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This was the first ColdFusion event that I have attended. It had a pretty good turn out and was a good event to go to. I was there giving two presentations (I’ll post more on those later) and was part of a panel discussion. I thought I would just sum up some of what people might find interesting about the event in this entry.

The keynote was given by Christian Cantrell. Christian is a great guy. I’ve got to meet him a few times in the past and got to spend some time with him on Saturday. His keynote had some information on Redsky, The next update to ColdFusion that Macromedia is working on. He also made some mention of ColdFusion’s future direction which they have already started to work on.

Some of what he mentioned:
- Additional deployment options
- More integration with other MX products
- Improve the development time

I also had the pleasure of meeting Tom Muck. Tom is an author of several books, including one book which I am currently editing “Flash Remoting MX: The Definitive Guide”. If you have used Dreamweaver and have at some point downloaded some extensions from the Macromedia Exchange, chances are that you downloaded something from Tom.

Finally there was some interesting information during the RIA Panel that Sam and I were a part of. There was a lot of good discussion and at one point Matt Liotta (the moderator) asked a question of what alternatives to Flash is there? The interesting part was that there was someone from Microsoft attending our discussion. We sort of turned the question to him to try and find out what they are up to (I mentioned that Microsoft must be paying attention to what Flash has been doing). So he smiled and said that Microsoft does keep up with the industry, also that what they have planned has something to do with the desktop enhancement in Longhorn (the next release of windows slated to be released in 2005) and integrating RIA capabilities straight onto the desktop. He said he couldn’t say much more and that we would be hearing more about it around the October timeframe (When Microsoft has their PDC conference). He also said he would try to find out more on what is officially public and would let us know.