FlashForward 2004 this week

I’ll be in NYC for FlashForward towards the end of the week this week. I will be in town from thursday afternoon till saturday and will only be attending the conference on Friday. I’m really looking forward to Jared’s session, it’s his first time speaking and am sure it will be very intersting.

Also I have been too busy to keep up with what friends will be attending so drop me a line sometime this week so we can meet up.

Note to Self, scrollIt() in ScrollBar class can lead to infinite loop

IÂ’m posting this here in case anyone runs into a similar issue. In a recent application we built (All V2 based of course) we got a bug which turned out to be much harder to track down than initially anticipated.

Essentially what would happen is if a user clicked the up or down arrows on a scrollbar the player would stop executing any more code because of an infinite loop. After spending a lot of hours I tracked it down to an issue with the user clicking a ScrollBar’s up/down arrows which would in turn call the scrollIt() function inside of the ScrollBar class and somehow an infinite loop would occur (The ScrollBar in use was part of a ScrollPane). At first I tried to comment out the code inside of the scrollIt() function with no luck, then I tried just not calling scrollIt() which worked but didnÂ’t really help, I even tried re-writing some of the code of the ScrollBar class and also had no luck. At the end I ended up copying the scrollIt() functionÂ’s code into a new function called scrollIt2() and calling that instead when the user clicks up/down and that worked. Why it worked I have no idea, I spent a few more hours after fixing it trying to narrow it down and couldnÂ’t find any logical reason for the bug and had to move on.

I’ll go back and look at it one day when I have some more free time and isolate the issue.

Speaking at MAX! Integrating with Microsoft Office

I’ve been accepted to speak at MAX again this year. I’ll be giving an updated version of the presentation I gave last year and at CFUN-04, Integrating with Microsoft Office.

I’m accepting questions or comments on what changes should be made–are there whole topics that should be discussed that weren’t? Were there things that should be dropped?

Right now it looks like I’ll be dropping the Authomation slides and am hoping to add an example using Jakarta POI and also of client-side communication between Flash and Excel.

You can view a Breezo of last year’s presentation and download the slides and examples here.

CFUN-04 is this weekend!

If you’re in the Washington, DC metro area and haven’t signed up for CFUN-04 you should do so now–it’s this weekend! Even if you’re not in the immediate area, this is a great conference for ColdFusion developers with content addressing all skill levels and a variety of topics with five different tracks.

Chafic and I are both speaking at the conference on Component Development in Flash MX 2004 and Integrating ColdFusion with Microsoft Office.

Speaking at MXEurope: CFMX E-Mail Agents

I just received notice that my proposal for MXEurope 2005 has been accepted. I’ll be speaking on creating e-mail agents in ColdFusion MX to assist with customer support. MXEurope is in London from January 31 through Februrary 2 next year.

Read more about my topic, CFMX E-Mail Agents.

Read more about MXEurope 2005.

This will also be my first time attending MXEurope so I’m really excited for the opportunity.