We're just about a month away from this years Scotch on the Rocks conference. Unlike previous years, we're taking 2009 on the road with stops in London (June 1st), Manchester (June 3rd) and Edinburgh (June 5th).

One of the major highlights of this year will be our sessions on Centaur; aka ColdFusion 9, and Bolt; the ColdFusion IDE that Adobe are working on.

ColdFusion Product Manager Adam Lehman will be covering Advanced ORM, and Evangelist Terry Ryan will be covering Bolt. Terry will also be giving the keynote at each location though Adobe are playing their cards close to their chests on what Terry will actually cover.

So, make sure you get your ticket for Scotch if you want the lowdown on ColdFusion 9 and Bolt.

www.scotch-n-the-rocks.co.uk

Fuzzy Orange are running a Scotch on the Road promotion as part of the upcoming ColdFusion Insider Workshops.

If you register for either the London or Edinburgh ColdFusion Insider Workshops, and purchase an upgrade from ColdFusion 6 or 7 to ColdFusion 8 either before the workshop or within 30 days of attending the workshop, receive one free ticket to your local Scotch on the Road event for each license upgraded.

Conditions

1. You must attend the workshop
2. You must purchase your ColdFusion upgrade via Fuzzy Orange
3. Offer only open to UK

We hate country specific competitions and promotions, so for those in mainland Europe, if you can provide the necessary proof of upgrade (from your local Adobe reseller), as well as confirmation of attending your local ColdFusion workshop, then we will honour the promotion when we bring Scotch on the Road to Brussels and Munich.

For the full list of dates for the ColdFusion Insider Workshops, head over to Claude Englebert (of Adobe)'s blog
http://www.englebert.be/blog/index.cfm/2009/1/18/ColdFusion-workshops-tour-2009

To purchase your ColdFusion upgrades, contact Fuzzy Orange using the information provided on our Contact page, or email me directly on andy[.]allan[@]fuzzyorange.co.uk

I'll be heading south on the 24th of this month to do a couple of quick client visits before partaking in a Wee Dram of Scotch.

A Wee Dram of Scotch is a one day ColdFusion event taking place in London on the 25th of September.

• Keynote - Adam Lehman/Claude Englebert
• ColdSpring - Mark Drew
• RAD Object Orientated CF Development - Peter Bell
• High Availability: Clustering ColdFusion Applications - Mike Brunt
• Subversion: Better Living Through Branches - Sean Corfield
• Setting up a Solid Level Local Dev Environment - Kurt Wiersma
• Railo 3.1: The Open Source Story - Gert Franz

A Wee Dram costs £10 to get in (cash only) and that gets you two drinks, plus 10% off the price of Scotch on the Rocks 2009.

And on that topic, we will be announcing the venue, dates and prices for Scotch 09 at A Wee Dram.

So, what are you waiting for ... Go Sign Up Now!

Issue 146 of Web Designer Mag features a review of this years Scotch on the Rocks.

Go pick up a copy!

My report of Scotch on the Rocks has been somewhat delayed due to Fuzzy Orange taking over offices all over the world.

We'll be out in force at Scotch on the Rocks next week, meaning we won't be manning the phones, though calls will be forwarded to mobiles. However, as this is "our" conference, we'll be somewhat busy.

I'm really looking forward to catching up with guys like Doug Hughes, Scott Stroz and Joe Rinehart, all of whom I met a few years back at CFUnited in Washington.

It'll be nice to see the Adobe crew again, including Jason Delmore, Kristen Schofield, Adam Lehman and Ben Forta.

There's a bunch of new folk that I can't wait to meet, such as Luca Mezzalira, Peter Elst, Neil Middleton and Neil Webb.

And last but not least, Gert Franz. We took Gert and the Railo crew out for lunch last year after the conference and introduced them to Haggis so I'll need to see what I can subject them too this year.

For everyone attending, make yourself know to me - I'll be the main idiot wearing the kilt - and who knows, maybe you'll end up with some extra swag, free drink or even some free training or consultancy. I get generous around conference time, so who knows .....

Alan Williamson announced earlier today the folks who will make up the steering committee for the Open BlueDragon (OpenDB) project.

Having known Alan for 4 years now, since I first asked him to present at the ScottishCFUG, I was aware that OpenBD was on the cards.

The members of the committee should be known to most of the community, and as Sean Corfield points out, not all of them have enjoyed a "friendly" relationship with New Atlanta in the past. However, that just goes to show the level of interest and commitment to the OpenBD project, and ultimately what it could achieve.

If you want to get involved in the project, then please join the community mailing list, which can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/openbd

If you want to experience OpenBD firsthand, then the initial release of OpenBD should take place at this years cf.Objective() conference, and 6 of the Steering Committee will be at Scotch on the Rocks;Alan Williamson, Andy Wu, Sean Corfield, Matt Woodward, Mark Drew and myself

We're planning something special for Scotch, so stay tuned!

I'm heading out to Dublin on Friday for the ScotchOnAir event.

This is a half day event put together by Scotch on the Rocks and MMUG Dublin.

Dublin was originally part of the Adobe onAir tour, but due to "unforeseen circumstances", the Dublin date was cancelled and Scotch's very own Kev McCabe jumped into organise something.

Kev has managed to arrange for Adobe's Ryan Stewart and Ted Patrick to come along and give talks on Air and Flex respectively, whilst Kev will be talking about ColdFusion and Flex.

I'll be doing my damnedest to plug Scotch on the Rocks and in addition to the swag Adobe have given us to raffle off, we will also give away a full 3 day pass to Scotch, There may also be a few other Scotch bits and bobs kicking around, and maybe some Fuzzy Orange swag too.

Now, if I can just survive my flight with Ryanair!!!

I'm up in sunny Aberdeen this Friday (which is also the last day of the early bird pricing for Scotch on the Rocks), giving a presentation on ColdFusion 8.

Fuzzy Orange will also be sponsoring the event so that everyone gets some food and a few beers.

Additionally, I will also be giving away a ticket to Scotch on the Rocks.

The presentation will be aimed at both experienced and novice ColdFusion developers. Heck, if you're a PHP/.NET/Java/Ruby/etc developer and want to know what the fuss is all about, come along.

See you on Friday.

This month saw the first in a series of articles by myself, published by Web Designer Mag on ColdFusion for Novices.

Issue 141 sees me showing easily and quickly, just how we can pull data from a database and display it in an Ajax grid. I think it takes around 28 lines of code. Real basic code.

Next month (issue 142) will see a more in depth look at programming using CFML - this should be on the way to the printers - and issue (143), well, I can't tell you what's going to be in that just yet.

In addition to the tutorial, I'm quoted on what we here at Fuzzy Orange think is "Hot for 2008". Scotch on the Rocks is top of our list, and it's very encouraging to see Web Designer agree with us, as it's number 51 in their list.