Wandering...

I started out in Tim Buntel's Blackstone session, but realized that he always has great presentations and that there would be nothing that I already didn't know and left after the first few minutes. It was in a big room that was mostly full, which is great. A good number of people raised their hands when asked if they were in the Beta, so I am not sure if they will hear much news there also.

I moved over to "Building a Basic CMS with CF and Dreamweaver" given by Dave Gallerizo. He was a dynamic speaker and I enjoyed listening to him talk even though it is very unlikely that I will ever design web sites, much less ones with Dreamweaver templates. I did gain even more respect for what you can do with DW and Contribute, and I liked how Dave worked in lots of ColdFuison references in to a DW based talk.

I moved on to catch the last 15 minutes of"CF performance Tips and Tricks" given by Rob Rusher. Rob had some really good advice (scope your variables, arrays are faster than lists, use cfswitch, watch out for whitespace). My favorite comment about someone who used a 30 deep - cfelseif: "Are you on crack?!!?"

There are many thing that I "know" about CFML, just because I am in the code every day. It is good to see stuff like that to remind me that some day we need to fix the fact that CFML lists use Java string functions and are dog slow, so our CFML users wont have to worry about how fast/slow a particular tag or function is. True, we may not be able to prevent every bad coding practice from slowing things down (for instance, we may never be able to 'fix' our friendly variable scope searching) , but everything we provide to users should not penalize them for using it!

On to the keynote!