I just got back from Shlomy Gantz's two hour presentation on Managing ColdFusion projects. First off, I would like to say that his presentation style is the best I have seen yet at the conference. He spoke very well, at a great speed, and was very well organized. This alone made the presentation very attractive.

The content consisted of everything that a project manager or developer should keep in mind when starting your projects all the way to maintenance phase. This included things like standards, requirements, consensus, reasons for failure, project success factors etc.

Shlomy included a small bit of participation with the audience to keep everybody awake and to encourage interactivity. He would ask what kind of experience people had with certain processes or what suggestions they had for others. He also encourage the basic hand-raising on certain items.

I really got a lot out of the class and encourage anyone to attend his sessions at any given conference that he attends. He also talked about his code generator which I have never tried before but I know a few people that use it and like it a lot.

His website is ShlomyGantz.com

I will not be posting my notes for this session due to the nature that they are quite detailed in capturing the presentation wholly.

Brian Rinaldi has just updated his Illudium PU-36 Code generator with some new features. One thing some users will like is that you can now do either XSLT or CFML templating.

For those of you that are wondering, the CFML templating engine is custom code written by Brian. This was in response to numerous requests that Brian had from users. There is still some escaping involved as would be expected. Such examples would be:

To many people this is easeir to read because the ANSI equivalents to the less than and greater than are not in place for the CF tags that you want to put in the template.

As of this post, Brian did not have a build of the application yet but it is available on the SVN over at Google Code.

MIchael's presentation was an excellent crash course in regular expressions. He hit the main points and generated quite a bit of interest in the class. In fact, there were even people sitting on the floor.

The main points that I gathered from the class where that regular expressions:

• Matches patterns of characters
• Non-special characters are matched literally in the expression
• A period is a control character that matches ANY other character.
• A collection of non-control characters matches another collection of non-control characters
• Using the caret (^) will ensure that you are matching at the start of the string, whereas using the dollar sign, will ensure that you are matching at the end of the string
• RegEx ranges of characters (the range is defined by the list of ascii character in their numerical order (such as at AsciiTable.com) and used in side a set of square brackets ( [ ] )
• Multipliers allow you to match anywhere between 0-n, or 1-n or anything in between of a set of expressions
• Finally, Michael talked about a couple of other things such as POSIX expressions, that are a little more readable.

Just sitting here waiting for the keynote to start. We have a half hour with Michael and a half hour with Ben Forta for the "Adobe Keynote".

Today, I attended Nate Nelson's SQL Performance class (aka Advanced Database). I very much enjoyed this class and got a lot out of it. There were many relevant sections of the course that I could easily apply to my day to day tasks to ensure that I have database driven applications that are efficient and run quickly.

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Photos are already starting to stack up for CFUNITED since the pre-conference classes have started today:

http://flickr.com/groups/cfunited/pool/

Yay I made it! This was my first time traveling so far by myself. I had also never dealt with any Metro system before. But everything worked out fine and I am here safe sound.

Looking forward to Nate Nelson's Advanced Database class tomorrow morning!

See you at the conference!

I just arrived into the Phoenix International Airport. I have a connecting flight from here into Washington DC Reagan. As I was walking towards the gate that I was to depart from, I noticed that many people had their laptops out. My thought was that either this town was highly technical, or that there was free WiFi :-)

The latter proved true when I opened up my MacBook and began surfing right away. Good job Phoenix! Maybe you can chat with John Wayne Waiport and LAX to get them to do the same.

Flight at 12:13pm PST towards Washington.