Things have been really busy here at SouthOfShasta.com-land for me, hence the lack of blog posts lately. One of the things I've been busy with is preparing for some upcoming presentations. I'll be speaking at the Sacramento CFUG and at the Bay Area CFUG in the coming weeks, giving my "Introduction to CFCs" and "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" talks respectively. Here's the details...

"Introduction to ColdFusion Components 2.0^*"
(This is the same talk I gave at Bacfug in April.)

Tuesday July 8th
at Sacramento ColdFusion Users Group
6:30pm
at the Clear Capital building
1410 Rocky Ridge Road - Suite 180
Roseville, CA

(^* The "2.0" is just to differentiate this from when I gave the same talk at Saccfug several months ago. They asked for me to repeat it for new members; this time we'll have the newer code samples that I shared with the Bacfug folks.)

"Intermediate Uses of ColdFusion Components"

Wednesday July 16th
at Bay Area ColdFusion Users Group
6:30pm
at the Adobe building
601 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA 94103

Any questions, just ask! :)

-nolan

I have a request/suggestion for the various User Group Managers out there: I'd like the software raffles to be "weighted" based on participation. My reasoning for this is below, and it may come across a bit like a rant because, well, it is. :)

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Dear Adobe ColdFusion Development Team,

I have an addition to my "CF9 Wishlist"...

Like most of us, I have to update my resume now and then. Being a coder by nature, I prefer building it in HTML. However, those pesky IT Recruiters always "need" to have it in "Word format". Despite my sending over an .html file and telling the folks "this will open just fine in Word, just click the File menu and press Open, trust me", I still get a fair amount of folks writing back, asking for a .DOC file. So I'm forced to either a) maintain 2 separate versions of my resume (.html and .doc) or b) do the "save as .DOC" conversion myself, then deal with all the margins and other auto-magic that MS Office screws up when doing said conversion (note: now that I'm on OpenOffice, it's not quite as crazy, but still more re-work than I really care to deal with).

So how about we add a 'format="WordDoc"' to the cfdocument tag?

I can already auto-generate .pdf and FlashPaper, which is great. And PDFs are good enough for SOME of those IT Recruiter folks, but it would really save us a lot of re-work if we could auto-genereate a Word file as well.

Or maybe (for the sake of slightly more cross-platform use) do a "format='RichTextFormat'"? I'll take either .DOC or .RTF files, which ever you guys can code up first. :)

Thanks, Nolan

Hi Sacramento / Roseville area folks...

On May 7th, I'll be speaking at the Sierra Multimedia Users Group, giving a sort of "high level, non-techie" introduction to ColdFusion and Dreamweaver. It will be an introduction for Dreamweaver-centric people that don't have a background in server-side programming, and I'll also provide a "high level" view at what ColdFusion does, and some of the features that make ColdFusion a great productivity tool. If you have a manager that's still on the fence about CF being a worthwhile investment, this might be a good presentation for him/her to attend.

Suggestions on a snazzy title for the preso are welcome. So far I'm thinking something like "ColdFusion from 10,000 Feet" or maybe "A High-Level Look at ColdFusion and Dreamweaver"...any other suggestions?

Note, due to some logistical issues, this meeting will not be webcast -- it's an in-person only meeting, however I will post any slides and source code after the preso.

See you there!

-nolan

Thanks to everyone that came out to the BACFUG meeting last night. I hope the talk I gave on "Introduction to ColdFusion Components" was helpful to those in the audience. The slides and source code have been added here, and there is a recording of the presentation at UGTV.

Just like the last time I gave an introductory talk, we had a bigger percentage of new faces in the meeting. Perhaps this is a sign that we need to have more presentations that go over introductions to various topics.

As an example, one attendee at last night's meeting was not familiar with the "var" scope! That's not even a topic specific to CFCs ("var" is just as useful when building regular CFfunctions), but there are still folks that haven't had to dive into the "newer" scopes in ColdFusion, and could benefit from a presentation on these topics, and last night is proof that these folks are willing to attend meetings when the topic is of interest.

I'll be back at BACFUG in July to give a talk on "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" -- it goes over some common uses of CFCs that don't require using a full fledged framework, nor do they require knowing more than just a very basic understanding of CFCs and object oriented thinking. We'll go over Beans, DAOs, Gateways, and maybe a few similar items.

Thanks again, especially to Sean and Luke for having me as a presenter, and for their assistance in getting the laptop/network issues squared away. :)

--nolan

Hi Bay Area CF-ers --

I'll be speaking at the Bay Area ColdFusion Users Group on April 16th, giving my talk on "Introduction to CFCs". I'm probably going to update it with some content from my "Intermediate Uses of CFCs" slide deck but essentially, the idea is, if you've never used CFCs before, and don't have an object-oriented background, then this presentation will hopefully help you get to the "next step"!

There's not much info on the Bacfug page yet -- that's my fault. I need to send Sean an outline, which is still on my "todo" list for later tonight.

...and no, this is not an April Fool's joke! :)

-nolan

I just responded to a post over on Alagad.com about using "homegrown" frameworks vs. using "regular" frameworks, and my comment quickly became a catalyst for a blog post of my own on that same topic.

Frameworks are a pretty common holy war these days. The phrases "always use frameworks!", and "which framework is best?" are both seen pretty regularly on blogs, message boards, or overheard at various user group meetings.

As a contractor, I don't always get to determine the requirements, or time lines, or technology stack that I have to be responsible for. And as such, I sometimes need to make difficult decisions.

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Nothing really "new" here. I've been posting my "CF9 WishList" thoughts on various other blogs, and decided I'd prefer to start compiling my list here on my own blog. The list as it stands currently...

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My teammate and I just spent a couple hours debugging an overloaded function:

We had a method foo( int num ) that was called passed a (char*):

foo( (char*)"test" );

...yet the integer version of the method was still being called, and quite happily at that! Huh!? It turned out to be the same issue noted here:

Here's the mess you're in: if Base declares a member function f(double x), and Derived declares a member function f(char c) (same name but different parameter types and/or constness), then the Base f(double x) is "hidden" rather than "overloaded" or "overridden" (even if the Base f(double x) is virtual).

Alas, my compiler doesn't like the noted "using" syntax, so I have to go about solving things the "long way" (either re-defining all the methods in my derived class, or renaming the derived methods so overloading no longer happens).

I can't believe I've never run into this "feature" of C++ before! And I can't believe this is how they chose to implement things! :)

It seems to me that if the method has a unique signature that's not redefined in the derived class, the compiler should happily look in the base class for that implementation. If I have foo(char) in my base class, but happen to have a redefined foo(int) in the derived class...why should it care? Assuming the data is always cast to the correct type, I fail to see why C++ requires we go through all this extra work.

If anyone can offer more insight, I'm very curious as to why C++ is wired this way.

--n

One of my main projects did a pretty big 180 last week. After demoing some functionality for a potential customer, the customer informed us that they'd prefer a command line tool over a web app (for use within various scripts and batch files they're running).

So for the next few months, I'll be switching gears and diving back into C++ work. It's been a while since I've worked on anything substantial in C++. This will definitely be a challenge for me over the next few months, getting (back) up to speed on the Boost library, and various other goodies.

Fortunately I have a few ColdFusion projects still in the works to help balance things out, and keep me sane. :)