization Guru Mike Brunt gave an awesome presentation on tuning ColdFusion. In a short 50 minutes he covered such topics as JVM configuration, multi-server install and load testing. It was an excellent overview. One recommendation (that he made in is lyric British access) was to install See Fusion or Fusion Reactor instead relying on the built in monitor.