I know it's been in the blogsphere for a few days, but if you missed it, ColdFusion 8 Public Beta is Live on Labs; it will let you develop next-generation Internet experiences faster and more easily than ever before. Here are just a few of the key features that you'll discover in the public beta:

• Significant performance improvements - up to 5Xfaster than ColdFusion MX7.
• Server monitoring identifies server bottlenecks, allowing for tuning and improved performance.
• Code debugging speeds your development with set breakpoints, variables monitoring, and step through ColdFusion code with an Eclipse plug-in debugger.
• Integration with Adobe Flex(tm) and AJAX features let ColdFusion power personalized, multimedia-rich applications to enhance your users' experiences on the web.
• High-quality, on-demand presentations can be created dynamically on the server.
• Applications can interact with PDF documents and forms for a printable, portable way to intelligently capture and share information.
• Create and manipulate images with more than 50 new CFML tags and functions
• Native support for .NET objects to easily integrate all of your enterprise data and infrastructure services.
• Server-side printing

VMWare is the best virtualization software for Windows and they just released the 6th generation. This is what I use to test my code in different environments, different databases, os's, etc: CFMX7, CFMX8, Windows, Linux, Oracle 9, Oracle 10, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 ... it's trully amazing. You can now clone existing systems and virtualize them; this was previously available only with VMWare Server. I also ran Ubuntu Workstation, OSX, just to test them. You can develop locally and map a folder in your VM to your local machine, thus, all your dev environments will read out of the same codebase. Among the new features you can find:

• Windows Vista support: Users can deploy Windows Vista as a guest or host operating system, facilitating re-hosting of legacy systems, enabling upgrade and migration projects with minimal end-user disruption and simplifying Windows Vista evaluations.
• Multiple monitor display: Users can configure one virtual machine to span multiple monitors or multiple virtual machines to each display on separate monitors with this industry-first capability, enhancing desktop productivity.
• USB 2.0 support: Users can take advantage of high-performance peripherals such as Apple iPods and fast storage devices.
• ACE authoring capabilities: As a companion to VMware Workstation 6, VMware now offers a VMware ACE Option Pack, which enables VMware Workstation 6 users to create secure, centrally manageable virtual machines. Mobility is one of the primary benefits of this Option Pack, as it allows users to securely transport virtual machines on portable media devices such as USB memory sticks.
• Integrated Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) functionality: Users can create a virtual machine in minutes by “cloning” an existing physical computer.
• Integrated virtual debugger: Users can deploy, run and debug programs inside a virtual machine directly from their preferred integrated development environments (IDEs), accelerating debugging with this industry-first integration with Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Background virtual machine execution: Users can run virtual machines in the background without the VMware Workstation user interface for an uncluttered user experience.
• Automation APIs: Users can write scripts and programs that automate and help quicken virtual machine testing with support for VIX API 2.0.

In addition, VMware Workstation 6 advances the state of the art in virtualization technology with groundbreaking new capabilities including:

• Continuous virtual machine record and replay (experimental): Users can record the execution of a virtual machine, including all inputs, outputs and decisions made along the way. On demand, the user can go “back in time” to the start of the recording and replay execution, guaranteeing that the virtual machine will perform exactly the same operations every time and ensuring bugs can be reproduced and resolved.
• Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) support (experimental): VMware Workstation 6 is the first virtualization platform to allow execution of paravirtualized guest operating systems that implement the VMI interface.

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.

The new products include:

• Adobe InDesign CS3
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Adobe Illustrator CS3
• Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
• Adobe Flash CS3 Professional
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
• Adobe Fireworks CS3
• Adobe Contribute CS3
• Adobe After Effects CS3
• Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
• Adobe Encore CS3
• Adobe Soundbooth CS3

The launch will be broadcasted here: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/launchevent/webcast/

Imified is an instant messenger buddy that offers access to productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. The site is powered by ColdFusion and their IM bot is done through CFMX7 Event Gateways. However, the most important business aspect is that their back-end / account management is all AjaxCFC! :->
The concept is great because it's simple, yet very handy... I wish them luck and hope they add many more features.

I also wrote a few bots before, but quickly ran into licensing issues with the networks. All networks restrict the amount of messages a single user can send/receive per day, and some networks charge up to $50,000 simply to allow your bot to live.

I just can't believe there is no official documentation on this issue. If you ever tried to install ColdFusion MX7 on a Windows 2003 Server with sp1 pre installed, your ColdFusion will not install properly.

I just tried to install it over 20-30 times, changing settings, nt security, firewall, web server, jrun, man .. everything! I tried to install it on an AMD 64 bit CPU running Windows 2003 Server. The 64 bit threw me off, and I almost returned it and ordered a new system... the strange fact is that I have other AMD 64bits running ...

Regardless of the installation type, standalone, multiserver, using the built-in web server, iis, or apache, it will always finish the install with errors. If you look at the logs you will see 2 or 3 non-fatal errors:

ERROR - jrun.xmljava.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\JRun4\tmpmove.bat (Access is denied)

or

ERROR - jrun.xmljava.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\CFusionMX7\tmpmove.bat (Access is denied)

Web Server Connector Configuration Error
Status: ERROR
Additional Notes: ERROR - JNDI port 2902 for server cfusion is not active

The last one I don't have the exact error, but it was something along the line of cannot find C:\CFUsionMX7\lib

Missing the entire /lib folder does not look so 'non-fatal' to me. Anyways, ColdFusion would not start. After trying everything known to man, I even tried to copy the /lib folder from another server.... nada, nothing.

I found two solutions to this problem:
1) Reinstall sp1 on top of the pre-installed sp1.
2) A little easier, and I still don't know why this works, install CF with the silent mode. Run the CF install file from a command line (DOS box) with "-f silent.properties" and it will take 2 mins to install. Silent.properties is a file that you must create using a text editor. See this technote for details.

I installed it silently with the built-in server, and then manually attached the IIS connectors. It also installed the Report Builder, I guess it's part of the silent install... so I removed it after it was done. I kept a copy of the silent.properties if anyone needs it, but it's close to the template provided in the technote.

Adobe should document this issue! Next time you're installing CFMX7 on a W2k3 box, remember this post, it may save you days.

Harshad Harshad Oak posted an entry with seven Ajax toolkits / frameworks to watch out for ... Google Web Toolkit, Dojo, Yahoo! User Interface Library, Direct Web Remoting, Spry framework for Ajax, Mochikit, and Script.aculo.us.

Some of them I agree, some not ... and it's missing a few too.

GWT may succeed just because it's Google; it's nice and intuitive for Java Developers, but somewhat limited. We should expect major improvements in this framework over the next few months.

Dojo is the best JavaScript library out there... really nicely thought, OOP, with many Widgets and Ajax support. It is also being used by the Open Ajax Effort, which is developing an IDE built over Eclipse...
The Y! UIL has great patterns and their userbase is growing. I haven't followed it closely, but I wouldn't bet money on this one.

DRW is being developed by Joe Walker. He's a very bright guy, but being alone in this game doesn't help... DRW 2.0 is coming soon and has built in capabilities for reverse Ajax / comet and JSF interfaces... Up till now DWR was the most widely used library in the Java world, but GWT has a greater chance to succeed.

Spry is an attempt from Adobe to get in the game. IMO, unless Adobe builds this in ColdFusion somehow, they have no business here. It's a nice framework, somewhat limited at the moment, not advertised, but no where nearly as mature as many other frameworks...

Mochikit is too small ... it  will not grow as fast as needed and disappear over time.

Script.aculo.us is a nice low level animation library. It doesn't do Ajax and shouldnt be on this list. While it's a great library, used by RoR and will be around forever, it doesn't belong in this list.

In addition to all these products, we're missing some big players! Microsoft for instance. Atlas will be by far the most widely used Ajax framework ... I am not a Microsoft fan myself, but Altas was very well thought and it's a great product. Also, Laszlo, Tibco, Zimbra AT, Backbase, are larger than many libraries mentioned in this list... All of them are mature products, some are commercial, but you deserve to be on this list.

Brian posted today a small review on Red Gate's SQL Prompt, and SQL Completion Tool... the best part: it's free for a limited time! I haven't checked it yet, but it looks amazing, a must have I would say. SQL Prompt works with Microsoft Query Analyzer, SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio .NET 2003, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Manager, and UltraEdit32.

SQL Prompt provides Intellisense? style auto-completion for Microsoft SQL Server editors. It will tell you the exact formatting you should use for your SQL commands, while you are writing them and will therefore help you write fast, perfectly formatted SQL statements.

I've been talking about it for a while, but I finally downloaded ISAPI Rewrite. It is a tool that runs on top of your IIS (web server), and rewrites the URL's before they hit ColdFusion... what does it mean? what you can have better urls that do not look dynamic, and even though you could do that with CF in the form of index.cfm/var/value, you can now do the same and take the load off your CF server. In addition to that, you can even remove the index.cfm completely, so the urls look even cleaner. It is possible to translate:
/search/books to index.cfm?event=search&keyword=books ... how nice is that?

There's a great article at bpurcell.org that talks about all the different uses of this tool. I will be trying it out all this week and probably blog results within a few days.

Ray just announced blogCFC 5 Beta. For those who do not know, my blog runs blogCFC v4. I wanted to recode the entire thing in MVC, but I chose to wait until blogCFC 5 final is released.

Here's a list of changes.

• An admin. No more stinking design mode.
• Send to Friend. Send blog entries to a friend. Or to an enemy. Whomever.
• Preview mode on articles.
• Category SES URLs.
• Related Entries (Thanks to Jeff Coughlin and Charlie Griefer).
• Hey look, a pure CSS layout! Not here of course, but you can see it over at the BlogCFC blog. The admin is NOT pure CSS. I may ask Scott to take a look once I feel the admin is done. The CSS work was all done by Scott Stroz, so please thank him and visit his wish list. (His wish list, and Jeff and CJ's can be found in the word doc/pdf in the install folder. PLEASE thank them before me. I've been thanked!)
• New "Orange Crush" visual theme. Hmmmm. Orangy!
• More cow bell.
• Admin lets you quickly delete comments, trackbacks. You can also edit settings (although this is a bit dangerous). This is a nice way to update your spam list.
• Draft mode. It's not really called draft, but you can write an entry and leave the Released flag to false.
• Delayed entries really work now. Seriously, I mean it. It works.
• If you searched for poo, and clicked More Entries, it registered as a new search hit. It won't anymore. I still register a search hit if you follow it from the stats page.
• If you use an image as an enclosure, it will automatically be placed in the entry, top left. This was a user-submitted idea.