If you follow me on Twitter you probably already know, but I wanted to put the word out that I'm now running ColdFusion 9 Enterprise. From a performance standpoint, the difference on SlideSix is pretty noticeable. I'm also loving how quick the Flex Management Console is now thanks to the complete Flash Remoting overhaul that came with CF9.

Want to know the coolest thing of all about this upgrade? It didn't cost me a dime. That's right, I was lucky enough to get a completely free license to CF9 Enterprise from ColdFusion Product Manager Adam Lehman. Do you have a brilliant idea for a startup that takes advantages of the power of ColdFusion? Pitch your idea to Adrock and you may just get your hands on a free license too!

I can't wait to take advantage of some of the UI enhancments and I know that the PDF upgrades will lead to an immediate improvement in the conversion quality of some presentations. There's also a handful of other ideas I have in mind to play with. More on those later.

As a footnote, I should mention that for the most part the upgrade went fine but there was one minor annoyance. The process to get CF working on IIS7+ is widely documented, but I ran into a different issue. After CF installed I kept getting Handler Mapping errors thrown by IIS. I'm not exactly sure this is the right thing to do, but the fix was to check 'Configure 32 bit webserver' in the web server connector tool. See screenshot:

Update: I ran into this issue because the App Pool was configured to run 32 bit. When upgrading from 32 bit CF to 64 bit make sure to set 'Enable 32 bit applications' to false in the App Pool's advanced settings.

There are a handful of changes that went live last weekend on SlideSix. The changes consisted of several bug fixes, but more importantly some usability enhancements that will hopefully lead to a better user experience. Here's a look at what's new.

Here's a quick puzzler to get your brain working. I just helped out a friend with the following issue but I'm interested in seeing how others go about solving it. I'll borrow Ray's Friday Puzzler rules - don't spend more then 5 minutes on it and the best solution is granted 1,794 bonus points.

Write a UDF that solves the following puzzle: If it is any day or time after noon on Friday (server time) then set 'reportDate' equal to the current date. If it's any day or time before noon on Friday then set 'reportDate' to last Friday. Sounds easy, but it can get a little tricky.

Post your entry in the comments below.

After finishing up a few outstanding fixes and enhancements for SlideSix the other day I decided to give search a bit of love. Well, I didn't quite decide it; it was more of the gentle reminder from Sean Corfield about the existing search not really working all that well that prompted me to action. Regardless, I learned a few things about search that I'm going to share over a few blog posts that will use this alliteration littered title.

I'm doing a little work on cleaning up an application and came acrossed an undesirable circumstance related to the UI. The app contains what appears to be a tab navigator, but rather then the tabbed links revealing hidden form elements in another tab they take the user to a whole new page. The obvious problem with this design is that the user may populate elements in the first 'pseudo-tab' and click on the next tab assuming that they will be able to save the data after populating the other tab. Since I'm not at liberty to make massive changes to the UI I came up with the following solution using jQuery so the user is at least warned when they leave without saving their changes. I think it's a workable solution, and better yet it was terribly easy to do.

I posted this on my Twitter account the other day but I thought it was worth sharing here on the blog for the benefit of those who don't follow me on Twitter. It's basically a sneak peek at the SlideSix desktop (AIR) application that I've been working on for the past few months. The app is nearly finished and I'll be using it to present my material next week at CFinNC. Here's a quick overview of some of the planned features:

• Live Presenter Mode (Supports multiple monitors)
• Virtual Presenter Mode (Live webcam/audio & chat)
• Twitter Monitor (Instant feedback)
• SlideSix Upload (Including drag/drop support)
• And more...

Note: Screencast is best viewed in full screen mode.

I'm really interested in getting some feedback on the app. If you have suggestions or ideas please leave a comment.

I hate to write simple posts like this without bringing my own unique take on an announcement, but this one is too good to pass up. I'm extremely excited that ColdFusion 9 is finally publicly available. Congrats to all my friends at Adobe who've worked so hard on this release. It really is a game changing release for the CF world. I wish I was in LA to raise a glass with you right now. Thanks again and congrats.

I'll be blogging much more in the coming few weeks on some of the new features of CF 9. Stay tuned.

I'm happy to announce the launch of the SlideSix Gear Shop. Slide Ninjas across the globe can now show their pride and support SlideSix at the same time!

To kick things off I've ordered a small batch of t-shirts from the shop and am having them delivered to Ray at MAX. He'll be giving these out to some lucky Ninjas at the CF Unconference so make sure you check it out. There are only a few freebies though, so you might want to order one today to make sure you get a hold of one of these bad boys - they're sure to make everyone jealous!!

I'm finally getting around to really digging into ColdFusion 9 and stumbled on a very strange error with Flash Remoting (specifically the Flex Messaging Gateway) in one of my applications. The app worked just fine on CF 8 but I started getting a 'foo is undefined in event.data.body' when I tried it in 9. So I started doing my standard troubleshooting. Step one was to dump out the struct in question. Oddly enough, my key was there and it had a value. Next I tried structKeyExists() and sure enough CF told me that the key did in fact exist. However, when I tried to access the value I'd get the exception. I even tried associative array notation and accessing the keys as uppercase in case there was some weirdness going on. That didn't work either.

This is super cool. Simon Free has put together a contest to help bring awareness to the three newest ColdFusion conferences and will be giving away 3 customized 'CF Dude' Flip cameras - one at each event. So what do you have to do to win? It couldn't be easier. Just register for one of the events and then tell him, in 100 words or less, why you love ColdFusion or are excited to learn ColdFusion. That's it. He'll pick a winner at each event and will award the Flip camera. See the site for the rest of the details.

Awesome idea Simon, and nice work on the site design by Andy Matthews.