Cyril Hanquez

CFUG Belgium 2nd event review

Cyril H. — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:49:44 +0000

Just after Scotch On The Rocks 2010, we were lucky to have Ben, Ray, Alison, Terry and Claude to come over and give a talk. I must say that I was very disappointed to see that only half of the people who registered showed up: with such great speakers, I expected that more people would be interested, especially with 300+ ColdFusion developers that work in Belgium. Well except that “negative” point we had a great event: read my review of SOTR 2010 regarding the talks that they gave (there was some changes from the initial plan), I will just point to the online slides:

Introduction
slides

Mastering the ColdFusion Application Framework - Ben Nadel
slides
code samples

Supercharge your ColdFusion Builder – Ray Camden
slides and code samples

How Catalyst Will Transform The ColdFusion Developer – Terry Ryan
-

During the break we had a Flash Builder 4 Premium license and the new book from Steven “Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst: The New Workflow“ to giveaway: congrats to our winners!

To end our event, we had an informal Meet The Team which started slowly (typical with an European crowd) to finally turn out to be pretty interesting: lots of questions about pricing of course (CFBuilder vs. CFEclipse or CF9 vs. open source CFML engines), about old Allaire/Macromedia days when ColdFusion was getting more or less attention, etc…

Special thanks again to our speakers and Adobe, it was so great to have them here in Belgium and thanks also to people who attended the event, you seem to be very passionate about ColdFusion!

To be sure that we understand your expectations for the Belgium CFUG, I created a survey with few questions so please fill it (locals only!) quickly so we could setup our next event.

Pictures of the event

understanfFlash Builder and Flash Catalyst: The New Workflow

Scotch On The Rocks 2010 review

Cyril H. — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 23:11:51 +0000

So Scotch On The Rocks 2010 is over: 1 week already but I didn’t have the time to write a review before, I had to recover Seriously let’s have a quick look at what happened for me but I won’t go into the detail of each sessions that I followed, it does not really makes sense after so many days.

Day 0 – aka “pre-Scotch”

Well, I should avoid saying that I managed to loose myself in London while trying to find my hotel: no map, my phone refused to load Google Maps (conspiracy?) so after 30mins I decided to call Guust, who was already in London, to guide me. The fun fact is when I got him on the phone he was 150 meters from me and my hotel was just 1.5 km away Later, after that “false start”, we met some folks at the Tiger Tiger: Leanne, Andy, Matt, Ben and Ray were already there, then later the other Adobians (Alison, Terry and Claude) joined us and also some other EU ColdFusion folks. We had a great time!

Day 1

Andy and Terry kicked off the conference with a good keynote – not much marketing stuff. Then I attended my 1st “Ben Nadel session” I really enjoyed it and learned about what you can do in the Application.cfc. I was curious about the HTML5 session and I was not disappointed: the only thing is that Chris could avoid the “Flash bashing”. Hopefully it was not systematic and usually non relevant (I could write pages on that). Terry impressed the audience with another good Catalyst demo. Aral is definitively a showman and his talks on Emotional Design is very good and inspiring. Don’t miss his talk if you have the occasion! Ray has done a good job talking about ColdFusion Builder extensions – now I have no excuse for not writing at least one (stay tuned…). Reachies and an informal meet the team ended this 1st day. People splitted into small groups for diner so I ended up in my hotel room quite early: “Legally Blonde The Musical” was playing just in front of my hotel but it was too late to get a ticket…

Day 2

I was a bit lazy on that second day but I wanted to talk a bit with the crowd so I missed some sessions. I started with Serge‘s presentation on mobile: I’m currently trying to develop for Android I missed the 2 other morning sessions but couldn’t miss Luca‘s one on AIR & printing: it’s something that I need to investigate more as reporting is always the most difficult part when creating businness apps. As an early adopter of tweetdeck I couldn’t miss their session: good stuff again and a bunch of tips to remember when developing with AIR. Finally my last session was with Ben about creating an API.

Conclusion

The Fuzzy Orange Team made it again this year: Scotch On The Rocks 2010 was a blast! A very good line up of speakers, a really cool place, a wonderful crowd, everything rocked! I also finally managed to put real faces on some twitter friends (the CF twitterers hunt)

Now what? You’re serious about ColdFusion (but also about Flex and AIR), you’re living in Europe and you never attended any conference? Damn you, you must attend Scotch On The Rocks 2011 ! It will be:

- in Edinburgh, March 3-4 2011
- Apex International Hotel
- 3 tracks per day
- pricing: from super cheap (£50) to full price (£199)

I hope to see a lot of you there!

Missing SOTR2010? Come to our CFUG event(s)!

Cyril H. — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:25:46 +0000

As you may already know, Ray “ColdFusion Jedi” Camden, Ben Nadel, Terry Ryan, Alison Huselid and Claude Englebert will do a “mini European” CFUG Tour just after Scotch On The Rocks. So if you really can make it to SOTR2010 then not excuses for not attending one of those CFUG events:

Brussels – May 26, 6.30PM
Adobe Belgium – Culliganlaan 2F, Diegem

Amsterdam – May 27, 5.30PM
Adobe Systems Benelux B.V. – Europlaza, Hoogoorddreef 54a, Amsterdam

Munich – May 28, 5.30PM (Ben Nadel, Terry Ryan)
Adobe Systems, Georg-Brauchle-Ring 58, 80992 München

Zurich – May 28, 18PM (Ray Camden, Alison Huselid)
Technopark, Technoparkstrasse 1, 8005 Zürich

They are not coming very often to Europe so it’s a unique opportunity that you MUST NOT MISS! I hope that there will be a lot of you at those events… by the way there are still some places left for our Belgium one.

My SOTR2010 schedule

Cyril H. — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:20:27 +0000

Only 3 days left before Scotch On The Rocks (BTW there are few tickets left) and I finally decided which sessions I will attend (If I don’t change my mind in the last minute).

Monday 24th May

09:00-10:00 – Keynote (Adobe)
10:15-11:15 – Mastering the ColdFusion Application Framework (Ben Nadel)
11:30-12:30 – A whistlestop tour of HTML5 and CSS3 (Chris Mills (Opera))
13:30-14:30 – How Catalyst Will Transform The ColdFusion Developer (Terry Ryan)
14:45-15:45 – The Art of Emotional Design: A story of pleasure, joy, and delight. (Aral Balkan)
16:00-17:00 – Supercharge your ColdFusion Builder (Ray Camden)
17:30-18:00 – Raffle and Awards Ceremony
18:15-19:30 – Birds of a Feather

Tuesday 25th May

09:00-10:00 – Get ready for the mobile revolution (Serge Jespers)
10:15-11:15 – AJAX is the answer to everything and we never need to worry again and life is full of unicorns! (Ray Camden)
11:30-12:30 – SQL to HQL (John Whish)
13:30-14:30 – AIR & Printing (Luca Mezzalira)
14:45-15:45 – An enlightening insight into the world of ‘TweetDeck labs’. (Tom Woolway/James Whittaker)
16:00-17:00 – Applying Twitter’s API “Best Practices” In A ColdFusion Application (Ben Nadel)

See you there!

ColdFusion – a parallel Universe technology?

Cyril H. — Fri, 07 May 2010 08:24:14 +0000

I’m really wondering… ColdFusion is so easy to use and so powerful compared to other existing technologies on the market. And look at those CF evangelists, don’t they acting weird sometimes, hum?

Okay just joking of course I wanted to mention that in the episode 2×15 (few episodes ago already) of Fringe they changed the opening title for an 80′s style where you could read Cold Fusion. Not really the one we are using as it was written in two words, but I couldn’t resist to write something because this TV show is currently one of my favorite and what they have done is really cool. Below I’m putting the two versions of the opening title sequence so that you could compare and if you don’t know this TV show and really recommand you to watch it (IMO if you liked X-Files you should love that one too).

Original Title Sequence

Retro Title Sequence

Build an app in a week

Cyril H. — Fri, 07 May 2010 06:53:08 +0000

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!

SOTR2010 Reachie awards… EMEA entries only!

Cyril H. — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:54:09 +0000

About 1 month ago I wrote a blog post regarding Scotch On The Rocks Award Nominations. It seems that some people misunderstood that only EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) entries are accepted and I also have some people telling me that they only know US ColdFusion developers blogging – ouch!

So to help a bit I started (with the help of my twitter friends) a list of EMEA ColdFusion bloggers that I’m sharing on Google Reader and I also created a list of EMEA CF twitterers. It’s far from being complete so please add in comments any new blog or twitter account that I missed (sorry in advance) and I will update the list.

You have no more excuses now, go vote!

CFUG Belgium- (late)1st event review

Cyril H. — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:36:01 +0000

The launch meeting of the Belgian ColdFusion User Group took place on April 1st 2010: we had around 20 attendees (amongst them non CF developers!) which is not that bad for a first one. People were really interested by the User Group so we can count on them for the next one Marta Gal - a woman, yes! – has done our 1st community presentation about “XML import/export with ColdFusion”. Then Claude Englebert presented on ColdFusion Builder. Networking was really good and I’m sure that we will be able to do something cool with the 300+ ColdFusion developers working in Belgium Here are some topics that they would like to be covered in upcoming meetings: beginners sessions, ColdFusion for java developers, frameworks (ColdSpring, CFWheels, FW/1, ColdBox, Model Glue,… , comparison), ORM, Security, Clustering, Deployement, Flex & AIR integration, LCDS, ANT, multi-language CMS systems, extJS, etc… it’s huge!

So if you’re interested in presenting on one of those subject, just drop me a line/tweet

You will find a video recording of the introduction (Thanks to Peter Elst), and I put online the slides and the pictures taken during the event.

Next meeting will take place on May 26th, location to be confirmed depending on the number of registrations: we will have presentations from Ray “ColdFusion Jedi” Camden & Ben Nadel (2 ColdFusion rockstars) and Terry Ryan (Platform Evangelist). Alison Huselid (Product Marketing Manager) and Claude Englebert (EMEA ColdFusion Product Specialist) will join Terry for a “Meet the team” session (a free-form open discussions giving attendees a chance to face the product team and ask, comment, criticize, suggest, and more). It’s a good opportunity for any developer, project leaders or IT Director to join and ask any questions.

So please register quickly!

Flex.org revamped!

Cyril H. — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:12:43 +0000

If you missed it, go immediately to the brand new Flex.org website as it received a facelift. It’s way better than the previous one! For those who don’t know what the website is about, you will find there some customer case studies, some hints to get Started with Flex and a also lot of useful resources to learn, to download products or to get in touch with Adobe’s evangelists and the Flex community. I should also mentioned that Tour de Flex has been updated also with Flex 4 samples.

Flex 4 SDK, Flash AND ColdFusion Builder are out!

Cyril H. — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:34:39 +0000

You have probably already heard the news, it’s a pretty big one.

Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4 are finally released.

Flex 4 SDK introduce several improvements including:

new set of components (Spark) and support for FXG (graphics interchange format for the Flash Platform) to create more expressive interfaces.
improvement of the states that makes them easier to use.
integration of the Open Source Media Framework’s video class (via the VideoDisplay component).
many enhancements to the developer productivity, etc…

Flash Builder 4 (next version of Flex Builder 3) has been also greatly improved.

new designer/developer workflow: integrate easily with ColdFusion Builder and soon to Flash Catalyst
enable better data-centric development: support service introspection, connect to Coldfusion, php, Java classes, webservices…
improve productivity: getter/setter generation, event code generation, better refactoring, etc…
network monitor and Flex Unit support, etc…

ColdFusion is finally getting a real IDE with ColdFusion Builder.

eclipse based IDE with code insight and code assist support (CFC introspection, UDF, SQL support…).
integrated debugger
remote project support
extensible with CFML: write your own extension (ie. to support a framework) or download already existing one on RIAforge
integrate easily with Flash Builder

Now let’s see what is the offering:

Flash Builder 4 Standard Edition
full: € 211.75/upgrade € 83.49
not include profilers, network monitoring, Flex unit testing.

Flash Builder 4 Premium Edition
full: € 603.79/upgrade € 277.09
includes Adobe ColdFusion Builder

ColdFusion Builder
full: € 260.15
also includes Adobe Flash Builder 4 Standard Edition !

And I do not forget that Flash Builder 4 (Standard) and ColdFusion Builder are free for education – https://freeriatools.adobe.com/