Seven new projects and ten updates over the past two weeks. You all clearly didn't cut me a break over my vacation, releasing a crazy amount of new projects and updates. Clearly, when I get to CFUnited in a couple weeks, I will have to set you all straight! Oh, and if you didn't already hear, I announced my latest event in Boston focused on Flex and ColdFusion which you can find at RIAUnleashed.com. Hope to see you there.

I am proud to officially announce RIA Unleashed : Boston, New England's only conference focused on building rich internet applications using the Adobe Flash Platform including Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Catalyst and other technologies. RIA Unleashed is, in part, an expansion of the former Flex Camp Boston events I have run the past two years. The event will be held at Bentley University in Waltham, MA, on November 13th, 2009, from 8:00am to 5:30pm.

Dave Shuck presented Advanced Illudium Code Generation to the DFWCFUG the other day. He offers a detailed overview of how to get started using my Illudium PU-36 Code Generator and even dicsusses some of the basics of the object oriented development practices in ColdFusion (like what is a DAO, Service, etc). He takes it a bit further however and shows how you can create your own custom templates (which was the point of Illudium in the first place after all) and even how you can create a template that eases the process of regenerating files when database changes occur. He does this by extending a set of base objects so that you can overwrite the base objects without worrying about overwriting your added code. He has shared these templates and you can download the zip here: http://www.remotesynthesis.com/assets/content/dshuck-templates.zip

Dave briefly mentions that I recently released an Illudium "connector" for the ColdFusion Builder's RDS DataView. This brings up something I have been meaning to post about (and will hopefully soon), which is "What is the Illudium project about in light of Builder?" The reason I originally released this project was because the code generated by the ColdFusion Eclipse Extensions was not customizable. At the time (many years ago now), the ColdFusion team wasn't convinced this was important to anyone, but the popularity of the project helped to prove otherwise. Now, with Builder, we can customize the included code generation and even build our own. I have some ideas about the new vision for Illudium but it tends to change day by day. I hope to post about this in more detail soon but feel free to share your thoughts...

View the recording: http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p32018267/

Four new projects and seven updates this week. Sorry for the long delay in posting this, but I have been caught up making presentations for CFUnited (and other user groups) as well as playing with the new toys released Monday (i.e. ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder). I will also be taking next week off as I will be maxing and relaxing in sunny Rincon, Puerto Rico on my first no kid vacation in some 8 years! So, keep the updates to a minimum to save me the time when I return ok?

ColdFusion 9 includes a new Flash-based page element for handling multiple file uploads. Many people have spent quite a bit of time solving this problem, but using ColdFusion 9, you could add this functionality to your site in just about 5 lines. It includes the functionality you'd expect from a multi-file upload element including things like the ability to specify a maximum number of files or a maximum file size. It's also fairly customizable using styles. So let's look at a basic example.