Five new projects and two updates in ColdFusion open source this week. CFUnited, which begins tonight, completes what has been a crazy month for me and seen me criss-crossing the country for various trips. Nonetheless, this should be both fun and exciting and I expect many announcements to come (I personally recall Liz Frederick, Adam Lehman and Ray Camden have each hinted they have some announcements via Twitter). I, personally, have 2 sessions at CFUnited including an intro to Flex for CF developers and another about building ColdFusion Builder extensions. Anyway, for those of you who are attending, be sure to stop me and say hello.

Six new projects and seven updates in ColdFusion open source this week. Clearly this was a busy week. I think open source developers must have heard about my vacation next week and wanted to make sure I didn't forget about them whilst sunbathing in Miami or playing slots in Vegas. Perhaps it has more to do with the final CFUnited being right around the corner...nah, it's definitely about my vacation.

Two new projects and six updates this week in ColdFusion open source. This update actually covers more than a week (again) but I think the warm summer weather hasn't been conducive to open source coding. Nonetheless, I expect to hear some announcements coming before this year's CFUnited, which you probably heard by now will be the last one ever. There's still time to register, so if you can attend, you should! While you're at it, don't miss the early bird rate for RIA Unleashed 2010!

Today the ColdFusion community learned that its longstanding flagship conference, CFUnited, will be no more. I wanted to share my own perspective on this, especially given that the naysayers are already out there with posts bemoaning how this is a further sign of the Apocolypse. Being both a regular speaker at events like CFUnited , a track chair for this year's CFUnited and a conference organizer for RIA Unleashed I think I have a unique perspective - but I also want to get feedback from the community regarding the way forward.

Recently, I was assigned to handle issues related to conversion of some HTML documents we have built into PDF using the <cfdocument> tag in ColdFusion. One of the things you will notice if you check the documentation for the <cfdocument> tag is that it doesn't support the full-range of CSS style options (and no CSS3 for that matter at the moment). Rather than go through each of the many CSS documents related to what I am working on and finding each and every instance of a style that wasn't on that list, I whipped up a little one-pager ColdFusion Builder extension that does the work for me. Here's how it works.

Once you install the extension, you simply right click on any CSS file and choose "cfdocument CSS test > check for compatibility." Once it is done checking, which takes all of a few milliseconds, it will give you a list of any styles you may have used that are not on the supported styles list. At the moment, it simply tells you which styles were not supported not where they are in the document but, assuming others find this useful, perhaps that is a future enhancement. In addition, there are some limitations listed to some of the supported styles, I don't currently check that. Nonetheless, if you are working with cfdocument, this could be useful for you (and is yet another example of how you can quickly solve problems with ColdFusion Builder extensions).

If you want to install it, I am posting the code here for the time being. Also, I created a little video to show you how it works and dicuss the code used to build the extension as it is a good simple learning example in my opinion (sorry if the audio isn't great...but its still ok).