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.

It struck me the other day that I have greatly missed contributing to open-source projects on a more significant scale than I have managed lately. Part of what hit me was that, while I felt that I had learned a lot from a technical knowledge standpoint in the past couple years, I hadn't grown as a developer as much as I'd hoped and I think a good chunk of that can be attributed to the change in the nature of my personal open-source contributions. It turns out that while you can read books and develop projects at your particular place of work, there is no substitute, in my opinion, for contributing to some of the community open source projects in terms of what they can teach you. Let me explain.

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).

I am excited to announce that tickets for RIA Unleashed: Boston 2010 are on sale now at an early bird rate of $50. You also have an option for a hands-on training day for $150 or you can combine the two tickets for a further discounted rate of $175. That's $175 for a full day of hands-on training and a full-day, 3-track conference - you cannot beat that! Both days include lunch and the Thursday night attendee party. Keep in mind, this is an early bird rate that is limited to the first 100 registrants. Tickets will not be getting any cheaper, so if you like saving money, act fast! For those of you who haven't attended in the past, RIA Unleashed is a conference focused on the entire Adobe Flash Platform stack including Flex,  Flash, AIR, ColdFusion and more. You can buy tickets at http://riaunleashed2010.eventbrite.com/.

We're already fortunate enough to have many exciting sponsors including Adobe, Digital Primates, eSyncTraining, Mura, Paypal and Universal Mind. All of them are helping to make this the best year yet.

While all the session details and speakers are not yet announced, I wanted to highlight some of what I have announced so far based upon your particular interests (Flex/Flash/AIR and/or ColdFusion). Keep in mind, if your interests cross over, as mine do, you can mix and match sessions and workshops on Flex, ColdFusion, AIR, Flash however you like:

For Flex, Flash and AIR Developers
Here's a summary of what is announced...so far.

1/2 Day, Hands-On Workshops

• Mobile Flash Development on Android - Scott Janousek
• Data-centric Development in Flex and Flash Builder - Michelle Yaiser
• Getting Started with AIR 2 - Elad Elrom
• Enterprise Patterns for ActionScript - Speaker TBD
• LiveCycle Data Services - Kevin Schmidt, Adobe

Speakers (conference day)

• Ryan Stewart
• Jesse Warden
• Jeff Tapper
• David Tucker
• Jesse Freeman (aka theFlashBum)
• Andrew Powell
• Mike Labriola
• Steven Sacks

What're you waiting for? Register today! http://riaunleashed2010.eventbrite.com/

For ColdFusion Developers
More to come soon.

1/2 Day, Hands-On Workshops

• ColdFusion ORM with Hibernate - Mike Kollen, eSyncTraining
• Building a website in Mura CMS in 2 Hours or less - Sean Schroeder, Blue River Interactive
• Customizing Your ColdFusion Builder IDE with Extensions - Simon Free

Speakers (conference day)

• Adam Lehman
• Raymond Camden
• Terrence Ryan
• Marc Esher
• Rey Bango (of the jQuery team)

Buy tickets today - http://riaunleashed2010.eventbrite.com/

Five new releases and six updates this week (or so) in ColdFusion open source. I am sitting in the jury pool as I write this - what fun! It's been a busy week, clearly, in ColdFusion open source but also personally as I have been busy getting speakers, sponsors and workshops confirmed for RIA Unleashed : Boston 2010. I'm really excited about this year with the two day format including a day of hands-on training (each day can be purchased independently). If you are into ColdFusion (which, by reading this, I assume you are), you'll want to catch speakers including Raymond Camden, Adam Lehman, Terry Ryan, Simon Free, Marc Esher and more. Oh, and if you do Flex or AIR there will be tons for you too...sorry to ramble on, just excited, but enough about my conference...