Charlie Arehart On ColdFusion 8's Hidden Gems
I've had this one bookmarked for a while in my To Be Reviewed folder and finally got to reading it all the way through this morning. I'm talking about Charlie Arehart's presentation on Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 8. I read through the PDF version, but you can also watch his recorded Adobe connect presentation. If you haven't yet had a chance to look at this or watch his presentation, stop what you're doing and make this a priority. It's quite literally a laundry list of all the awesome features available in ColdFusion 8 that you need to know about.
Charlie Arehart is like the master of information organization. Between the User Group TV collection, Object Oriented Programming round-ups, and documents like this one, Charlie seems to have a super power for rounding up all the useful information on a given topic or area of interest and packaging it neatly for our benefit. It's pretty sweet!
Not only is this a great list for developers to read, I intend to use this list almost as a marketing tool through which I can sell ColdFusion 8 to my own company. When my boss asks me "Why should we upgrade to ColdFusion 8", it's great to be able to have something like to send him. At that point, the onus is practically on the company to provide a reason as to why we shouldn't upgrade.
Reader Comments
Hey Ben, thanks so much for the kind words. I really appreciate it. I should say, though, for those who may be motivated to look at the presentation, that while Ben says it has "a laundry list of all the awesome features available in ColdFusion 8 that you need to know about", it actually is *just* a subset of them, not even all of them. I clarify that it's "hidden gems" and only about those features that don't get talked about a lot. I don't list many (over a dozen) of the prominent new features, so just be clear that you want to combine what I have with of the lists from Adobe or others who've listed the "big features".