Well, CFUnited is over for yet another year. This is something like my fifth or sixth year of attending this ColdFusion conference. (The years are starting to run together; I’m feeling way too old to be 29.) Ran into a friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in something like 12 years yesterday, which was very cool — he’s working at Adobe and was giving a couple of presentations on Flex and the future of Adobe development platforms. It was definitely good to catch up a bit.
This year’s CFUnited was a mixed bag for me, honestly. I guess part of the experience was colored a bit for me by the fact that the tech path that my organization’s going to be taking in the near future is most likely going to take us far away from ColdFusion, right at a time that, ironically, ColdFusion is moving closer to .NET in some regards. The other part of it was that besides the new and exciting stuff that’s soon to be coming down the pike with CF 8, Flex 3 and the new integrated runtime (AIR, neé Apollo), a number of the sessions were rehashes of last year’s. That said, there was much good information distributed, as usual.
I’ll be taking some .NET training soon as my org’s getting prepared for some big changes coming up in the next few months. Tackling a new language or two has gotten me a bit excited; definitely looking forward to the experience. Got down the Express versions of the various Visual Studio bits and have been playing around with them a little bit on my Vista laptop. I think I’ll try to make a desktop front end client for my magazine database as a pre-training warmup excersize in familiarizing myself with .NET-style data access and brushing up on my object-oriented stuff, which I haven’t had much opportunity to try out over the years. Will let you know if anything interesting comes of this.