During the week of June 7^th to June 10^th there will be a series of 8 e-seminars targeted at EMEA time zones (yeah!!) and audiences, that will demonstrate how to build a multiscreen application (from start to finish) using all the power of Flash Platform, in combination with the device and technology of your choice. It’s a unique opportunity to learn about the power of the Flash Platform and you could have your questions answered by Adobe’s EU evangelists and experts during the interactive Q&A sessions.

Here is the list of the sessions:

• June 7th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Erase the Designer to Developer gap: Adding interactions to your design with Serge Jespers
• June 7th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Connecting your design to PHP services with Mihai Corlan
• June 8th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Connecting a web application to a J2EE backend using Flash Builder 4 with Michael Chaize
• June 8th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Working with Flash CS5 components in your Flash Builder 4 project with Mike Jones
• June 9th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Going multi-user with P2P in Flash Player 10.1 with Tom Krcha
• June 9th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Developing multi-user applications with LiveCycle services with Tom Krcha
• June 10th – 12:00 – 13:00 GMT
  Bringing web Applications to the desktop with AIR 2.0 with Piotr Walczyszyn
• Jun 10th – 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
  Code once and run on multiple mobile devices with Mark Doherty

Even if I would have love to see one session on ColdFusion, you should not miss it so REGISTER NOW!

On March 1st-2nd Yakov Fain, Victor Rasputnis and Anatole Tartakovsky from Farata Systems gave their Master Class Advanced Flex training here in Brussels.

It is something that is missing in the official Adobe curriculum: when you reach a certain level of knowledge of a technology, you need to dig some advanced aspects that are usually not taught in the normal curriculum (ie. best practices, frameworks overview, fine tuning,…). That’s why this training was really nice: they were able to cover advanced (and complex) subjects, give tips and illustrating all of them with their own experiences. This was truly beneficial, compared to a purely theoretical training (if you understand what I mean)! Another good (and funny) point was the fact that the three of them sometimes have  a different point of view and are able to present things on different levels, from a complex technical description to more simple words. They also presented their own open source alternatives to existing products or solutions (ie. Clear Toolkit) which was very interesting.

So I highly recommend you to follow this training if they are coming to a town near you – They are going to Paris (France) in June 28-29 2010. And try to convince Yakov that frameworks are not evil… LOL

A last word, they wrote a book on “Enterprise Development with Flex” if you are interested (see below).

Yes it’s true: now is your chance to learn ColdFusion 8 for free following the curriculum available here. You will be able to download the following courses (or indivual units) in PDF:

INTRODUCTION TO COLDFUSION 8

UNIT 1: GETTING STARTED WITH COLDFUSION 8
UNIT 2: BUILDING COLDFUSION APPLICATIONS
UNIT 3: PUBLISHING DATABASE CONTENT
UNIT 4: BUILDING FORMS WITH COLDFUSION
UNIT 5: BUILDING SEARCH INTERFACES
UNIT 6: BUILDING A DRILL-DOWN INTERFACE
UNIT 7: INSERTING NEW DATA
UNIT 8: UPDATING AND DELETING DATA
UNIT 9: REUSING TEMPLATES
UNIT 10: SECURING AN APPLICATION

ADVANCED COLDFUSION 8 DEVELOPMENT

UNIT 1: GETTING STARTED WITH ADVANCED COLDFUSION 8
UNIT 2: INTRODUCTION TO COMPONENTS
UNIT 3: MANIPULATING LISTS AND QUERIES
UNIT 4: MANIPULATING DATA WITH ARRAYS AND STRUCTURES
UNIT 5: ADVANCED COMPONENT CONCEPTS
UNIT 6: HANDLING ERRORS AND EXCEPTIONS
UNIT 7: CODE AND CONTENT REUSE
UNIT 8: WORKING WITH PDF FILES AND FORMS
UNIT 9: DATA AND FILE MANIPULATION IN COLDFUSION
UNIT 10: SCALING APPLICATIONS

I remind you also that Adobe ColdFusion 8 for Education is available for free if you are students, faculty and Education staff. More information on that here.

For advanced topics, I recommand you to follow also the upcoming eSeminars (register here and get a chance to win Ben Forta‘s and Raymond Camden‘s Adobe ColdFusion 8, Getting Started, a Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1) :

Beyond HTML: Using Ajax, PDF, and More to Create Engaging Applications with ColdFusion 8
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 11:00 A.M. PT
Today’s application users demand far more than simple HTML web applications: they want rich desktop-like application interfaces, personalized multimedia experiences, printable and portable content, and more. This 60 minute session will show how Adobe ColdFusion 8 delivers these and other engaging application experiences with features like Ajax support, on-demand multimedia presentation generation, and PDF document and form applications.

ColdFusion 8 and the Adobe Flash Platform
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 11:00 A.M. PT
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 5:00 A.M. PT | 1:00 PM EUR
Learn how you can leverage the productivity of ColdFusion with the Flash Platform, including Adobe Flex®, to lower costs, enhance productivity, and streamline processes.

Upgrading Seamlessly to ColdFusion 8
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 11:00 A.M. PT
Experience how easy it is to upgrade an existing ColdFusion installation to ColdFusion 8. With several new features, dramatically improved performance and scalability, and easier integration with enterprise IT environments, upgrading to ColdFusion 8 is a seamless process in any environment.

If you want to keep in touch with CF news subscribe to  coldfusionbloggers.org and to conclude this post I  want invite you again to give it a try, even if you’re already a brilliant php or .Net developer, test, share your thoughts!

First of all I want to wish you a “Happy New Year”. May 2009 be a year full of love, friendship, laughter and “happy coding”

Yeah I know that it’s a bit late to review MAX Europe, but just after the last day of the conference Peter, Pablo and me heard that Adobe was laying off 600 people so I wasn’t very motivated in blogging anything. Then came the holiday season, the New Year and now we are already the 22th… Time is flying by and I can’t keep up ! Should I mention that we were out of water for an entire week at home ? Then I should also tell you that I finally received my brand new MacBookPro (my first Mac!) W00t! Thanks again  Nokia :-)

Back to MAX Europe 2008: I won’t do a detailed review - really useless – instead I will share some personal thoughts. I must start by saying that It was my first MAX conference and I had mixed feelings about it : lots of information was available on the web after MAX U.S. (It was already the major complain in 2007) and there was some negative talks on twitter (pricing, topics…).

General sessions and Sneak Peeks

Really great, especially the “Men in Black” parody. It’s really a nice way of presenting new products or features – they were doing the show ! It was mainly focused on CS4, so after the CS4 launch event that we had few weeks ago at our User Group, I didn’t learn a lot of new things – luckely there were some other impressive things shown that I really enjoyed.

Sessions

As a AIR/Flex/ColdFusion developer it was really hard for me to choose which session to attend. Some were a bit disappointing – skill level is hard to determinate sometimes – while others were great. It’s the same for all conferences in fact

Labs

Definitively the most disappointing thing for me : it’s not due to the teacher, of course, but why the content is based on the examples shipped with the product ? Normally you already try them at work/home and you expect the labs to go further,  don’t you ?

Networking

The best part in any conference I was happy to see some familiar faces (I really wished some others could have been there) , people that I only knew from twitter, some others that I didn’t knew at all. Also seeing all those enthusiastic evangelists in one place was so cool!

Location, arrangements and events

Everything was perfect and very well organized : rooms were quite comfortable, there was enough food for everyone, everyone was nice., lots of free stuff and goodies. I was a bit surprised to see that half of the attendees left the party very early and that evangelists were hiding…

In conclusion I would say that I really enjoyed MAX Europe 2008 but, as suggested by someone else I think, it would be nice to postpone MAX Europe for 6 months after MAX U.S. – in that way, there will be new things to present, new reasons to attend

my Pictures of MAX Europe 2008.

My friend Neil Webb just started to record video tutorials tackling PHP remoting using Flex & AMFPHP. The first two are “Installing Apache, mySQL, PHP & AMFPHP” and ““Hello World!” PHP remoting example“. The next one will cover the Mate framework using php instead of ColdFusion. He is planning to do a complete series, so that a user can come to his site and have all the resources in one place

I always found video tutorials very valuable as an addition to an article or a course. So I wish him Good Luck! Go to his new Video Tutorials Page.

When you want to learn Flex, it’s not always easy to choose which course to attend or which book to buy. Here’s your chance to get access to free valuable learning resources. Enjoy !

Flex in a Week is a 5 days long free video based online training program for developers. This program is intended to help developers accelerate their Flex learning. Here are the topics covered :

Day 1: Flex basics
Day 2: Component development
Day 3: Putting it all together
Day 4: Adding visual appeal (coming soon)
Day 5: Architecture and advanced topics (coming soon)

Grant Skinner posted about one month ago his monster deck of 165 slides from his  one day ActionScript 3 workshop that he made in Toronto in 2007. It covers a wide range of topics including AS3 / AVM2, migrating from AS2, errors, events, display list, regular expressions, E4X (XML), loading data and assets, optimization, and includes “a few obscure tips and architectural ideas”.