Day 2 at CFUnited was very short for me. I had to work. ;-) I was able to attend the first two sessions of the day, however. Dave Watts' session on ColdFusion and IIS security on Windows was very informative. He crammed a lot of information into the session, and I learned a lot. Apparently I'm doing some pretty bad things on my servers. We are currently doing a lot of upgrading at the company I work for and hopefully I'll be able to put some of this best practice network stuff into actual practice.

The second session I attended was by Jeff Tapper on the new CF event gateways. Very cool stuff. I can think of some very good uses for this new functionality, as soon as I install the CF 7 server.

I had to leave after that, but I sent one of my guys in my place to attend a few other sessions. He enjoyed it.

One of the most impressive things I've seen this year was the new ASP.NET tools and framework. Microsoft is really getting their act together. Those of you who know me know that I like to build sites using ColdFusion custom tags like this:

<cfimport prefix="template" taglib="tags">
<template:template>
page content here
</template:template>

Imagine my surprise when I saw the new ASP.NET framework with custom templates that looked identical. The advantage I can see is that the design environment actually shows what is in the template, which is the entire page design. In ColdFusion, there really isn't a design environment for the server other than Dreamweaver, which only shows rudimentary designs when CF code is implemented. I'll be looking more seriously at these Microsoft tools, as the MM tools have really let me down over the past few years. Funny to come away from the ColdFusion conference excited by the competition. ;-). Nah, I still love ColdFusion.

I came back for the ColdFusion 10th birthday bash. More drinks, socializing, and live music. Alexandru had a few drinks and threatened me with impalement like his fellow Romanian Vlad Tepes. He even showed me a picture of himself with long hair looking very Tepes-like. I'm going to think twice next time I talk about overwriting system files in Dreamweaver. ;-).

I also met quite a few cool people from Macromedia, including Christine Lawson, who was exceptionally nice, and many of the CF dev team.