Just a quick note to announce that I've just added a page here on the site for finding and posting ColdFusion/Adobe jobs. The widget is from http://developercircuit.com. You can check the page anytime by following the link in the upper right of my top nav bar (or click here). Start posting your jobs right away!

A while back I put together a short survey to gauge interest in ColdFusion training from the community. I kinda forgot about the survey until now since I'd had my hands full with other chores and with travel. The basic purpose is to gauge interest in the need for training, what specific areas you or your organization might need training in, etc. There are only 7 questions in the survey for now (I may follow up later with a more detailed survey).

I've been heavy into some research lately, trying to become more familiar with some advanced concepts. Part of such research has been to learn more about Progressive Enhancement. I wouldn't exactly call myself an expert on the topic, but essentially it's a shift in mindsight from what I've gotten used to with Ajax development over the last year.

I will be presenting a preview of my cf.objective() presentation 'Integrating ColdFusion 8 Ajax with Model-Glue Applications' at the Cleveland ColdFusion User Group meeting on April 10. I've been trying to attend more meetings in person but things often come up for me. Brian Meloche and Dan Vega do a great job with the group, so if you're in the area you should try to attend. I believe Brian is also presenting at the April meeting and I think Dan is presenting in May.

I've been working a bit with Sharepoint lately for some team sites at work and needed a way to dynamically manage some user lists for a given site. Since Sharepoint has a pretty extensive API for interacting with the various bits I figured it would be pretty simple to create a scheduled task in ColdFusion that would pull a list of valid userid from my database and pass the list to Sharepoint to keep the authentication up to date without much intervention on my behalf.

The public SnipEx server at cfsnippets.org is now back online. As suspected it was a stupid error on my part that brought it down and I apologize. Thanks to the user (sorry I forgot your name) who brought this to my attention.

I wanted to put out a quick message to users of the public SnipEx server at cfsnippets.org to let you know that the server is temporarily down. Unfortunately I don't have access to the server from where I'm at today so I'll have to dig into the issue tonight. I'm sure it's related to some silly changes I made the other night. Many apologies...

Many folks have asked recently how I worked around the - umm - 'plain' look of the ColdFusion 8 Ajax controls. I originally planned on that being a part of my cf.Objective() Ajax presentation, but what the heck, I may as well show it now. It's actually quite simple. Ext ships with several 'themes'. To use these with your Ajax controls, just include them on your page. For the 'aero' theme: How 'bout a Vista theme? A few words of caution though.

Here's a quick example of how to add a functional minimize button to your CFWindow. createWin = function(){ ColdFusion.Window.create('Window1', 'This is a CF window','win.cfm',{x:100,y:100,height:300,width:400,modal:false,closable:true,collapsible:true,draggable:true,resizable:true,center:true,initshow:true}) //get the Ext window object var w = ColdFusion.Window.getWindowObject('Window1'); //add the class for the collapse button w.collapseBtn = w.toolbox.

A reader (ironically named Todd) commented on my post yesterday: I'd also like to see some discussion about Ext vs. Spry. Dreamweaver CS3 seems to have settled on Spry while CF8 has settled on Ext (1.0). Apparently, Adobe divisions do not talk to each other. I can't decide between them. I find Ext (at least teh 1.0 version used in CF) to be difficult and frustrating to use. Prototype.js was easy. I haven't yet tried Spry.