Reminder: Adobe's Scorpio Spring Tour is coming to town today, so don't miss it! This is your one chance to catch the official pre-release demo of all the cool new features coming up with ColdFusion 8. Among the features to be presented tonight, you may expect to see: [source]

1. Built in AJAX widgets. Create AJAX windows, auto complete forms, calendar popups, grids, WYSIWYG editors, and much more. All using simple ColdFusion based tags and generating industry standard solutions such as Prototype and Yahoo User Interface Javascript.
   
2. Native JSON support. ColdFusion components now know if they are called by a web browser and will return JSON formated data automatically. You can also create JSON packets directly or consume them and turn them into native ColdFusion objects.
3. .NET (and Java!) integration. Pull in .NET objects and use them like native ColdFusion objects. Combine .NET and Java on the same page if you like. Easily the best web based middleware solution.
4. Microsoft Exchange integration. Love it or hate it, most organizations use Exchange religiously. Now you can read and update email, calendars, tasks and much more. No change to the Exchange server is required.
5. Flash based presentation builder. Combine HTML, Audio, Flash Movies, Images, and CFCharts to create spiffy flash based presentations on the fly. Just wrap your existing pages in CFPRESENTATION and you are on your way.
6. Full PDF integration. Create, combine, update, and interact with PDF files using CFPDF and CFPDFFORM tags.
7. Native image manipulation functions. Blur, sharpen, draw, rotate, stream to browser, and much much more. This finally brings ColdFusion's image support in line with PHP and other frameworks while keeping it so simple that even I could use it.
8. Across the board enhancements. Improvements in security, speed, Flash Forms, Report Builder, and more.
9. Administration API. Now you can access, audit, and snapshot all the information the server knows about itself. No longer is ColdFusion a black box. Audit long running processes, most frequently run queries, and bottle necks. SnapShot the server before making your change or doing a reset so that you can analyze potential problems later.

I am curious why no one has posted any articles on the IIS/Apache Flex Modules... Adobe made available on labs a plugin to compile Flex code server-side, just like Flex 1.5 did... with that said, it's probably simpler to write Flex than Flash Forms, and by far more powerful... so why haven't we seen any ColdFusion / Flex Module examples? Performance? I haven't tried it yet (guilty as charged), but I will put together a few examples to prove my theory... yes, they say it's not for production use, or at least they won't support it .. but if it works w/o a bug performance hit, can you imagine the possibilities? Maybe a cf-wrapper, a custom tag that already includes some of the higher level code allowing you to replace your old-slow-pain-in-you-cheeks flash forms? Who's with me?

Microsoft renamed the Windows Presentation Foundation / Express to Silverlight ... finally, cuz the WPF/E was the longest name for a technology ever! Not sure about this Flash Killer thing ... I do like the WPF, but it is Windows Vista / XP + .NET3.0 dependent ... and the Express part of it is cross-browser / cross-platform, but somewhat restricted and can't touch Flash's power and 97% market penetration.
Check out this great article for more info on Silverlight.

CF.Objective() is coming up. Like I said last time, the speakers lineup is amazing, it's less expensive than most conferences, and you will get tons of advanced topics: Ajax, ColdSpring, Transfer, Flex ... Some brand new Scorpio news ... hope to see you there.
I will be speaking on Flex and the Cairngorm micro-architecture ... fun stuff.

btw, Mark said he will finish my Transfer composite keys support by then, so this post makes is official! :) I can't wait.

Transfer 0.6.3 was released today. tql support is now official, and the next one in line is composite keys. Keep an eye on this project! I will be posting more and more about it.

If you're a web developer, you should use Firefox. If you use Firefox, you should use Firebug. If you use Firebug, you should install the latest security update. You can read more at the official site, or simply update your plugins through the Firefox interface.