Tuesday, March 30th the Triangle Area ColdFusion User Group will be hosting a special ColdFusion Builder event with Adobe.

Josh Adams from Adobe will be here to show us ColdFusion Builder, the long awaited ColdFusion IDE from Adobe. Josh will be digging deep under the hood to show us all the cool new features like ORM integration, extensions and more!

For more information and to RSVP please visit the TACFUG site.

This being an Adobe event I’m sure there will be some cool stuff you won’t want to miss!

Josh Demonstrates Latest ColdFusion Builder

Dan, Bucky, Mike and I at CFinNC

I can’t believe it has only been 8 months since I posted the teaser headline “Nothing Could be Finer” on my blog.  This was one of the early posts referencing CFinNC – a conference Dan Wilson and I organized along with a great group of volunteers from TACFUG our local ColdFusion user group.

We learned a lot organizing the conference.  Looking back did we really need Meat Option #1 and Meat Option #2?  Probably not. :)

Dan and I have been talking about hosting another conference since right after the holidays. We knew we wanted the same great facility at the College of Textiles. We wanted the same group of volunteers and we wanted to keep the conference free like CFinNC.

I think everyone involved wanted to do it again.  Could we pull it off?  What could we do better?

There was only one way to find out…

Now everything has come together and we recently announced NCDevCon 2010.  A new name for a new conference.  We’re still highlighting the Adobe product stack (Go ColdFusion!) but we also wanted to attract people from outside our community.  With NCDevCon we’ll be expanding into more general web development and design – JavaScript, CSS, Ajax and more.

We’ve got the same great group of volunteers that brought you CFinNC…

“It was very well run! Having tons of volunteer help made this very successful.”

The same great facility:

“The facility was perfect: clean, professional, roomy, convenient and fast WIFI all across the campus.”

And we anticipate the same level of great speakers with some new ones thrown in:

“From both a presenter standpoint and an attendee standpoint, I thought you folks did an awesome job. The content was both varied and super-relevant and, at least for the sessions I attended, the speakers were excellent.”

Event registration is open – sign up now!

We’re also accepting speaker submissions. Got something to say about web development, design, ColdFusion, etc?  Submit a topic!

Check out our website at NCDevCon.com.  You can also follow us on Twitter @ncdevcon

At work I have ReviewBoard running on VirtualBox on one of my development machines.  This has been working great but every once in awhile I accidentally close the VirtualBox console because it’s sitting in my taskbar:

VirtualBox in Taskbar

I remember reading about a ‘headless’ mode in the VirtualBox documentation.  This will setup VirtualBox running as a RDP server – it can run ‘invisibly’ and you can connect via Windows Remote Desktop to intact with the system.

You can either configure the remote settings within the VirtualBox GUI:

Remote Display Dialog

Or pass them in through the command line.  I went this route and created a batch file called start-reviewboard.bat:

REM  Batch script to start VirtualBox instance of ReviewBoard in headless mode
REM  Connect via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to port 8000

"C:\Program Files\sun\VirtualBox\VBoxHeadless.exe" -startvm ReviewBoard -p 8000

This starts VirtualBox in headless mode (VBoxHeadless.exe), starts my ReviewBoard vm, and sets up RDP (port 8000).

You can run this script and it should start VirtualBox – but you will still be left with a DOS box sitting there in your taskbar. Turns out it is fairly easy to write a small script to run a batch file silently as well. I created start-reviewboard.vbs:

REM 0 = hide window, 1 = show window (useful for debugging)

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "D:\scripts\start-reviewboard.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

You use this script to run your batch file and pass in a parameter to hide the window (0). I’d recommend setting that to 1 while you get things setup so you can see what is going on and once you have worked out the kinks set it to 0.

When you run it – you should get a DOS window and a message “Listening on port 8000” (or whatever you set the port to). I changed the port to 8000 as I assume Windows is already using 3389 (default RDP port).

To connect I simply start Remote Desktop Connection and enter localhost:8000.

To stop VirtualBox simply issue the following command:

VBoxManage controlvm YOUR_VM_NAME poweroff

For More Information on Shared Folders (Virtual Directories):

• VirtualBox documentation on Shared Folders
• Alternate method of sharing folders
• Ubuntu docs on shared folders

I’ve finally posted my instructions for getting ColdFusion 9 up and running on VirtualBox!  It took me a few times to work through the process and get everything working (and documented) and at one point I forgot the password on the VM image and had to start over again.  Oooops.

Documentation is now on my wiki:  VirtualBox and ColdFusion 9

What will you end up with? A ‘virtual’ server running Apache/ColdFusion 9/MySQL.  Using VirtualBox’s shared directories you can access your code on the guest system.  This seemed to be the most simple and flexible way to configure things.   In my example I’m sharing the CFEclipse workspace directory but if you are using something different it should be easy to adjust to your configuration.

You could certainly run a GUI version of Ubuntu and install an IDE so you would have a self-contained development environment but with this example I wanted to create a system I could use at work and at home for various projects but not necessarily share the code and settings between them.

If you try this and run into any issues with the documentation – please contact me with corrections!

I’ve been using Oracle SQL Developer I think since the very first initial betas.  I could never stand the TOAD interface and the few bugs I encountered with SQL Developer were never bothersome enough to stop using the tool.

Over the years SQL Developer has matured very nicely and now is very stable and feature rich.

When someone from Packt contacted me and let me know there was a book on the way I was very excited.  Oracle SQL Developer 2.1 by Sue Harper covers the latest release for SQL Developer – 2.1.  This release brought a lot of stability to the project and also introduced the new Data Modeler from Oracle.

I’ve been skimming through the book for the last week or so.  I honestly thought since I’ve been using SQL Developer for so long there would be very little new to me in the book but I’ve been pleasantly surprised and have picked up a lot of small tips that have helped me work smarter and more efficiently with SQL Developer.

The book covers quite a bit:

• Install, configure, customize, and manage your SQL Developer environment
• Includes the latest features to enhance productivity and simplify database development
• Covers reporting, testing, and debugging concepts
• Meet the new powerful Data Modeling tool – Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Detailed code examples and screenshots for easy learning

A few useful tips I’ve picked up since reading the book have been:

• The ability to highlight and filter data in the grids.  This is really useful when you are trying to dig through some complicated data looking for very particular information.
• Using bind variables in the worksheet.
• The code formatter – cleaning up my mess!

What else does the book cover?   There are chapters devoted to PL/SQL, dubugging and tuning, extending SQL Developer, source control integration (using Subversion) and a large chapter on the Data Modeler which I’m just waiting for a new project to start to begin exploring that particular tool.

If you are just getting started using SQL Developer I’d highly recommend the book.  It will get you up to speed quickly and seems useful as a quick reference.   If you are an experienced SQL Developer user I still think the added section on the new Data Modeler will be quite useful.

One of the things I’m most excited about in the latest CFEclipse 1.3.5 release is the new code formatting feature.

At work we have a LOT of spaghetti code…  weird indenting, mixed case tags, etc.  With the new code formatter in CFEclipse getting this cleaned up is a matter of a few keystrokes!

Format Source - New in CFEclipse 1.3.5

The mixed case tags really drive me nuts as well and I’ve kept Homesite installed because it can easily swap case on tags.  I asked Denny about this (Denny is one of our awesome CFEclipse developers) and he added an experimental ‘change case’ feature!  Woot!

Change Case Option - New in CFEclipse 1.3.5

It doesn’t work with cfscript but most of the older code I work with was probably written before the cfscript was introduced so it isn’t a huge deal.

See this list for more new features in the CFEclipse 1.3.5 release.

I’m working on an older project written in Fusebox (I’m so happy to be working on something using a framework for a change!) and was struggling to weed through the circuit files.

I’m using CFEclipse and editing the XML files using Aptana’s XML editor.

My first thought was I could use the Outline view but that didn’t give me anything useful:

Aptana XML Editor - Default Outline View

Digging in the Aptana preferences however turned up this GEM:

Aptana > Editors > XML

“Tag attributes to show in outline view”

By default this is set to ‘id’.  I added ‘name’ (it accepts a comma delimited list) and viola! It now shows my fuseactions in the Outline view:

Outline View Showing Name Attribute

I think CFBuilder is using Aptana under the hood so I would imagine this may work there as well.