I had some experience installing Coldfusion 8 on a Windows Server 2008 box last week. I captured some screenshots so I could do this brief tutorial.

First, Microsoft has locked down everything in Server 2008. Thankfully they've been a bit smarter about it this time. Rather than installing everything by default and prompting you to "cancel or allow" it they have introduced server roles. This means that if I want to setup a webserver I need only install the pieces of software for hosting webpages.

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Adobe really needs to do a better job of marketing Coldfusion to new developers. A friend of mine is an aspiring developer and getting his feet wet with .NET. He's always so impressed when I show him how easy it is to write Coldfusion. Today I was showing him a Coldfusion project I'm currently working on and he asked me why more people don't know about Coldfusion. I couldn't really answer him. Why isn't Adobe doing more to promote Coldfusion amongst new developers? I've come across so many people who are not the greatest programmers, but Coldfusion turns them into productive team members. Coldfusion is by far the most productive language I've ever used. Adobe should really promote the accessibility of Coldfusion.

I ran into a problem trying to return the newly created identity from a table. The identity column was a uniqueidentifier type.

Table structure:

I needed to retrieve the new UniqueID value after an INSERT statement.

The default value for UniqueID is set to newid().

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I haven't blogged in a while because I haven't had much to blog about.

Over the weekend I got my hands on SeeFusion for the first time. It was fairly easy to setup (Using the provided Windows MSI installer). It provides alot of great information about your Coldfusion instance. Long running SQL queries and page requests. Java thread inspection and KILL commands. The Enterprise edition allows long requests and queries to be logged for later analysis. All this great information is presented in a pretty Flex based interface.

Brian Kotek released a beta version of his FormUtilities CFC project.
Very cool code to make handling large forms a lot easier.

Whenever I need for Coldfusion to force a file download I use code similar to this:

The problem is that I can't see the total file size. The message varies by browser, but the situation is the same. The user can see that they have downloaded x of an unknown file size. That's not a show stopper, but it is annoying. I've been looking for a solution and finally stumbled onto the simple answer:

Today I ran across some old code that reminded me why being "clever" can get you into trouble. The code basically collects a bunch (over 30) data fields that are submitted via a web form. At the time the client was continually adding new data points. In an effort to make adding new data points easier we began to place a delimited list of key/value pairs into a single text field in the database. What a great idea! Now we don't have to add a new field to the table every time we add one to the form......Wrong! Today the client asked for the ability to sort/search on one of those data points. Something that should have been as easy as adding an ORDER BY clause to my query has turned into a refactoring job.

I came across this set of CF utilities. It's not free, but it's cheap for what you get:

http://foundeo.com/fusionkit

Over the last few years my development environment has evolved and changed as newer and better tools were released. I've had my current setup running for a few months now and I'm really pleased with how it's working.

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Ben Forta confirmed the ability to set set per application mappings in Scorpio. This will be great for distributing code and encapsulating applications. Too bad it only works with Application.cfc.

Rey Bango has put together a neat list of sites that are powered by Coldfusion.

http://www.gotcfm.com