In the final episode recorded at CFObjective 2010, here's one of the sessions from the conference, a panel discussion called The Duct Tape Programmer vs. The Architecture Astronaut, where we discuss the balance of getting things done without a lot of planning vs. doing a lot of planning what you are going to build before you starting building it.

The emcee is none other than former co-host of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast, Matt Woodward.

Our panel members are:

• Simon Free
• Peter Bell
• Dan Wilson, and
• me, Brian Meloche

This session starts with a skit. I'm not in the skit. Matt's the narrator, Simon's the boss, Peter's the "Duct Tape" guy and Dan's the "Astronaut". At the end, the consultant that you hear is Mark Mandel.

This panel discusses a "get'er done" kind of developer or an obsessive planner trying the architect the perfect system. The discussion soon turns into a discussion about failed projects, lessons learned and best practices each of us use (or would like to use).

Over the last two years, I've had several requests wanting me to be interviewed for the podcast (and I'm willing to do that... I just haven't found an interviewer). That doesn't happen this time, but what you do get to hear a lot more than normal, since I'm not the emcee in this one, I give a lot of my own views and share some experiences. That said, I had to bleep out a few things I said in the session, but not any details that are missing from the experience - you still get the gist of what I was talking about.

This episode was recorded on Day 1 of CFObjective, April 21, 2010.

This was an interesting session that I think you'll enjoy. The audio quality, especially at the beginning, is not so good, but by the time we get into the panel discussion, the quality improves, so if you don't like what you hear at first, try to stick it out until the panel begins.

Run time: 1:05:11

I told you we're back, didn't I??? :-)

This is the second of three episodes recorded at CFObjective 2010.

This is a mobile interview, with Matt Levine and Sean Schroeder of Blue River Interactive (creators of Mura CMS). We mostly talk about the new Mura version 5.2. Later, we talk about the conference. Near the end of the interview, Chris Peterson of Alagad, whose session Matt and I just attended on the Amazon cloud, joins in and we continue to talk about sessions we attended.

This episode was recorded with a Flip Video camera, which has a surprisingly good microphone (sorry, no video). It was recorded in the vendor area on the morning of Day 3 (Saturday, April 24th). That's why you'll hear kids, people and a few unknown sounds during the recording. :) However, the quality of the sound is pretty good on this one, better than the next episode we have coming out next. This was the last episode I recorded. I had hoped to record one or two more at lunch, but my shuttle left earlier than expected, and I had to leave suddenly to make it (which I did, somehow). The next episode was recorded on Day 1, but will take some more time to clean up.

Run time: 21:53

Listeners, it is with great pleasure that CFConversations is back!!! And we're back with a vengeance!

This roundtable episode was recorded on Day 2 of CFObjective 2010. We had:

• Brian Meloche
• John Mason of the RIA Podcast
• Charlie Arehart, who is a regular on the RIA Podcast

We talk about the first couple of days of the conference, and various sessions we attended and presented. Here is a link to my presentation.

I also want to mention that John, Charlie, the CF Jedi Master himself, Ray Camden and Josh Adams recorded a roundtable earlier in the day for the RIA Podcast, and you can find that on the website or by searching for RIA Podcast on iTunes.

Believe me sincerely when I tell you how much it pains me when I can't get out a podcast, and the joy I am feeling right now that I was able to get this to you and in short order (24 hour turnaround). The last several months have been pretty tough on a lot of levels. Thankfully, things have stabilized and I'm hoping I'll be able to resume a regular schedule. I recorded two other episodes, including the Duct Tape Programmer vs. Architecture Astronaut session. I had planned to record my session, but I am planning something special for that later. Stay tuned!

Enjoy!

Run time: 40:45

It's been a longer than expected hiatus (yeah, I know you've heard that before), but we're bring something you've probably not heard about for the first CFConversations episode of 2010.

If you're using the ColdFusion Builder beta, you may have noticed that there's something missing that may have been a part of your old IDE: There's no code formatter.

Dreamweaver has its own code formatting features, and HomeSite+/ColdFusion Studio has Codesweeper. For CFBuilder, though, that functionality's not there. Now someone may build a ColdFusion Builder extension, but I've found another option.

Searching around the net for an Eclipse plugin to format code, I found HTML Formatter. Now, you may think it's just a program that formats HTML code, but it's designed to format ColdFusion code, in fact, it was designed specifically for ColdFusion. If you go to the link above, you'll see a YouTube video:

Through some detective work, I found the developer, Matt Pressnall, and contacted him. Eager to try it out before hearing from him, however, I paid the $14.99 and bought the program, and I was pleased with the results. I realized though it's called HTML Formatter, and it does format HTML, it was written for ColdFusion, and if you check it out, you'll see that the video on the homepage uses a ColdFusion example.

Matt contacted me back, and we got talking, and I realized that this, and he, would make a good interview for CFConversations, and it would help get the word out about HTML Formatter.

We talk about what led to Matt creating the application, how it can work within your Eclipse workflow but also with any other code editor, how it's currently Windows only, the licensing, how it works and what it can do over built in tools.

We also get into some of the other interesting things about Matt, such as working with his wife, who is a web designer, his company, Copper Six, his experiences working with Ryan Stewart prior to him joining Adobe, some other projects he's worked on, and an interesting story of a viral video he created while his wife was expecting their first child. Check that one out, it's quite cool!

This episode was recorded over the holidays, on December 28, 2009.

Enjoy!

Run time: 46:45

For this episode, here's an interview recorded on October 21 with David Stockton of Intergral, the company best known for their server monitoring tool FusionReactor and their ColdFusion debugger, FusionDebug.

David discusses their long awaited analytics tool FusionAnalytics, which I can't WAIT to get my hands on! You can sign-up for the beta here once it's out (it's still in Alpha):

http://www.fusion-reactor.com/labs/signup.cfm

The potential of FusionAnalytics, if it lives up to the hype, is big. I am looking forward to seeing what it can do.

David and I also talk at length about FusionReactor, some of the things he's seen during Intergral troubleshooting engagements, the framework vs. no framework discussion, ColdFusion 9, Railo and driving a beat-up 1989 VW Golf that he purchased for £82 across Europe and some of the adventures during that trip.

Run Time: 1:18:27

Note: This is most likely going to be the last CFConversations episode until at least December, due to some tight project deadlines I've got coming up. Stay tuned!

The last, but certainly not least, of the episodes recorded at this year's CFUnited was an interview I did on Day 3, with the guys from Blue River Interactive, the company behind the open source Mura CMS. Specifically, I interviewed:

• Sean Schroeder
• Matt Levine
• Ryan Thompson
• Malcolm O'Keeffe

This was a very fun interview to do, and I think that comes out in the recording. We talk about Mura, its beginnings, how Blue River markets themselves and Mura to other companies (very interesting to hear; it certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities), the name change (from Sava CMS), the guts of the CMS and Mura's reception at conferences, in the blogosphere and user group community, among other things.

If you haven't looked at Mura yet, I strongly suggest you have a good look at it. I think you'll be impressed! My recent exposure to Mura motivated me to get this interview. I have been told that I am somewhat frugal when it comes to giving out compliments, :-) I don't speak highly of something unless I mean it... and I do mean it when it comes to Mura, and no, they're not paying me to say that!

Enjoy!

Run time: 1:04:38

This episode's much later than expected, due to back to back but unrelated computer outages, and then several delays this month, but we're finally back with a new episode! And I apologize, but we won't be having any episodes recorded from MAX or CFinNC, and we'll only have stuff from this past weekend's bFusion/bFlex if we're lucky enough to have one of the guys record some for us (I'll update this once I know one way or another).

On this episode, we have another of our "Speakers of CFUnited" series, even though CFUnited has long since come and gone. This is an interview Mark Phillips of Standpipe Studios, best known for Vertabase, a project management application and software as a service provider that's written in ColdFusion.

I remembered Mark was at a Birds of a Feather at MAX 2007 that I hosted, where we discussed ColdFusion in the Enterprise. I was curious, as a lot has changed since that BOF. In the two years since that conference, we have two new and viable open source ColdFusion engines, a new ColdFusion 9 and much more. I asked what does any of that means for a company like his that sells both hosted applications and source code.

We also discuss the conference (from a Day 1 perspective), project management, the Vertabase application, AIR and dogs (briefly).

This interview took place on Day 1 of the CFUnited 2009 conference, which was August 12th.

Enjoy!

Run time: 30:49

I am happy to give you this second interview with Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe, following up the one we did at cf.Objective() 2009. This one was recorded on Thursday, August 20th over Skype.

In this post-CFUnited interview, we talk about the conference, both from each of their perspectives, and the corporate Adobe perspective. You may be surprised that one of them... well, you'll have to listen to find out!

I ask them about what they think about 4CFF.org, which was announced at CFUnited. Adobe isn't actually involved in 4CFF at this point, but they comment on it individually.

Since the last time we had sat down at CFObjective, Adam and Terry have been busy people! They both did stops on the user group tour, so I ask how the tour was for both of them. Since this was Adam's second tour, I also ask him how the ColdFusion 9 (Centaur) tour compared to the ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) tour two years ago.

Also since the last interview, ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder were released as public betas. I asked how the participation and response has been so far. It may or may not be common knowledge that ColdFusion Builder was built on Aptana Studio. I ask why Aptana was chosen over the Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst engines, which were also built on Eclipse.

From the last interview, I followed up on something that had been hinted at during the last interview: Battles with Adobe Marketing. I try to dig more to get some dirt, but I got a very good explanation of why certain things get held back. Specific to that, I ask about their/Adobe's efforts to get the word out about ColdFusion beyond the current developer base.

I ask about a couple of things that were recently posted on Twitter:

1. Terry's repost of this post, and some of the posts that preceded it.
2. Terry talks about apologizing for not being Ben Forta.

Note: Speaking of Twitter, I have setup a Twitter account specific to CFConversations, in addition to the ones I have for the Cleveland CFUG and my own: coofuushun.

We didn't get to touch on the CFML Advisory Committee much last time, so I ask more about it this time.

Adam and I mentioned on Twitter that we were going to have this interview, so Some questions to ask (names not identified to protect the innocent):

• Do you have a release schedule for ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder?
• When are you releasing ColdFusion 9?
• How much will CFBuilder cost?
• More info on EC2 licensing?
• Will the ColdFusion 9 licensing be changed to allow for development and staging licenses? (You may want to listen to the podcast for this answer specifically!)
• Is ColdFusion so powerful that it can create a problem that ColdFusion itself cannot solve?

An aside: I'd like to congratulate Adam and Rachel on their recent announcement!

Run Time: 1:00:51

Recorded on Thursday, August 20th, this episode is a post-CFUnited 2009 "wrap-up fallout" roundtable, where we review the conference as a whole, "post-conference withdrawal and fallout" of things that both happened and what didn't happen during the conference.

On this roundtable, we have:

• Brian Meloche (Host)
• Adam Haskell
• Dan Wilson
• John Farrar
• Mark Mandel (who had to leave about 45 minutes into the podcast)

If not mistaken, aside from the last roundtable (which I split into two episodes), this is the longest episode published so far! I could have split this one in two, but I've decided that it has to reach two hours to be split. And, besides, it took me long enough to edit this one, and splitting it would have meant even longer delays.

During this episode, we discuss whether or not CFUnited 2009 was the best ever, the venue, some of the highlights from the conference, including the day 2 keynote (where my friend Todd Sharp's SlideSix was prominently mentioned), the day 1 keynote, as Dan tells us about the 4CFF.org foundation (he's on the board), the CFML Advisory Committee, and memorable sessions from the conference.

We also talk about some of the things that happened on the periphery of CFUnited. We ask Adam about the Fusebox fork to FuseNG. We talk about Model-Glue 3.0, Railo 3.1.1 coming out and going out of beta, and Mach-ii 1.8 beta.

We also talk about what I call "Post-conference fallout & withdrawal", especially the "fallout" portion of that. We talk about several speakers cancelling last minute, the most prominent of them being Hal Helms. We talk about his last minute cancellation, and his training offer, and offer some other suggestions, like doing a ColdFusion Meetup and giving his slides to Liz so they can be put on CFUnited's website.

Lastly, we talk about upcoming conferences, such as CFObjective ANZ, CF in NC, bFusion/bFlex, RIA Unleashed, and MAX.

Here are some links to things mentioned in the episode (in no particular order, and please add any not mentioned here in the comments):

• Jeff Coughlin's review of CFUnited
• SlideSix
• 4CFF.org Foundation
• The CFML Advisory Committee
• ColdFusion 9
• ColdFusion Builder
• CFObjective ANZ
• JBoss' display of Railo on the home page
• Railo's announcement
• Railo's presentation at CFUnited
• Model-Glue 3.0 final release announcement
• Mach-ii 1.8 beta announcement
• What's New in Mach-ii 1.8
• Adam's open letter to the Fusebox community
• Adam's announcement about the FuseNG fork of the Fusebox framework
• FuseNG website
• FuseNG's Guiding Principle
• Michael Smith's announcement re: Adam and the FuseNG fork
• Hal Helms' cancellation post
• Hal's training offer
• ColdFusion Meetup
• The CF in NC conference
• bFusion/bFlex Conference
• RIA Unleashed
• Adobe MAX

Run Time: 1:41:22

Note: This episode had an issue in the recording that has since been corrected. Hence, I am reposting.

The first of a deluge of CFConversations episodes is upon you! It's time to break the log jam!

This episode that is one of the Speakers of CFUnited series, is an interview with Lawrence Cramer, who you may know from Cartweaver.

Lawrence is speaking (in one hour! - apologies to all) on Real World eCommerce with ColdFusion, and he talks about his presentation. He also talks about how he got started in Dreamweaver and later ColdFusion, ColdFusion 9/ColdFusion Builder (still code named, at the time) and some other projects.

Run time: 40:11 (was 36:17)

[8/17 Update: There was a track overlap at around the 20 minute mark of the recording. It was mentioned to me, but not fully explained, so I only went back to listen to it today - 8/17 - and finally confirmed the issue. The track has been corrected, and now no longer overlaps. Apologies to all!]

I told you that I wouldn't keep you waiting for part 2 of the Day 2 CFUnited roundtable. Well, I did not disappoint!

In part 2, we cover a lot of stuff, including things both at the conference and other things to think about.

We talk about the importance of giving feedback to speakers, particularly if the talk didn't meet expectations. I shared reactions from my recent CFObjective presentation and how, although most feedback was very positive, some of the more negative comments helped me for when I present it next. That sent us off on a tangent about OO in ColdFusion and the recent discussions in the Blogosphere, including the podcast Hal Helms recently did that OO (and software development in general) is not a destination but a journey.

We discuss several of the birds of a feather sessions on Monday night.

John Farrar talked about his silent authentication BOF. Listen to the recording if you don't know what that means; I didn't myself know what silent authentication until I heard the definition. FYI, the Google Group hinted at in the recording is:

http://groups.google.com/group/cfauthentication

We also talked about the CFML standards committee BOF, the user group BOF, the iPhone development BOF, and the sci-fi BOF.

We discuss Joe Reinhart's inspiring day 2 keynote that prominently featured my friend Todd Sharp's Slide Six site as an example of sites CF developers should aspire to build rather than oldschool CF CRUD-style apps that ColdFusion no longer has the same advantages it historically had over other languages.

We also talk about some of the other announcements that might be lesser known by CFUnited attendees, such as Railo officially going gold on Wednesday, Model-Glue 3.0 going gold on Monday, and Mach II 1.8 beta being released. We FINALLY talk about 35 minutes in about the Fusebox forking announcement, as the fork will be called FuseNG.

We discuss some of the interesting day 2 sessions we attended. Janine Driver, Mark Phillips, Charlie Arehart, Mike Brunt, Adam Haskell and Barney Boisvert were singled out as speakers with interesting talks.

Lastly, some of the demo derby apps were discussed, as the two Johns and Timothy are each competing in the derby.

If you are at CFUnited, we'll be doing another roundtable tonight (Friday, August 14th) at 7:30pm in the Legolas room (Dogwood E) if you would like to participate in the next CFConversations roundtable.

Also, I am trying to schedule some CFConversations interviews for the rest of today and tomorrow morning with speakers, sponsors attendees. Even if you only have a few minutes, I'd like to talk to you. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook contact me through the contact form or just yell at me in the hallway!

Run time: 1:03:50

Unfortunately, the roundtable scheduled on Day 1 of CFUnited kind of fell through, but we made up for that big time on Day 2! It was two hours of non-stop podcasting goodness!

Since it went as long as it did and there was nothing to cut, I decided it would be best to split the episode into two parts! That is a first for a roundtable episode.

On the roundtable panel:

• Brian Meloche (moderator)
• John Mason - By the way, check out John's new RIA Podcast.
• Timothy Farrar
• John Farrar
• Anita Neal
• Jason Dean

In part 1, we talk about the new venue for CFUnited this year, Stellr, the day 1 keynotes from Liz Frederick and Adobe, day 1 sessions, birds of a feather and hints at several other things that we dive deeper into in part 2.

I think you'll really enjoy this one!

Run time: 59:46

Another one from the backlogs, this episode in the Speakers of CFUnited series features Barney Boisvert. This is a great episode, which was recorded on Day 2 of CFObjective in May.

Barney talks about his session, CFGroovy - Groovy for the CFML Developer, which he's doing Thursday at 4:45pm at CFUnited. Of course, that means he talks about Groovy and why he uses it with CF. We also talk about Hibernate, Grails, Fusebox and his mini Fusebox-inspired framework called FB3Lite.

This is a great interview that I think you'll enjoy!

Run time: 58:04

On Day 3 of cf.Objective() 2009, May 16th, I was able to interview Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe.

I knew Adam back when he was a user group manager. Adam's been with Adobe for three years, first as a ColdFusion specialist on the sales team, and later as a product evangelist for ColdFusion and government. He recently took over as product manager for ColdFusion and Bolt, the code name for the new ColdFusion IDE.

Terry, or Terrence as you might know him, joined Adobe this year as a product evangelist for both ColdFusion and Adobe in education. Before that, he was an Adobe Community Expert, and an IT director at the Wharton School of Business.

In this interview, we talk about Centaur, Bolt, the reaction so far, presenting the new stuff, release dates, and what might be coming in what might be called ColdFusion 10 and the second release of Bolt. We talk about what it's like to be former ColdFusion fanboys now working for Adobe, and for Adam, taking over the reigns of ColdFusion. I also ask Adam about his recent accident while in London for a Wee Dram of Scotch and his recovery, the CFML standards committee, and the other open source engines.

We also talk about the user group tour, which starts today, is hopefully coming to a city near you in June. Check your local user group's website, or groups.adobe.com, for more information. In Cleveland, Adam is coming June 17th, and you can find out more and RSVP by going to www.clevelandcfug.org. Please note: RSVP is for those who will attend the meeting in person. This is not going to be recorded or available on the web. Sorry... this is a in-person event only!

The only thing I regret about this interview is that it's not long enough, but that's all the time we had. I didn't get to ask everything I wanted, and skimmed the surface on several topics. However, maybe that's a good thing. I hope to sit down again with each of them very soon.

A few announcements...

Several people have asked for my What to Do When OO Fails You in ColdFusion" presentation from CFObjective. I'm going to be presenting it next month to the CFMeetup group, and I had some issues with my demo code for the conference, so I'm going to hold off posting it until that presentation's over and I have better demo code. The wait will be worth it.

Ryan Mannion at Politico.com contacted me, and they are looking for a Senior ColdFusion developer. Politico.com is a high-traffic site, with 40-100 million page views per month and you may have seen them mentioned on CBS' Face the Nation or CNN. The position is full-time, in Arlington, Virginia, and if you're interested, please check it out http://www.politico.com/employment/senior_coldfusion_developer.html.

If you haven't found it yet, there's a new ColdFusion podcast out there. It's called CFHOUR(), with Dave Ferguson and Michael Sean Becker. They're up to episode 9, and you can find them in iTunes and at cfhour.com.

Lastly, and I don't know who to thank, but just before CFObjective, a beautiful new 24" ASUS monitor showed up at my door. The shipping label had my name for both the bill to and the ship to, so I'm not sure who sent me this wonderful monitor. It appears to be an upgrade from one that was on my Amazon wishlist. Whoever you are, thank you. If you're curious, my Amazon wishlist can be found here.

Run time: 43:27

I had hoped we would have been able to get in more than only one roundtable at cf.Objective(), but one is all I was able to get, and it's a good one. I had hoped to get this out before the conference ended, but I had a few issues on Saturday, and I just didn't quite finish it. Once I got home, it took a few more days before I finished it, but here it is, still fresh!

On the roundtable panel:

• Brian Meloche (moderator)
• Mark Mandel
• Andy Powell
• Andy Matthews

Recorded during the last Birds of a Feather (BOF) time slot on Day 2 Friday night (around 8pm), this roundtable

covers Days 1 & 2, but not Day 3 except to say what sessions we were looking forward to.

We start with the keynote, which covered Centaur and Bolt and a few other things. Several Centaur and Bolt features were discussed and shown during the conference, both during the keynote and during sessions Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan did during the first two days, and a few more on Day 3 that we don't talk about here.

We also cover the interesting sessions we attended in the first two days, our own sessions (we were all speakers), the BOFs we saw, the Flash Builder renaming announcement, sessions we were looking forward to on Day 3, and some of the well-known speakers that did not attend this year (though we missed several).

Enjoy!

Run time: 59:53

Note: The episode is the eleventh roundtable episode, not the twelfth. I corrected the title, but the link will remain as is.

I've finally managed to get out an episode! Woo hoo! I'm happy to finally break the long hiatus.

Recorded on Day 1 of cf.Objective() 2009, this features an interview with the new "Railo Gang of Four": Gert Franz, Mark Drew, Peter Bell and Sean Corfield. We go into how Sean, Peter and Mark each joined Railo, Railo UK and Railo US' corporate ties to the Swiss mothership, and how they are building a consultancy. I also ask them some challenging questions, like Railo going after the enterprise market of Adobe's, the relationship with Adobe, preaching to those Java and PHP developers they'd promised, and how the new guys each lost their Community Expert ties with Adobe.

It's a great interview, and it was something I could turn around fairly quickly (only a few hours), given the fairly decent quality of the recording and little editing needed. Thanks guys, for doing this!

Run Time: 42:30

A few It's worth noting that the Peter Bell and Sean Corfield interviews are NOT this interview. I interviewed Peter back in February, before the hiatus and him joining Railo. Sean's interview was on May 3rd, after him joining Railo, so it appears there are a lot of Railo episodes in the pipe.

Also, much to my disappointment, I have been unable to get a Day 0 or Day 1 roundtable done. Although I had interested people each night, both roundtables fell through. I'm going to try again on Day 2. I'm hoping that getting this episode out during the conference will help get a few more interviews and a roundtable done tomorrow (well, today, I guess). :)

For the fourth installment in our Speakers of CFUnited series, I interview longtime pillar of the ColdFusion community Charlie Arehart.

This interview covers a lot of ground. We got into a lot and uncovered some of Charlie's own personal "hidden gems". We talk about Charlie's early career before ColdFusion as a Model 204 developer and the parallels between the ColdFusion and Model 204 communities, the early ColdFusion community, his involvement with ColdFusion user groups, speaking, and writing, his time at New Atlanta evangelizing BlueDragon, leaving there and going independent, and the type of work he does with ColdFusion today as an independent consultant. We find out Charlie is an old "song and dance man". We also talk about Charlie's seminary studies, and what he plans to do with it once he graduates. This is a great interview, and I think you'll enjoy it. If you don't know Charlie, you will after listening, and you will know him even better if you already know him. Charlie is one of the nicest guys around, and his detailed knowledge of ColdFusion and teaching that knowledge are what makes him one of our community's greatest assets.

Of the episodes we recorded at MAX 2008, the sound quality of this interview is definitely the best of the lot. The audio quality is as good as you can get for taking it in a hallway at a major conference, and you can hear both of us very well throughout the interview.

Enjoy!

Run time: 1:06:33

In our third installment of the Speakers of CFUnited series, Dan Wilson interviews Douglas Knudsen, consultant with Universal Mind, who is speaking on Connecting Flex to ColdFusion at CFUnited.

Doug talks about topics from his talk at CFUnited, working in a coworking group environment instead of working from home, his start with ColdFusion, and music to work to, including Chinese Silk music.

Run time: 46:37

Yes, I've gotten through my computer problems! This is first episode almost entirely edited with my new Gateway desktop computer. I've also added a beautiful new ASUS 22" 1080p monitor to replace my old 22" NEC CRT, more memory and a new KVM switch. I'd like to thank Charlie Arehart and past donations I've already thanked in previous episodes to help make those additions possible. This episode was edited in a brand new "studio" of sorts. Over the holidays, I set up a new office in my house for podcasting and other work, built a desk I had received as a Christmas gift back in 2007, and all in all have a much better setup now than the tiny mobile desk I had before.

Recent delays were not due to hardware at all, but were mostly audio related, as well as some health issues in my family that have taken some time away from the computer.

As mentioned here, the audio from the Meet the ColdFusion Birds of a Feather at MAX 2008 has severe problems, making it very difficult to edit. Sixty hours of editing - yes, that's right - 60 - have not produced an episode of enough quality for me to release it. One good thing from the experience is that I'm now using Audition for my editing, and, after a bit of a learning curve, it really gives you a lot of power. I think I can still recover at least some of the content from the BOF, but I've decided to put that on hold for a few episodes and release some interviews, including a couple that have been on the shelf for a while.

For our second episode in the Speakers of CFUnited series, Adam Haskell and I interview Luis Majano, the creator of the ColdBox framework. This was recorded October 24, 2008, so it predates the MAX conference, the Bolt announcement, and Adobe layoffs, and ColdBox is now up to version 2.6.2. Of course, Luis talks about Coldbox, but he also talks about growing up in El Salvador during its civil war, including Salvadoran cuisine, coming to America, how he started in ColdFusion, pre-Coldbox, what led to Coldbox and why Luis is excited about ColdFusion's future. This interview, which was originally scheduled to be released before MAX, is one of my favorites so far. It was delayed due to some time sensitive episodes, vacation, and the MAX episodes (including ones not yet released, as mentioned earlier) but I'm proud to bring it to you now, and I think you'll really enjoy it!

Run time: 1:07:26

CFConversations wants to let listeners know that the UK CFUG, including Mark Drew, Niklas Richardson, Neil Middleton, Andy Allan and Kevin McCabe are now doing a monthly podcast called CF Docs. It's on iTunes, and you can find it here.

And, the ColdFusion Muse, Mark Kruger, has released his first podcast episode in some time.

For our first episode of 2009, we begin a new series of podcasts, called The Speakers of CFUnited. In this episode, Doug Hughes, best known for his Alagad consulting company and as the creator of the Reactor framework. They discuss, among other things, Alagad, Reactor, advice for developers who want to start their own consulting company, and the future of ColdFusion.

Although the first three episodes in this series do not specifically talk about CFUnited, expect most of these interviews will include some information about their planned sessions at CFUnited, along with the usual interview stuff.

We're planning a lot of activity around CFUnited, and we have some special things coming up in upcoming months between CFConversations and CFUnited. Stay tuned!

And thanks to Dan Wilson for producing another great interview episode!

Run time: 54:12

(NOTE: Episode 27 was originally going to be a portion of the Meet the ColdFusion Team BOF session recorded at MAX 2008 North America. Why it's delayed is explained here.

For the last ColdFusion Conversations podcast of 2008 (you might see me refer to it as such from time to time), we finally have the long awaited podcast of the ColdFusion Uber Panel from the Day 3 ColdFusion unconference at MAX 2008 North America in San Francisco, recorded on November 19, 2008.

As previously mentioned in CFConversations episode 25, the quality of the raw audio recording for the uber panel was pretty bad, but, somehow, through several false starts, I think I've finally made the audio listenable, even fairly good in some spots, although the quality does vary with the speaker. It's as good as I can get it, although it's still not as good as other roundtables.

The Uber panel features Ray Camden, Sean Corfield, Charlie Arehart, Jason Delmore and Joe Reinhart, with me as the host and moderator. You'll also hear Kristen Schofield, the ColdFusion Marketing manager in the second half of the recording (although she wasn't a panelist, you do hear from her several times).

Unfortunately, you probably already know that Jason Delmore was among the 600 laid off at Adobe earlier this month. Jason was speaking as the ColdFusion product manager at the time this was recorded. A replacement has not been named, but I just wanted to extend a holiday well wishes to Jason, Steven Erat, and to all of you former ADobe employees affected by this untimely layoff.

Speaking of the holiday season, I wanted to let listeners know that my Christmas gift was a new computer, and many of you donated funds and gift cards that were used in part to fund the purchase of a new computer, along with some of my own funds. Many thanks to those of you that helped me out with this, and it's very much appreciated. I didn't get everything I need, but it's a start. Unfortunately, I'm still not using that computer, as it has a bad memory stick. Once the replacement RAM comes in, I'll be using that machine for CFConversations editing and producing for the foreseeable future.

In case you're curious, I got this refurb from Tiger Direct, via Amazon. Yeah, you Mac guys will say why not a Mac? Well, I couldn't afford one, so I got the best computer I could for the money I had. Once it's fully up and running, it should make podcast editing a lot faster. I'm still saving up for a monitor.

After a long layoff, longer than I had hoped, we're back with episode 25. I was delayed in putting out this episode. I had hoped to get this episode out during MAX, but there were some difficulties in both scheduling and audio quality that delayed this recording. We were unable to record a regular day 2 roundtable as we had hoped, due to ColdFusion's placement in the Sneak Peeks at the end of that demonstration. We were prepared to leave the hall to do the roundtable after the ColdFusion sneak, but with it being the last shown, that meant there was no time, since people going to the event had to get right on the bus after the sneak (I skipped it this year - it would have costed us $100 for my wife to attend). Thankfully, I recorded Ram Kulkarni's sneak peek of ActionScript3 in ColdFusion from the sneak peek, and the audio recorded is the first part of this episode and I think the quality is pretty good. Here is the recording on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uImhKFhwAu0 With the lack of a day 2 roundtable, I tried to record an impromptu day 2 roundtable on day 3, which is the second part of this episode, just before recording the Day 3 uber panel, which will come out in the next episode. Immediately after MAX ended, I went on vacation with my wife for a week and a half, visiting with family and getting some much needed rest, which delayed the release of further episodes until December. We didn't fare as well with CFConversations recordings at MAX as I had hoped. We did get some good content, but not nearly as many interviews as expected, and several of the recordings came out REALLY bad. With the exception of an interview I did with Charlie Arehart, all of the recordings have flaws, and this impromptu day 2 roundtable and the day 3 uber panel, recorded directly after, are the worst of the lot. We had some problems with the amplification causing reverb and echo, and the microphone setup just didn't work. I've spent days trying to fix the next two episodes, and I'm still going to try to fix up the uber panel, but I'm done working on this one... It sucks, my desktop wants to crash every time I try to fix it... four times today! and if this gets out, you'll know I'm washing my hands of it (it sounds OK if you aren't listening with headphones). The content of this and ESPECIALLY the uber panel in the next episode are worth listening to... but the quality degrades beyond the sneak peek. Hopefully, I will have learned something from the 40+ hours I've spent trying to fix this episode, and I'll definitely be experimenting with audio setup of a venue with an audience and amplification for next time. Thanks to Doug Laakso for his recent Amazon.com gift card and Felix Tjandrawibawa for his recent Paypal donation. After creating this MP3, I was able to purchase a new desktop computer through Amazon with the gift cards received plus some of my own money, which should make it to me as an early Christmas present, and I hope to use Paypal to bump up the memory on the desktop. Enough of me apologizing! Here is episode 25! Run time: 17:48

This roundtable features talk Day 1 coverage of MAX 2008, from Moscone West in San Francisco.

Panelists:

• Brian Meloche (moderator)
• Adrian Moreno
• Judith Dinowitz
• Michael Dinowitz
• Jeffry Houser

We cover, in no particular order, CFUnderground, the MAX Day 1 Keynote, some info from Judith shared at a press conference by Kevin Lynch, sessions, food, the unconferences, festivities, how it compares to MAX 2007, and, especially, a look to tomorrow. ColdFusion wasn't covered at all, but the buzz is that ColdFusion will get a LOT of coverage during the day 2 keynote.

I've rushed this one out to you, so it may be a little rough in some spots, but I think I was able to clean it up quite a bit.

Run time: 40:57

For our final podcast before MAX, we have a very special interview with Michael & Judith Dinowitz, of the House of Fusion, Fusion Authority and Flex Authority.

Michael and Judith announce that they are giving away CDs with all issues of Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and Flex Authority at the MAX 2008 ColdFusion Unconference and Flex unconference. Of course, you'll be able to purchase subscriptions, too!

Of course, we don't stop there!

Michael & Judith go back to the beginning of ColdFusion, so Adam (who came in as an emergency interviewer, when my Skype recorder would only record my voice) and I ask about the early days of ColdFusion, the start of House of Fusion and the CF-Talk list, how Fusebox started with the help of CF-Talk, the technical side of the House of Fusion, other lists on House of Fusion, how Fusion Authority got started, then Flex Authority, the difficulties editing and publishing two journals, and family life.

Since we didn't have enough time to do a pre-MAX roundtable, we end the episode in a mini-roundtable fashion, speculating on what Adobe will announce at MAX next week.

You may hear a few weird things in the recording. It couldn't be helped, given the recording on Skype.

Run time: 1:21:15

In this episode, Jeff Coughlin interviews Geoff Bowers of Daemon Internet Consultants (pronounced demon). In North America, many developers may not know Geoff, but he's well known in his native Australia. Daemon organizes the WebDU conference, hosts the popular web aggregator Full as a Goog and are stewards of FarCry.

One of the frameworks that wasn't featured in our recent part 1 and 2 controller framework roundtables, but is an important framework, is FarCry Core.

Many ColdFusion developers only know FarCry for its CMS, and only think of FarCry as a CMS, but the FarCry CMS is written on top of a very powerful framework in and of itself, the FarCry core, that is used around many web applications, the CMS only being one of them.

In this interview, Geoff talks about his personal relationships with his employees at Daemon, what makes WebDU different from other developer conferences, the FarCry CMS, and explains the differences between FarCry Core and other ColdFusion frameworks. Namely, FarCry Core is completely object oriented from the ground up, where everything in it is an object, and has a built-in ORM.

This interview's a little long, but it's packed with content. I thought about splitting into two episodes, but we've got more coming before MAX 2008 San Francisco, so I'm releasing it as a single episode. Thanks to Jeff Coughlin for doing the interview and doing a fantastic job with the editing (I only had to tweak one thing, plus the intro/outro).

Show links:

• Fullasagoog.com
• WebDU Conference
• FarCryCore.org
• FarCryCMS.org
• FarCry 5.0 Jump Start Course
• Daemon Internet Consultants
• Some example sites using FarCry
• Mayo Clinic
• BlueScope Steel
• SelecTV
• Daemon Blog
• FarCry Twitter
• Fullasagoog Twitter

Run time: 1:24:48

This episode has been sponsored by Quality Logo Products, Inc.. Kurt Bonnet was kind enough to sponsor the podcast in exchange for this job posting:

Chicagoland Web / ColdFusion Developer (60k-80k) Quality Logo Products, Inc.

Quality Logo Products, Inc., located in Chicagoland, is a fast-growing company looking for a full-time experienced web developer to join our team. You'll have the opportunity to work directly with the business owners to design and implement new web sites, new features to existing sites, and digital marketing strategies. We offer an aggressive salary (60k-80k), $2500 per year allowance (in addition to the annual salary) for conferences/further education, annual performance bonus, retirement savings matching up to 3% of the employee's gross salary, 3 weeks vacation, telecommute/remote working opportunities, and more. Learn more at: http://www.qualitylogoproducts.com/jobs/ and apply at jobs@qualitylogoproducts.com.

This is direct hire by a fellow CFer, not a recruiter.

If you are interested in sponsoring an episode, you can do so with a PayPal or Amazon wish list donation. Email me at podcast at cfconversations dot com if you're interested.

You heard him on episode 19, and now, Adam Haskell and I interview Isaac Dealey, creator and lead developer of the onTap and DataFaucet frameworks.

In this interview, we discuss onTap and DataFaucet in more detail, and we also get to know Isaac in a very candid and personal way. We discuss Isaac's struggles with Asperger Syndrome, an Autism Spectrum Disorder, his diagnosis two years ago and his decision to go public about it. When you hear Isaac's story, you may realize that you might know or work with someone who has Asperger, but doesn't know it, or you might even have it yourself. I know I have worked with a few people who are definitely candidates for it. Regardless, Isaac's a brilliant guy, and you'll hear that in this episode. We also discuss Isaac's artistic side, with his Woohooligan site.

This interview's a bit long (for an interview), but we think you won't get bored and you'll enjoy every minute of this episode.

Run time 1:10:55

Following up on last week's Part 1 on controller frameworks, we now bring you Part 2, in what will be a continuing series on frameworks used in the ColdFusion/CFML developer community.

Part 2 features other viewpoints not represented in Part 1. For this episode, which was recorded on Wednesday, October 15th (technically, Thursday, 16 October 02:00 UTC time), we have:

• Brian Meloche (moderator)
• Adam Haskell (representing Fusebox)
• Ray Camden (representing Model-Glue)
• Chris Peters (representing ColdFusion on Wheels)
• Mark Mandel, of Transfer fame, but Transfer is an ORM framework, not a controller framework, so he wasn't representing it. On controller frameworks, Mark is framework agnostic.
• Nick Kwiatkowski, who is anti-framework.

The plan is to do more roundtables on other kinds of frameworks, such as ORM/Data, dependency injection, and unit testing frameworks, after the MAX North America conference some time in December or January. We're also interviewing some of the framework authors and lead developers in other episodes (we have two of those already done, and more scheduled).

The feedback on Part 1 so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and I believe part 2 is more of the same. This one was a little more contentious than part 1, and that leads to good podcasting! I personally think this episode is one of our best to date.

Enjoy!

Run time: 1:03:04

This roundtable is different than the previous five roundtables on CFConversations.

Inspired by the ColdFusion Weekly roundtable on Flex frameworks, and by popular demand, this episode is part one of a two part series on ColdFusion controller-based frameworks, and the first part of an ongoing series on ColdFusion frameworks in general. Although people were asking for it, this series is something I intended to do from the very early on in this podcast's development, and it was about time to start them.

For this episode, which was recorded on Friday, October 10th, we have:

• Brian Meloche (moderator)
• Kurt Wiersma (representing Mach-ii)
• Russ Johnson (representing ColdBox)
• John Farrar (representing SOS and Co-op)
• Isaac Dealey (representing onTap)
• Rick Mason (uses a simpler, homegrown framework)

Now... are you reading this, and are saying, "Hey!!! Where's Fusebox?? Where's Model-Glue?" Well, those frameworks, as well as ColdFusion on Wheels, a framework agnostic and an anti-framework person, are represented in part two of this series, which was recorded on October 15th and is still being edited at the time of writing this post. We had to plan for two sessions, and with scheduling conflicts, this is the alignment we got. Some had advocated doing all of the major frameworks together, but that wasn't possible with scheduling. Considering how well both episodes came out, I wouldn't change a thing! :-)

We're planning to do a series of frameworks roundtables over the next few months. We'll do roundtables that discuss Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control frameworks, database/ORM frameworks, and unit testing frameworks. Those episodes have not been recorded at this time, but we're planning to do those episodes after MAX in December and into 2009.

I think you'll really enjoy this episode! It was fun to do, and we got into a lot of interesting points. What you won't hear is the 4 1/2 hour discussion most of us continued after the podcast recording was done... but, you know what they say... What happens on Skype STAYS ON Skype! :-)

Run time: 1:12:37

This episode's a little different than what we've had in the past.

bFusion & bFlex was a two day event held last month at Indiana University, organized by Bob Flynn and the Indiana Multimedia User Group.

I missed the event, due to a scheduling conflict, but thanks to Bob, this episode features selected "Man on the Street" interviews from the event. I also want to give thanks to Heather Warnsman, a member of Bob's user group, and Keith Danielson, manager of the Indiana University Flash User Group, who conducted these interviews.

Run time: 20:25

This episode features the last of our interviews from CFUnited.

On day three, Brian Swartzfager sat down with Joshua Cyr, Principal Developer at Savvy Software, the makers of Savvy CMS, and manager of the Seacoast ColdFusion and Flex Group. In this interview, Joshua talks about Savvy, selling a CMS and ColdFusion at the same time, Adobe's direction with ColdFusion, conferences, and frameworks.

Run Time: 20:33

Due to some audio problems on the six year-old Dell Optiplex SX260 that I'm now using to produce the podcasts, episode 16 was delayed, but I finally got it out without crashing! :( Unfortunately, I can't afford to buy a new computer right now, so I have to make due. If you're tired of me complaining, a gift card from my Amazon wishlist would help me finally get some decent hardware or you can donate via Paypal.

This is our eleventh interview, and the first with an Adobe person in the hot seat! On day four of CFUnited, I sat down with Josh Adams. Josh is a Systems Engineer with Adobe, specializing in ColdFusion.Before that, Josh worked in a similar position at New Atlanta and, before that, was the Atlanta CFUG manager. During this interview, we talk about working for Adobe, his time at New Atlanta, user groups (a passion Josh and I both share), open source CFML and the initiatives surrounding CF9.

Run time: 30:12

Episode 15 was delayed a few times, but we finally have it for you!

On June 25th, Dan Wilson interviewed Mark Mandel via Skype. Mark is best known as the lead developer and creator of the Transfer ORM framework, as well as JavaLoader and teaming with Luis Majano on the new CodexWiki project (still in private beta). This episode was recorded around the time Transfer went to Version 1.0 release. Since then, development on Transfer 1.1 continued and is now at Release Candidate 2. Mark was also a member of the last CFConversations round table episode (11).

Thanks to Dan Wilson, who did the interview and all of the editing for this episode! I think you'll really enjoy this episode, and I second Dan's comments about Mark being a good guy to have a beer with.

Run time: 39:56

After an unplanned one week hiatus (personal commitments came up over the long weekend and during the week), we're back with episode 14!

On day four of CFUnited, Adam Haskell interviewed Mark Drew. Of course, most of you know of Mark as the lead developer of the CFEclipse project, and, of course, CFEclipse is discussed, but Mark and Adam talk about a lot more during this interview, including Railo, ColdSpring, conferences, tattoos, cooking, a little about bendy buses, and a couple of things you might not know about Mark.

We'll be starting up another round of interviews in upcoming weeks, and if we have spoken to you about an interview, you may be contacted soon to get it scheduled, especially if you aren't going to be at MAX San Francisco. We'll also be doing similar coverage at MAX as we did at CFUnited, so expect more roundtables and interviews then. If you want to be interviewed for the podcast, please email me at podcast at cfconversations dot com, or use the contact form.

Special thanks go out to Steve Bryant, Sid Maestre, and Ezra Parker for their generous gifts from the Amazon wishlist. Sid's donation helped pay for some well needed RAM on the six year-old desktop I am using to edit the podcasts (since I no longer have access to the laptop I had been using). Steve's donation was a new Blue Snowball microphone, which we'll be using at the MAX conference, and Ezra's donation is a step towards getting us a new laptop of our own for the podcasts. If you want to help out, too, a gift card from the wishlist is appreciated, or you can donate via Paypal. Thanks in advance for your donation!

Run time: 32:22

We're a little late with episode 13, which was partially by design (to get us back to a weekend release) and partially due to other commitments this week, but the wait is worth it!!!

On the 4th of July weekend, Brian Swartzfager was able to interview one of the legends in the ColdFusion community, Hal Helms. Hal's well known in the CFML circles for his contributions to Fusebox and Mach-ii, his numerous speaking engagements, his articles in CFDJ, FAQU and on his personal site, his training and as a podcaster.

At the end of the recording, I mention a Paypal donate button. You'll see that under our Amazon wishlist. Thanks in advance for your donation!

Run time: 50:07

On day two of CFUnited, Adam Haskell and I sat down with the ColdFusion Jedi himself, Ray Camden. We discuss several topics, including Ray's career, his new position at Broadchoice (which he had only been at for a month or so at the time of this interview), his many open source projects, why he writes open source applications, Spry and jQuery, ColdFusion 9, his role on the CF Language Advisory Committee, maintaining a balance between family, coding and blogging, TV and... tattoos.

The quality of this recording was one of our better ones from the conference, thanks to the use of Jeff Coughlin's Blue Snowball microphone. We're trying to purchase a Blue Snowball of our own, and you can help make that a reality with a donation of an Amazon gift card, which start at $5. Here is a link to our Amazon wish list if you care to donate or show some appreciation to our podcast.

Run time: 34:16

Hey! Adam here... Brian got a bit of a break from editing and I took this conversation on to edit and produce, with Brian adding some finishing touches in the end. This was my first hack at producing an episode so please be patient as I learn more about editing levels. Editing it was a challenge but I had a great time, I hope everyone enjoys the episode half as much as I enjoy producing it!

With CFUnited quite a few weeks in the past and 10 episodes under our belt it's time to bring back the round table platform. We're bringing it back in style we've gathered 8 stellar participants including:

• "The God of ColdFusion" Sean Corfield.
• Myself (Adam Haskell)
• Brian Meloche (it rhymes with wash already!)
• Rick Mason
• "Mr Transfer" Mark Mandel
• Bob Flynn
• Jeff Coughlin, and
• Richard Goodrow

As one should expect with this stellar group of participants, the content is great and covers a wide range of topics.

Bob Flynn kicks this conversation off with an announcement about bFusion and bFlex, two days of free hands-on training in Flex and ColdFusion at Indiana University... check out the episode for more info!

From there, you'll get the opportunity to pick up hiring tips and ideas from some folks that have been very successful in hiring top talent in the past (Brian's note: This was recorded before it was announced that Brian Kotek was also joining Broadchoice).

The conversation doesn't stop there, as we had to take this opportunity to pick Sean's brain about the CFML Advisory Board. Brian also announced that a new vendor-neutral site to promote the CFML language is in development (Brian's note: I pulled the domain name from the podcast because, well, we're not quite ready to completely open it up to the general public yet [but the basics are up]. If you are really interested in helping out, use the contact form and I'll tell you more.).

We asked Mark Mandel how he felt about ColdFusion 9's Hibernate functionality, and we all chimed in about other ColdFusion 9 functionality, and talked a bit about alternative editors and search tools.

We also covered the SQL injection hot topic, including a free tool from HP called scrawlr and a project called Query Param Scanner.

CFUnited was covered for the last time, I promise.

We also talked about the Railo 3 beta and the Open BlueDragon releases.

Sean and myself closed out the conversation with a short discussion of an announcement that should have been made by now. It seems this announcement still has not come out so it's exclusively made on this episode! (Brian's note... nope, we're not mentioning it in writing... you have to listen near the end of the podcast!)

Run time: 1:36:37

On Day one of the CFUnited conference, several of us sat down with Gert Franz of Railo, correctly pronounced "Rhy-low" (not "Ray-low"). Railo, a Swiss company, sells an alternative CFML engine, also called Railo, which has been getting a lot of attention in the CF developer community in recent months. During Gert's keynote at the Scotch on the Rocks conference in early June, it was announced that version 3.0 would have support for CFVIDEO and Hibernate, which had been getting a lot of attention in the CF blogosphere, especially since the cf.Objective() conference in early May. Furthermore, Gert announced that Railo version 3.1 would be released as open source under the LGPL license, with support from JBoss and hosting from Jboss.org.

The Railo open source announcement was enthusiastically welcomed throughout the CFML community, as has been documented on several previous episodes of CFConversations. Even key Adobe personnel such as Ben Forta and Adam Lehman were enthusiastic about the announcement.

Also, during Adobe's keynote at CFUnited, it was announced that Gert was one of the members of the CFML Language Advisory Committee.

In this episode, we talk about all of these things, some of Railo's history, and a little about Gert himself, who's a warm and very approachable person, with an interesting history that I think you'll enjoy hearing about.

This was an interview that a lot of people wanted to be a part of, or just listen to in person. Also in the room were: Peter Bell, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jeff Coughlin, Joe Reinhart and Rick Mason, and most of them get involved in the interview at one point or another. This interview was one of my highlights of CFUnited, so I hope you enjoy it.

This was the first podcast recorded at CFUnited, and we didn't have access to the Blue Snowball microphone we used for most of the interviews and round tables. This interview was recorded from three Macbook Pro built-in microphones, although one of them produced a recording that was unusable. The interview itself required substantial post production editing to make it listenable, so the quality may not be as good as episodes six through nine. However, I think, it's now in a listenable form.

Due to the difficulty in editing this episode and the timeliness of other episodes, this episode got pushed back a couple of times. Ironically, this worked out, as Gert is doing a U.S. user group tour that starts on Monday, July 28th, which coincides with the release of this episode.

This is the first episode where my inserts are recorded via the new headset, courtesy of Marc Esher. If you liked the new music track, it's from a band called spineCar, from the Album Up From the Mud, and the track is called "Smoke". I'm thinking it's going to be the podcast's theme song. What do you think?

Run time: 56:47

In this... controversial... special mid-week episode of CFConversations, Rick Mason interviews Nick Kwiatkowski, manager of the Michigan Flex User Group, and the organizer of the Michigan Flex Camp, which will be held in East Lansing on July 30 & 31. It's a two day Flex camp that only costs $40... and that's a heck of a deal.

This episode, like the last one, has a lot of Flex content, but there is a lot of ColdFusion content, too. Nick talks about what he thinks about ColdFusion frameworks, the ColdFusion "elite", Flex and "the cloud".

We're using a different theme from the last episode. This track is courtesy of monstertracks.com, and it's called MEGARAT30. Tell us what you think of the music intros. We're experimenting, and will try a few more in upcoming episodes.

Run time: 38:02

In this episode, Dan Wilson interviews John Wilker of 360 Conferences, the company that brings you the 360 Flex conferences.

John and Dan talk about the 360 Flex conferences, the upcoming conference in San Jose on August 18-20, ColdFusion and Flex. A summary of the conversation can be found here:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddsr546t_26fshzw7k2

Note: This is the first episode not produced by Brian - this one is all Dan! :) Dan is one of the team here at CFConversations, and we're pleased to have one of his episodes on the podcast. He's got more episodes coming! Also, by popular demand, this episode features our first experimentation with theme music. Let us know what you think. We'll experiment with other tracks and how they are presented in the next upcoming episodes. Also, since Dan was the producer on this episode, let us know what you thought of the audio quality, and how it compares to our most recent interviews.

Run time: 43:06

Our third interview episode is with John Farrar of SoSensible.

On July 2nd, Packt Publishing released John Farrar's ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial, their first ColdFusion title, and the first non-CFWACK title since Rob Brooks Bilson's Programming ColdFusion back in the MX 6.1 days.

John's a fellow user group manager, and a friend of mine. On Day 2 of CFUnited, I interview John, along with Adam Haskell (who's listening). We talk about the new book, John's CO-OP and SOS frameworks, JQuery, CF9, open source, and the Adobe education licensing of ColdFusion announcement. We also talk about his family. John's got a big family, and I try to get down to how he can get anything done working from home with twelve kids.

This was recording via Jeff Coughlin's Blue Snowball microphone, which was also used for the CFUnited Round tables. The sound had to be boosted in post production, but it seems to be good under the circumstances. There is some echo in the room.

Some people have noticed a quality improvement in the last few episodes. I hope this episode's quality doesn't suffer too much from the last two. It was recorded a different way, so it may sound different. As previously mentioned in other podcasts, we're still learning how to produce these, and although we're learning more as we go, we don't have all the equipment we need to do episodes of the quality Matt and Peter of ColdFusion Weekly did in their run. Unfortunately, getting the right equipment isn't cheap. If you would like to help us out, please click on the Amazon wish list icon found on the right. Even a $5 gift card will help to get us equipment like microphones, mixers for on location interviews, and even Macs to replace the borrowed computers we're currently using to produce the podcast (sad, but true). Thanks to Dan Wilson and Rick Mason who purchased the first few items off of the wish list to help make the podcast a better one.

Links to the book:
Packt Publishing
Amazon.com

Run time: 50:19

Our second interview episode is with Michael Smith of Teratech. We discuss putting on CFUnited, Fusebox, Teratech, the recent Adobe announcements made at CFUnited and open source CFML.

I have mentioned previously that I have help with these episodes. The interviewer this time is another Brian, Brian Swartzfager, who you may recognize from the ColdFusion Weekly roundtable episodes, as well as CFConversations Episode 3.

This was recorded using a handheld recorder. The quality is quite good, but it might sound a tad more "AM radio" like than some of our other episodes.

Enjoy!

Run time: 16:54

The first four episodes of CFConversations have all been in a roundtable format, but that's not the only format CFConversations will be using.

With episode 5, we begin releasing episodes in a new format: Interviews.

In this episode, Brian sits down with Liz Frederick and Nafisa Sabu of Teratech. We discuss putting on conferences as big as CFUnited, their thoughts on the CF developer community, their backgrounds, and open source CFML.

This was recorded using a Flip Video camera behind the booth on day 2 at CFUnited. The audio quality is surprisingly good, but you will hear some background noise from both the conference and the street.

Enjoy!

Run time: 19:59

Recorded at the end of Day 3 of CFUnited.

On this podcast:

• Brian Meloche
• Rick Mason
• John Farrar
• Dana Tierney
• Ken Auenson
• Chris Hough
• Seth Bienek
• Timothy Farrar
• Adam Tuttle
• Adam Haskell

Most of this episode focuses around the ideas that came out of the Promoting CFML Outside of the CFML Community session Friday evening. We think some of these ideas are a call to action for the CF developer community.

Group 1 - Promoting CFML to New Developers

Team Consisted of:

• John Farrar
• Rick Mason
• Dana Tierney
• Ezra Parker
• Jeff Coughlin
• Brian Swartzfager

Summary: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_27dnzqx5gs

Group 2 - Promoting CFML to PHP Developers

Team Consisted of:

• Adam Tuttle
• Timothy Farrar
• Seth Bienek
• Dee Sadler
• Ken Auenson
• Chris Hough
• Adam Howitt

Summary: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_26frtdsbv8

We hope you'll find this long podcast worthwhile!

Time: 1:37:27

Update 6/25: I have updated the MP3 to boost the volume level.

Episode 3 is a roundtable summary of Day 2 at CFUNITED, with Brian Meloche, Adam Haskell, Rick Mason, Judith Dinowitz, Brian Swartzfager, Dee Sadler and Bill Shelton.

We go through the morning and afternoon sessions, Host My Site's keynote, more conference discussion and we also get more opinions about Adobe's keynote, specifically the new educational licenses.

Play time is 42:54. Enjoy!

Update 6/25: I have updated the MP3 to boost the volume level.

Episode 2 is a roundtable summary of Day 1 at CFUNITED, with Brian Meloche, Adam Haskell, Rick Mason, Dan Vega and Ezra Parker.

We go through the keynotes, which included several important announcements from Adobe, sessions, birds of a feather, hotel and conference venue impressions, and a look to Thursday.

Play time is 1:20:19. Enjoy!