Next week I'm off to London to speak at CFUnited Europe, and the following week, I'll be speaking at AJAX World East.  In both places, I'll be speaking about the joy that is Flex 3 in all its forms.  The CFUnited talk is more focused on how Flex can improve the lives of CF Developers, while the AJAX World one is more focused on how Flex can help RIA developers increase their real world Retursn On Investment from RIA's.  On another note, CFUnited has just released the session schedule for their Washington DC Conference in June, and rumor is that the session schedule for WebManiacs should be available shortly.

The WebManiacs 2008 conference schedule has been finalized and registration is open. Early bird pricing ends Jan 31. Consisting of a two-day ColdFusion conference ("CFManiacs") coupled with a three-day Flex conference (FlexManiacs), hosting over 70 speakers and 130 distinct topics (some of which are hands-on), WebManiacs promises to have the most comprehensive coverage of Flex, AIR, and ColdFusion at the lowest price. Seating is limited, so folks should register early in order to get into the more popular sessions.

I'll be speaking on building AIR applications in the first few days of the conference.

1/18 - Flex Camp Chicago

1/24 - Flex Camp Omaha

2/24-2/27 - Flex 360 Atlanta

3/12-3/13 - CFUnited Europe

5/1-5/4 - CF.Objective()

5/19-5/23 - WebManiacs

6/25-6/28 - CFUnited

I've been asked to speak at the first ever CFUnited Europe this year.  CFUnited, which has been running each year in the Washington DC area (earlier under the name CFUN) for the past 9 years, is branching out, and hosting the conference in Europe as well. The conference will be on March 12th and 13th in London.  Hope to see you there!  I hope to be presenting on Flex 3 for ColdFusion developers.

While the blog was down last week, the CFUnited Scheduler was launched.  This is a cool little AJAX app, which lets you figure out which sessions you want to attend.  You can browse the sessions by time, by presenter, or by track.  If you are going to CFUnited this year ( a must for all ColdFusion Developers ), this is an invaluable tool! 

By the way, I'll be presenting my topic "Flex 2 for ColdFusion Developers" Thursday and Saturday, both days at 8:30 am.

 See you there. 

According to Matt Chotin's blog, the Max 07 dates and locations are as follows:

As an attendee of each of the Allaire / Macromedia / Adobe conferences since 2000, I have every confidence this event will be as good, if not better than the rest.  See you in Chicago!

For the 6th consective year, I have been invited to present at CFUnited (acutally, in 2002, 2003 and 2004 they called the conference CFUN, but thats a different story).   Of those 6 years, I've only missed presenting at one, CFUN 04, as my daughter was born 3 days before the conference started.  Oddly enough, we are expecting our 2nd child about a month before this years conference, but barring a really late delivery, I'm sure I'll have no problems making it to the conference this time.

This year, I'll be presenting on the topic "Real World Solutions: Data Push using FDS and CF."

This year's conference will be held June 27th - June 30th at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center.  For all the details, visit the CFUnited-07 website

Brian Szoszorek of New Era Caps and New Point media has recently written another worthwhile DevNet Article on ColdFusion Gateways for Adobe.  This time, Brian focuses on using a Directory Watcher gateway to dynamically update a Verity collection.  Certianly a worthwhile read, reminding CF developers about the value of Vertiy, and some added value which can come from integrating an Event Gateway with it.

Anyone who came to my session at CFUnited about EventGateway's, heard me reference an upcoming article by Brian Szoszorek.  Well, that article has now been released and can be found on Adobe's DevNet.  For those of you who weren't at my session, the article walks you through an excellent use case for a DirectoryWatcher Event Gateway in ColdFusion.  Any of you who have production servers with Trusted Cache enabled (which really should be every one!), knows it can be painful to manage the cache as files are edited on the server.  Brian's article will walk you through how to use the ColdFusion Administrator API and a DirectoryWatcher Event Gateway to programmatically update the trusted cache when it is needed.

An excellent idea that can be put into place in virtually every CF7 app!  Check it out.

Browsing to the MAX 06 site, i found they have released more details, including a listing of the 8 tracks:

• Adobe Collaboration Solutions
• Adobe LiveCycle Technologies
• eLearning
• Mobile and Devices
• Rich Internet Applications
• Vertical Market Solutions
• Web Design
• Web Development

They even have listings of each session to be presented.  I've been asked to present the "Getting Started with Flex Development"  session, which is one of 25 Rich Internet Application sessions of the conference.  Anyhow, up to now, information about the conference has been few and far between, but fortunately, there is now a wealth of information available.