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As tends to happen the first time i do any new presentation, I woke up ridiculously early to obsess over the details. I was up and about by 4am, and wasn't scheduled to present until 9:30a, so I had lots of time to rehearse, tweak and otherwise muck with it. One of the things I found, was that the Jabber Transport I was planning on using in the presentation was down, so I needed to find a back up plan. Yesterday, I'd talked to the people (actually one guy, whose name I didn't catch) at Zion Software about there Instant Messaging plug in for CFMX7, so I thought I'd give them a try. Even though the pragmatist in me thought it would be fine to cut out the Instant Messaging, and not worth trying to install new unknown software so soon before a presentation, I went for it anyhow. By 8am, I received the email from them approving my request for a Demo license, and by 8:05 it was up and running flawlessly.
The presentation went off reasonably well; except for a particularly bad choice on my part to run in dual monitor mode, when what was on my screen was not the same as what the audience saw through the projector. Bad choice. I managed to survive, but probably seemed a bit clueless at times. Sorry about that.
I managed to see a few other sessions, Sean Corfield's talk about enterprise integration was fascinating, giving a behind the scenes look at the architecture which makes Macromedia.com tick.
Joel Spolsky (who yesterday gave a wonderfully rambling keynote), gave his "Project Management the /Joel on Software/ way" talk. Again, a great speaker. This was a bit like a 12 step program for programmers.
My final session of the day, was Mike Nimer's CFMX7's Flash Forms and XML Forms. Lots of good stuff. As a Flex developer, I haven't yet had a need to use the flash forms, but it was good to see what they were all about. I was a bit bummed to learn the XML forms use XSL/XSLT on each request to generate the HTML, rather than running it once and caching it. The main reason I tend to avoid XSL on public facing sites is the time the transformations tend to take.
Tonight there's an event for the 10th Birthday of ColdFusion, I fear there may be more free beer, and I'm all out of Advil. At least I don't need to present tomorrow.
