Preliminary MAX session sign-up statistics

We received some preliminary statistics on attendees signing up for our MAX sessions. My session, Integrating ColdFusion with Microsoft Office, is ranked number 5 right now for ColdFusion sessions.

I’m really excited about this session since I’ve been given approval to depart from the traditional “this is how you use CFOBJECT” session to do a real comparative analysis of different access methodologies. I’ll review and provide code samples for interacting with Microsoft Office through automation, document properties, HTML, XML, and Jet, including options available for Linux servers and the brand new options for Office 11 users.

The session is available in three different time slots so there’s no excuse to miss it. See you at MAX!

Is Java supported in CFMX?

The question of what is supported Java usage in CFMX came up on a mailing list today. When is Java fully supported and when is it not? Can we expect our applications to continue to work in future versions of ColdFusion if we take full advantage of Java? What about the wonderful ColdFusion internal classes?

Here’s my $0.02…
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MSSQL Developer for $42!!!

Microsoft dropped the price for MSSQL Developer edition from $499 to only $49. You can find it at some locations even cheaper. This is a great buy so anyone working on a Windows box has no excuse not to have MSSQL.

It’s also great for people on a production budget. While MSSQL Developer is only for developer use, it does include the client tools. That’s important because MSDE can be used in production but doesn’t include any client tools. You can use MSDE in production and buy MSSQL Developer for the client tools to manage your production box.
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Access session vars from outside the session

There are many situations when it is necessary to access a session variable from outside the actual session. You may want an administrative page to list active users or you may want to utilize a scheduled task to process data stored in user’s sessions.

While it’s simple enough to create a sessions structure in the application scope to store all sessions, cleanup becomes an issue and you’re really duplicating work that ColdFusion must be doing internally anyways. After some digging I found that ColdFusion MX has a SessionTracker class that it uses to keep track of all sessions and you can access it to!

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