We want to let everyone know about Capital Flash Camp! Capital Flash Camp is a full-day event focusing on the Adobe Flash Platform that will be held on April 16 in Washington, D.C. Enhance your skills in ActionScript and Flex while learning from local and national industry experts. Flash Camp will provide an introduction to the Flash Platform as well as covering advanced topics for existing Flex and ActionScript developers. In addition to great training, this is also a fabulous venue for networking with other developers in the community.

Reserve your seat now at a *special $20 discount* for TeraTech clients and customers.

My topic for CFUNITED 2010 was selected! I'll be speaking about the new Excel generation features in CF9; much easier and more flexible than generating the XML or HTML used to be.

Thank you to everyone who voted for my topic.

See you all at Lansdowne.

We recently completed a ColdFusion project for Georgetown University to automate their CEID application process. I got this email from their project manager. We always work hard to make clients happy and it is nice to hear back directly on how we did!

"Our Experience with TeraTech has been top notch.  Ajay was extremely helpful as our developer and provided us with useful feedback on our requests and task items. He was readily available for communication and delivered exactly what we wanted. The President of TeraTech, Mr. Michael Smith, impressed us as being just as available in case there were any problems and was consistently making sure we were satisfied as the project progressed. Nii was an excellent facilitator and he did a fantastic job keeping the wheels of our project turning. We thank them for all of the hard work and appreciate their efforts."

Recently we helped out Allergy Supply improve their ColdFusion website. The old website was hard for customers to use. Some don’t complete check out. And it didn’t display correctly in some browsers. We review current site front end and shopping cart and make list of suggested improvements and estimate of cost to do. We fixed a long list of bugs. And we figured out the shopping cart abandonment rate in the site statistics.

"From time to time we all need IT help. Allergy Supply Company recently had a project beyond our capability. We called TeraTech. After a consultation to define the job TeraTech had a solution that reflected changes in real time and allowed us to see how these changes could work for us. Thank you TeraTech.

Sincerely,

Ray Cardinale
President
Allergy Supply Co."

Fusebox is the most used framework, used by 35% of ColdFusion developers according to the partial results of the State of the CF Union survey. The next most used are Model Glue,  ColdBox and Mach-II each at about 15%. Note that the percentages don't add up to 100% because 1) people may use more than one framework 2) some people don't use any frameworks.

The survey is open for another few weeks, so if you haven't voted yet check it out. The survey also shows what versions of CF people use, databases used and common programming challenges.

A few weeks ago TeraTech's ColdFusion server tuning guru Ajay Sathuluri gave a webinar on How to Cure Slow and Crashing ColdFusion servers. He looked at how to diagnose problems and some common ways to heal a sick ColdFusion server. He also discussed what tools you can use to prevent problems from occurring.

If you missed the webinar you can get the notes from it by completing a short server survey here.

Ajay has been using ColdFusion for more than 10 years and has spoken on server tuning and load testing at CFUnited and MDCFUG.

Miki Saxon writes in her blog about four leadships skills that even Attila the Hun could have used:

• leading people
• strategic planning
• inspiring commitment
• managing change

"... it will be the executives and managers who get it; who understand that these skills need to be embedded in the company’s DNA; they are not CEO skills, but core competency requirements to thrive in the 21^st Century."

We had overwhelming interesting this week's webinar on How to Cure a Slow or Crashing ColdFusion server with over 200 people registering. Many attendees asked if we could do future webinars in more detail on some of the following topics

• Staging environment best practices
• JVM settings, memory configuration
• Garbage collection
• Monitoring tools
• Load testing

we are planning on doing some of these in the next few months. If you have other topics you would like to see let me know.

Of the attendees on the webinar the majority were using CF 8 Enterprise, with CF9 coming in a close second, followed by CF 7 and earlier.

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• Are your ColdFusion applications running slow or even crashing the server?
• Are you concerned about what increasing load will do the the reliability of your application?
• Do you want to protect your organizations reputation for quality on the web?

Then join TeraTech's ColdFusion server tuning guru Ajay Sathuluri for this webinar on what to do when your server is slow or sick. We will look at how to diagnose problems and some common ways to heal a sick ColdFusion server. We will also discuss what tools you can use to prevent problems from occurring. 

Ajay has been using ColdFusion for more than 10 years and has spoken on server tuning and load testing at CFUnited and MDCFUG.

The webinar on "How to cure slow and crashing ColdFusion servers"  is on Thursday Dec 3, 2009 1:00 PM  EST. The webinar will cover fixing slow servers, performance bottlenecks location and diagnosis tips. It will be approximately 45 minutes including time for Q and A. The webinar is free. You can register at  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/750953064 Hope to see you there!

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

Interesting article in CIO Insight on why having both business and technical skill is important to get ahead in IT management. And having the ability to translate from tech speak to biz speak and back again is vital.

The author knew he had connected with the C-level staff when at a buget cutting meeting the President said “IT isn’t staff,” he said. “It’s a core business function.” Now that is music to an IT manager ears!