Coldfusion server reinstallation or cloning is a common scenario however if your server is the type with multiple data sources, recreating those DSNs could be hell on earth - especially when you have a world cup match to watch.

All you need do is back-up of CFROOT\runtime\bin\neo-datasources.xml. This XML file is where CF stores the data source settings for all DSNs. Mind you, the passwords are encrypted.

Adobe has announced the availability of Coldfusion 9 Beta product. With so many exciting features, I am definitely hooked up to another 2 years of pounding out CF codes (even though it seems the time to stop is just around the horizon). CF9 is also coming with a new Coldfusion Builder.

For those who don’t know, Coldfusion is the sliced bread of programming languages.

A recent upgrade of a CF7 to CF8 sent my blood temperature past the 100C redline when the editor of a content management system went belly up. The bug is a curious one: CF8 now has some new functions (filedelete, filecopy, filewrite, etc) which are in conflict with functions in the KTML for CF version.

This is a little annoying considering that Adobe has acquired Interakt, the maker of KTML. Only God knows thousands of KTML installation that has gone crazy.

Now, not all versions of KTML have the source code so those hapless victims are in for it. For me, all I did was look for the functions and where they were called and changed the function names.

ColdFusion 8 rocks and that is all I have been seeing and reading from the community. It seems am the only one left out (Duh!): I have been freaking busy. So busy that the Beta installer has been sitting on my test server and I have not even clicked on it once to install.

Once am through with my current assignments, there would be enough time to unleash the CF Dragon all over the place. I can't wait to try out the new AJAX and PDF features to wow my colleagues and make their .NET codes look like a piece of wet and cold spaghetti.

If you ever had gotten stuck with writing insert and update statement for a table with a zillion columns, you can understand my pain.

And applications (most of them) must work with data. Select is cool, in fact, the dudes that crafted the SQL standards even created the almighty shortcut, *, which can select from 1 to a zillion columns. But how do you have a quick work around to update say a table with 150 columns? The truth, there is not shortcut. You have to do the grunt work.

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Looks like not all columns are born equal on Active Directory linked server on SQL Server.

I have a pretty little view which initially was selecting just four columns (mail, samaccountname,company and displayname) from a linked AD on an SQL Server 2000. Trust me, there was a reason to add more columns to the view. However, my attempt to include all the columns I wanted (valid columns!) was throwing error

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Coldfusion 8 would soon be out of the door with a big bang. Top on my list are built in AJAX widgets, .NET (and Java!) integration, Microsoft Exchange integration and native image manipulation functions. For more of the other exciting jokers up Adobe's sleeve, check out this website.

Ray Camden just announced a FireBug extension for debugging CF applications, ColdFire. You can read more here. It should make life easy for everyone except me. Why? Because somehow, I never use Firefox (which is my one and only browser) to work with CF applications. The reason is simple: I usually write only enterprise applications and Firefox is unfortunately a mile from conquering the enterprise space

At last, the RIA beam has been focused on Nigeria.

The Nigerian Adobe User Group would be doing an RIA conference to discuss and showcase what we Nigerian's got to offer. ColdFusion and Flex are going to get serious scrutiny. I also heard that some bits of Apollo would be revealed. The conference would be from January 19 to 21 2007 at Yaba College of Technology (But I gotta go to church!).

For those who don't know, RIA stands for Rich Internet Applications, which is Adobe's cut for the Web 2.0 paradigm. In all honesty, Adobe has been on the RIA stuff before the Web 2.0 apostles got their celestial callings.

For more information, please visit www.augng.com.

The ColdFusion 8th iteration is now hot on the cooker and everyone is wishing for this or that. For me, the following should be sorted out or included:

Better CFDOCUMENT
For the kind of work I do and for enterprise reporting, CFDOCUMENT is just too important but the present implementation is whacked from inside out. All the bugs should be squished and let's get rolling. There should be more formats for the CFDOCUMENT. I suggest Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

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I have been facing a challenge of using cfdocument to create very nasty and mean looking reports. After boasting about all CF can do, I guess getting reports out on PDF should be as simple as abc. Alas, I think I boasted one more time too many. The cfdocument rendition of anything apart from simple text is pathetic. It is so buggy that I wonder which Macromedia product manager signed off on it. Its processing of CSS styles, positioning, font-sizes are so terrible. Right now, I feel like breaking someone's ..... My!

Vince Bonfatti is asking questions if Blue Dragon should be open sourced. I guess some dudes have been laying it on him.
I don't think so. Must everything be open sourced?

I don't know how I could describe the frustration I have passed through when a linked DB2 server on MS SQL started returning 1 single row using the openquery syntax.

After trolling on the net for days, I finally found a solution at http://sastools.com/b2/post/79394261#comments

There is a great article on web security at ColdFusion Muse. This is part of a series of security articles you have got to read. I think it is best to secure out applications now before it gets too late. You never know when the hackers would strike.

Like I have discussed before, I have been banging my head against the table (I mean it!) on a project I am working on presently. This project involves writing fancy reports against very nasty databases. One, they are as old as my late grandfather (the oldest among the two) and two, the data is all messed up.

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CF threw an error when I ran a query of queries (QoQ) on a recordset which has zone in it and I was using the column on a group by select (to gimmie summaries on a dashboard, you get it?). Is this a bug or quirk?

"Query Of Queries syntax error.
Encountered "zone. Incorrect Select List, Incorrect select column,"

I have been an Oracle DB person for quite a while until my new job where we are running DB2 and MS SQL for the moment. Now, in Oracle, the NVL() function is a quick shortcut for series of nasty CASE THEN ELSE statements. Since the data am dealing with here is a little messy, I needed plenty of such.

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Someone toiled nights and day to write a lovely piece of blogging software (powering this website) and gave it out for free. Then another person woke up one day, stole the code and started reselling it as his own.

What do you call such a person? A mad man. A donkey with 2 legs.

The person is Ray Horn. Read more about what he did.

I moved a CMS application from one server to the other (which was almost a good replica of the production server) and CF couldn't find my components again. Since I don't have a ready access to the webroot to store my components I had to look for a way to dynamically pass the component path to the CreateObject function.

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I just finished our new website (my place of work). Now, I live in Nigeria and most of our customers are resident in Nigeria too. However, because of our local Internet infrastructural constraints, most visitors would have narrowband connections.

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The CF8 flour is in the mix and on its way to the oven. Now that we've been asked to dream big, so I will be stating my own wish list here.

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