Last Wednesday I did an “Introduction to ColdFusion 9″ at the Adobe User Group Belgium for the Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, ColdFusion 9 pre-release event: Other speakers were Serge Jespers, and Maarten Cox. My talk was targeted mainly to non-ColdFusion developers, so I showed only simple features.I tried also to make the audience realize how simple but powerful ColdFusion is and how it could be a great addition to any existing data center (especially with CFaaS/ESL and new integration capabilities).

Peter Elst managed to record a video of my talk (except the last 5 mins I think) – thanks a lot to him! So here is the video and the slides. Hope people enjoyed it even if I think that I could have done better   Next time for sure… 

 

Yesterday our AUG Event started with Ton Frederiks and Klaasjan Tukker from Adobe Systems who unveiled Adobe Creative Suite 4. It was really a great presentation with an in depth look at the new features. My favorites ones are : 
 

• Premiere Pro CS4 : speech to text rendering, searchable metadata – really impressive.
• Dreamweaver CS4 : live view, related files and code navigator, Adobe AIR authoring support.
• Fireworks CS4 : export a clickable prototype as an interactive PDF file.
• Flash CS4 : inverse kinematics (chain-like animation effects), 3D transformation, motion presets.
• Photoshop CS4 : masks panel, 3D painting and compositing, canvas rotation.

Please note also that the CS4 can now use the full power of your graphic card chipset (especially for 3D edition and Pan/Zoom).

After that first part, we had a break with some CS4 cakes and a great champagne offered by Boulevart. Thanks to them !

It was then the time for Aral “the showman” Balkan to give his presentation :

Aim for the low-hanging fruit or 5 rules for Hedonistics Developers

Like usual, that was a blast, so inspiring ! I’m always admirative when I see the quality of his slides and how he’s presenting his subject to make the audience react – which is not an easy task especially in Europe ! I won’t do an in-depth description (let’s keep some mystery), but he showed us that we’re adding more and more unecessary complexity (who said “frameworks” ?) which finally restrict our creativity and leads to frustration (hope that I got the right message !) : his example of AS1 to AS3 coding was perfect to demonstrate the first point (unecessary complexity). It seems that we are also focusing too much on coding against using the right tool (demo of http://scratch.mit.edu/). To conclude my small review, only few words to remember : Create, Share, Enjoy, Play and… make profit if possible ! And I can fall in love again with my spaghetti code !

We ended the event with a nice BBQ party (or should I add the funny ride to Brussels Airport too ?). Thanks again to Koen, the AUG crew, Adobe and the other sponsors. See you next time !

More Pictures available here.