This is starting to become more and more frequent:

I'm coding along, making excellent progress on a project only to be stopped dead in my tracks by yet another Coldfusion limitation.

I love Coldfusion, but all the stripped down and half-assed features are starting to get in my way.

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I installed the standalone Beta 1, downloaded Beta 2 today and it noticed the standalone install was disabled. I uninstalled the previous version and the reinstall picked up my workspace. My guess is because it was in the default location (Vista x64 Ultimate):

C:\Users\%USER%\Adobe ColdFusion Builder workspace

I began using FCKEditor long before it was included with Coldfusion. I've continued to use my own implemenation even after the release of Coldfusion 8.

There was a vulnerability found in the included FCKEditor: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-09.html

I applied the patch to my server and it also broke my own FCKEditor instance. I received "403 Access Denied" errors when using the FCKEditor file browser. After much time and effort the solution is pretty simple:

Add this to your JVM args in jvm.config: -Dcoldfusion.fckupload=true

***CAREFUL about copying an pasting the text above. Hidden carriage returns will cause CF to fail on startup.***

Even if you are not using the Coldfusion FCKEditor you still need to enable FCKEditor uploads. The updated JAR must have a built-in request filter for "filemanager".

I wrote a blog entry over a year ago discussing how to install Coldfusion on Windows 2008.

With the imminent release of Windows 7 and several user comments I decided to update the instructions for myself and anyone else who finds it useful.

I've installed Coldfusion 8 and 9 on most versions of Windows. I used the default setup options.

To make the Coldfusion install as painless as possible you need to take a few pre-installation steps.

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I'VE UPDATED THIS ENTRY TO INCLUDE WINDOWS 7

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: