I just got back from the first day of the CFUnited conference, and what a difference from past years. It has always been a well-attended event, but this year the venue is big enough to hold all the people. In previous years, I've jokingly referred to the conference as the "Holiday Inn Con", but this year they pulled out all the stops. By all accounts, they drew about 750-800 people this year. Of course, the conference always draws the best of the best ColdFusion speakers, like Ben Forta. Unfortunately, I'm only able to attend a few sessions this year, but there are quite a few good ones. The first was a good session by Sandra Clark about the CSS box model. I've always used CSS as opposed to tables, but the box model is something I always need reinforcement on, not being a designer. She presented the material very well. Next, I sat in on Simon Horwith's session on design patterns. Although I'm not a big fan of specific patterns, Simon also talked a lot about general good practices in programming, of which I am a big fan. He touched on CFCs in shared scope, which was the subject of my CMX article last week.

I next attended Bogdan Ripa's session on the Interakt extensions. The company has really put out some impressive stuff, which Bogdan showcased. I also got to talk about the practice of overwriting system files, which I blogged about here. I had a good talk with Alexandru about the situation, and he expressed the desire to move forward with plans to stop this practice. I understand that it would be impossible for the company to remove their products from the market to correct this problem, but at the same time I hope they move forward in a way that shows that they are committed to not following this practice in the future.

Then I split my time between Dean Harmon's session on <cfdocument> and <cfreport>, which really add much needed functionality to ColdFusion, and Sean Corfield's session on Fusebox, Mach II, and other frameworks. I'm also not a huge fan of frameworks, but I can see where such a system can be a huge benefit to a team or a larger scale site.

Finally, the open bar was a high point. . .enough said. I had a few drinks with the Interakt guys and talked about DW development, PHP, ColdFusion, and poker.

Fun and informative day, I hope I can make it back for a few more sessions.