I came out here around the first week of March this year to work on a high level project at the Adobe HQ. It has been a great time and tremendous experience not only working at the Adobe HQ (“The Mothership”) but also getting to experience California.

October 24th I will fly one-way back to Buffalo NY. During my stay I only flew back 3 times for a total of about 8 days, so needless to say I didn’t get much time back at home, not cool. While Buffalo may not be sunny Cali, its home and I miss my friends and family in that area. It actually gets a little boring when everyday is 78 degrees and sunny, it has only rained 3 times that I can remember out here. It was cool to actually see something different happen outside.

The best part is I am rolling into another Adobe project but I will get to work off-site back home. I am very excited about this project as it is a 100% ColdFusion 8 and Flex 2 project!

A colleague of mine called me today and he is in need of a few resources for jobs in the Buffalo NY area.

• .NET Developer
  
• Junior Flash Developer
  
• Microsoft SQL Server Admin

If interested please email your contact info to me so I can pass along: Brian AT newpointmedia DOT com.

As the Adobe MAX conference has now kicked off, Adobe has released a whole bunch of new beta's on labs.

• Adobe AIR Beta 2
  
• Adobe Flex Builder 3 Beta 2
  
• Adobe Media Player

What are you waiting for! Go to labs and check out the new Adobe technology releases!

It is so sad but I will not be attending MAX this year. It was a tough decision not to go at the last minute. Due to the timelines of the projects I am working on at Adobe, I really had to be 100% focused on the projects. Yes I said projects; I am rolling into another important ColdFusion/Flex project at Adobe so I am pretty busy. At this time I cannot go into detail about either project but hope in the future I will get to talk about them as they are really cool and I would love to share!

I look forward to reading all the blogs to hear about all the great things that are going to come about from MAX this year!

As you may have noticed I have not posted much. I have been slammed with many projects going on. Also I was running an older version of Blog CFC and it really needed an update so here it is!

ColdFusion 8 has another feature that allows a ColdFusion developer to leverage .NET inside their CF applications.

It allows you to call .NET classes in your ColdFusion code. ColdFusion 8 allows you to access and use these classes as CFML objects in the following ways.

- Direct access and control of the Microsoft products like Word, Excel PowerPoint and so on.
- Use existing .NET components
- You can use .NET assemblies to leverage features that may not be available in ColdFusion or Java. Note that because ColdFusion is a J2EE application, its more efficient to create what you need in Java then .NET

Also, your .NET classes you want to use do not have to be local. Your ColdFusion application can access .NET components that are on remote systems.

You may be asking, but we run Linux or OSX and do not have the .NET runtime installed. Not to worry, you don’t have to have the .NET runtime installed on the same machine as ColdFusion, you can still access .NET assemblies on remote systems even though your local system does not have the .NET runtime installed.

Here is a simple example from the docs of how to use .NET classes.

Also note that if you make a change in the .NET assembly, ColdFusion will recognize the change and use the new version. You can also secure communication to .NET from ColdFusion using SSL.

I am on the lookout for a ColdFusion developer for a position here in San Jose CA. Please email me your contact information with resume ASAP!

A security evaluation report was just released from Information Risk Managment, Plc. This report in short said that "ColdFusion 8 exhibits a high degree of resilience to application layer attacks with no compromise on functionality provisioned by the new features"

Read the full report for more details

Here is the conclusion they came to:

"IRM’s security evaluation of ColdFusion 8 revealed that the product has been well designed with security as a major consideration during development. The ColdFusion 8 model requires certain administrative tasks to be performed as a part of deployment in order to enforce a stringent security regime. Security management of these servers is essential in ensuring security of the overall deployment. It is important to follow Adobe’s best practice guides for securing these servers and applying appropriate security patches. Adobe also maintains resources on secure development of ColdFusion applications which can be found at the following URL:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/security.html.

ColdFusion developers should strive to incorporate secure coding principles into their development methodologies as highlighted by Adobe. Overall IRM was impressed with Adobe’s integration of security processes in the development lifecycle, the result of which can be seen in ColdFusion 8, a product that withstands stringent security testing with relative ease. All of the new features incorporated in this release adhere to highest levels of application security enforcement without any compromise on functionality."

Very cool!

While CF 8 is packing allot of features, it has gotten a big boost in the speed department as well! Buckle your seat belts!

Check out some stats:

1. Working with structs is 2x faster
2. List manipulation is 3x faster
3. Switch/Case statements are 3x faster
4. CFPARAM is 40x faster
5. Date functions 5x faster
6. Regex 3x faster
7. isDefined() 2x faster
8. CFC creation is 30x faster

When tested on Blog CFC and the Adobe.com store, there was a 30-40% speed increase!!!

It just keeps getting better and better for ColdFusion. Sean Corfield posts about using PHP in your ColdFusion pages. Check it out!

So why would you use this? ColdFusion gives you everything you need and more then PHP and is much more productive, we all know that. But, one thing that CF always got criticized for was the lack of open source applications. With this ability you the CF developer can now grab free PHP apps and integrate them with CF very easily. In fact, PHP can now see CF variables, and CF can see PHP variables. Both the CFML and PHP code are compiled down to java byte code.