Archive of Vernon Viehe's Blog (Quarterly)

Macromedia ColdFusion Studio - ColdFusion MX Tag Updater is here!

You may also want to check out the CFStudio FAQ

Folks today were asking about getting their subscriptions for CF Server and CF Studio fulfilled (seems someone had started a rumor it might take weeks). Here's the skinny:

CFMX is available for immediate download for folks with a current/valid subscription.

If you are registered with a current/valid subscritpion serial number, you should have received an e-mail with instructions outlining how to d/l CFMX. The e-mail contains a link and some instructions. When you go to download CFMX as part of your subscription, you'll have an option for requesting a backup CD and documentation at no charge.

If you have a current/valid subscription and did not receive this e-mail, first, be sure to register (or make sure you are registered).

Once registered, that will trigger the e-mail to you (not sure how long it would take, but I would guess within a day or two).

If you find that you're already registered with your CF Server Subscription number, and have not gotten this e-mail, please contact Customer Service, and they'll get you squared away. Keep in mind, we're swamped due to overwhelming response, but subscription issues do get a higher priority from Customer Service.

Note that our servers have been swamped due to overwhelming response to the MX family release. It may be hit-or-miss untill the traffic subsides, which is usually a day or two right after a popular release. (For those of you who are curious, we have not yet transitioned our systems to ColdFusion on the backend yet...it's Broadvision. We're working on the transition, but for now, we have to go with the systems that are in place.)

CFStudio Subscription: Also immediately available for download (kinda), same process as above for CFMX Server. But, there are a few kinks were working on, I anticipate these will be resolved in the next day or so:

1.) The letter that went out erroneously instructed to use the CF Server serial number at the supplied link, but you should use CFStudio serial number.

2.) Currently, there's a couple glitches in the online subscription fulfilment mechanism. Most importantly, the system is presenting the wrong bits for d/l (CFServer instead of DWMX & Homesite+) Also, sometimes the Studio serial number you're asked to enter isn't correctly recognized.

Once these issues are resolved and you can successfully fulfill your subscription online, you'll also be given the option to receive a backup CD and documentation at no charge.

These issues should be resolved shortly, so try again in a day or two. If you're still having trouble getting DWMX & HS+ as part of your CFStudio subscription, contact Customer Service and they'll quickly help.

MX hits the streets!

This morning, ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX, and Fireworks MX became available for download. You can buy online or download the trial versions of the final shipping product.

A new day on the internet has dawned - I can't wait till it's high noon!

A little delay on the adaptive tags. They'll be coming soon though.

The Macromedia Users Group Managers' Conference was great! I got to rub elbows with a lot of the movers and shakers in the CF community. Rob Brooks-Bilson, Selene Bainum, Jeremy Petersen, Stephen Rittler, Amy Wong and I went out in South Boston after the opening reception on Friday night. Of course, I reminded them that any non-disclosure agreements they may have signed extended to after-hours activites. I hope they don't check with their attornies on that. ;-)

One of the things I saw demo'ed at the conference was Tim Buntel showing off CFMXs adaptive tags. I hope to show a teaser here in my blog so that I can share the excitement. Stay tuned for an installment to whet your appetite for this powerful, but unsung feature!

If you're interested in ColdFusion, you should check out Macromedia - ColdFusion MX Application Development Center. It's chocked full of content geared towards the developer gearing up for ColdFusion MX.

I've been trying to change my Blog heading to reflect that I'm a community manager for Macromedia, but the change isn't "taking." When I have time to redo all the customization, I'll start over on my blog template.

I'm in Boston for the rest of the week, meeting with the Macromedia folks in the east coast office, and the User Group Manager Conference. I'm really psyched to meet the usergroup managers!

The Macromedia webforums were down today due to equipment failure. The IT department is working to get the system back up as quickly as possible. Folks can still use the newsgroup interface.

If you're having trouble with ColdFusion MX Prevew Release on Win98/ME, please be aware that Win98/ME aren't supported for the Preview Release, but will be supported using the stand-alone server installation for the final release of the shipping product.

Be sure to check the ColdFusion Release Notes live on the Macromedia website for any late-breaking news on CFMX.

We've seen where some installations of Preview Release version of ColdFusion MX aren't starting automatically. We've reported this to our engineers. This should be resolved for final release.

If you've installed CFMX and it's not starting when you boot up, i.e. you get an error when you open the Administrator for ColdFusion, navigate to C:\CFusionMX\bin and double-click the cfstart.bat. That should get it going for you.

If you're still having trouble, stop by the ColdFusion Preview Release Forums, and post your issue there for additional help.

One of the issues that comes up in the forums is that the Preview Release of ColdFusion MX doesn't offer IIS as an option, IF you already have a previous version of CF installed in IIS. This is by design, because our engineers didn't want folks to possibly mess up their existing installation by upgrading it with the Preview Release. It was intended that in this case, you should use the stand-alone server for the purposes of checking out CFMX. For folks who want to try CFMX with IIS, you'll need to uninstall any previous version of CF which may be installed in IIS, then run the CFMX install.

This could have been much clearer in the documentation that came along with the Preview Release version of ColdFusion MX. I apologize if anyone got gray hair over this one!

Very quiet over the weekend and today on the CF e-mail lists. This is good, because it give me an opportunity to work on a CF application for Team Macromedia bios. It's also given me a chance to hang out in the Preview Release forums a bit.

Macromedia wins countersuit against Adobe! <BG>. OK, now that that's out of the way, read the story for yourself.

Today, I noticed folks on CF Guru (an invitation only mail list for CF experts) are starting to really dig some of the cool new stuff that ColdFusion MX does. It was noted that CFMX can now do true server-side redirects, and Pete Freitag added that you can also include JSP pages or a servlet, and access other Java goodies. It's great to see folks getting excited about their new toys!

There is some concern in the CF community, and a lot of concern in the HomeSite community regarding the future of HomeSite. While we don't specifically comment on future releases (especially when we have a current rev pending release), we will have an FAQ posted that may clarify the situation. I'll post that link here as soon as it becomes available.

I had a mis-placed bracket in my post below, and it's hosing my ability to edit that entry. I was just saying, folks can let us know the features they want to see in future version of Dreamweaver MX by using the "wish" form (see link to right this time. =)

There was a lot of discussion on CF Talk today about DWMX. It seems some folks really miss having access to open/save files via FTP/RDS. Other folks don't seem to like having to define a site. In my experience, newcomers to Dreamweaver often fuss about defining sites, but once they get in the habit of it, they usually find something more substantial to focus on.

I got several nice off-line e-mails about how it was nice I didn't lose my cool. But the truth is, I'm very sensitive of the fact that the IDE is where most CF coders spend thier day. It's as personal and important as physical surroundings, perhaps even more so. Changes to something this intimate are always an emotional issue.

Fortunately, Macromedia will be including HomeSite+ with Dreamweaver, so folks can take their time in getting used to working in Dreamweaver MX, and letting us know what they want to see in future versions of Dreamweaver to make it their preferred IDE.

What would you do with a free iMac?

Macromedia has a new Tips Library, which is fed by submissions from the online community. To kick this off and get the tips library stocked up, we're having a promotion where you could win a free iMac!

Too much legal-eagle info for my blog entry, but please check out the contest rules for more information!

A topic that still comes up in the mail lists and forums is "Why did Macromedia call all of their new stuff MX? What was wrong with good old-fashioned numbers?" and "MX naming doesn't make any sense, it must be all about marketing..."

At first it took me a while to get my head around it. But finally it made sense to me...

With the old-fashioned number versioning, you have different products made around the same time and optimized to work together, but it can be challenging to remember that DW 4, FL 5, CF 5, FH 10 and Dir 8.5 all came out about the same time and "go together."

With the MX family of products from Macromedia, we've put more engineering effort than ever before into the interoperability/integration of our products, so I believe that the folks here at Macromedia wanted this to be reflected in a naming convention that closely ties all the products together, and is easy to keep clear which verions "go together."

Stated another way, it's a method of getting all the products on the same "version" without having to back-up or advance version numbers (i.e. move everything to version 8 so they all match, and then the possible resulting confusion when to do that, we have to jump 4 version numbers ahead on Dreamweaver, and back up 3 version numbers on something else.)

I'm not supposed to comment on the Adobe lawsuit. But I can say that it will not hurt our customers, and folks who adopt the MX UI will not be affected by the outcome of this situation. For Macromedia's official word on this, please see our press release.

The CF 5 Developer/trial download is officially back on the Macromedia site!

I've seen the Deerfield Website Pro question in the the mail lists now. What I've found out is that we don't officially support it in the CF MX release, but we will consider it in the future. If this is important to you, please let us know!

While I've not seen much mention of CFMX not running on Deerfield Website Pro (formerly of O'Reilly) in the forums or e-mail lists, it does seem to be the number one request from the Feature Request and Bug Report form (probably about a couple dozen requests). I'm checking into what our plans may or may not be in that area.

While we are seeing heavy traffic downloading the MX Preview Releases, and getting occasional reports of failed downloads because of server overload, it seems this is only coming up occasionally, and most folks are successful when they reattempt a bit later. It seems as though we've really fixed things up since we got swamped on the Flash MX downloads the few days after it was released.

Following Matt Brown's lead, I'm including a link to the Feature Request and Bug Report form in my links on the right. If you find bugs in any of the Preview Release versions, or if the cool new features in the MX family of Macromedia products inspire ideas for more cool new features, let us know about it!

An emerging issue for a few CF customers is the lack of a method of direct connection to databases (CONNECTSTRING) without setting up a DSN in the administrator module for CF. Early reports from engineering indicate it has to do with difficulties presented by the JDBC that CF uses now that it rides atop a J2EE server.

Some CF customers noted that we no longer had the development version of CF 5 available, which presented some problems for them. We're going to remedy this by posting it to the updaters page. This should be posted very soon. I'll note here when it's up.

Fusion Authority, the oldest independent online ColdFusion magazine, announced its support and sponsorship of CFUN-02, the Fourth Annual TeraTech ColdFusion Conference. Several big names in the CF community will be presenting or otherwise involved, including two Team Macromedia Volunteers: Micheal Dinowitz and Hal Helms.

Also announced today, Ben Forta will be at the NYCFUG on Monday May 13th. He will be doing one of the first public presentations and demonstrations of ColdFusion MX.

We ran into a glitch with the Preview Release forums not mirroring properly between the Newsgroups and the Webforums. The problem has been resolved.

There's more discussion of DWMX on the CF lists than discussion of CFMX. This community is getting familiar with a new development tool. the vast majority of "problems" are resolved by being pointed to where the feature is in Dreamweaver, not the lack of features. A lot of folks seem very impressed with DW as their new development tool! I know I am!

Found out in a meeting this morning that some of the performance issues some folks may experience in CFMX have to do with the not using the "trusted connection" in setting up the datasource. Using this feature can speed things up.

Neil Clark posted some very helpful info for folks having trouble with installation on installing with IIS 5ColdFusion MX Preview Release Forums - Installing CFMX W/ CF5 & IIS 5

Today was the first day of the Preview Release for the MX family of Macromedia products! (See, I told you I was working on some exciting stuff!)

We're working to raise the visibility of the preview release forums, but meanwhile, you can get there via this link, or through the Macromedia Support Site.

The talk on the CF lists is very positive! There are no really HOT issues. There was one thread about about performance. Some say it's faster at some things, slower at others. Mostly, it seems to be a logical debate without hard numbers yet.

There's some mention of the lack of a CF Studio, but it seems we've got some real Dreamweaver fans that are helping point out how Dreamweaver MX has all of the CF Studio goodies, with lots of great TOYS along with it, and with DW's extensibility, new "toys" are coming out all the time! I think we're going to pick up a lot of new DWMX fans from the ColdFusion community!

Receiving a little coverage is the lack of Mac version. It seems mostly an esoteric debate, because most of the CF developers are not on Mac, and Mac users (as well as Win) can use a remote testing server, and code CFML in DWMX all day!

Got some requests for creating the DesDev XML feed in WDDX in addition to custom XML. Instead, it's been suggested that we wait until the next version of ColdFusion is released, as it has improved native support for XML. Meanwhile, those running CF based sites can use the instructions found linked off of Mike Chambers Logged in this week, there are some links leading to cf code & tags that will readily parse the XML into native CF structures.

OH! And I got my new personal computer. It's a sweeeet laptop!

I don't have any big news today. I was only able to take a cursory glance in the forums, busy with some other exciting stuff! But since I've got some space in today's blog entry, I'll mention that anyone running a community website would probably want to know about the XML Feed Contest where you could win a digital camera or MP3 player if you hook your site up with our XML feed!

More information on the CFLocation issue (not Neo): the exact patch that breaks the cflocation functionality on long URLs is MS Patch Q319733 . Still awaiting more concrete information as we continue to investigate.

OK, so, a couple of folks didn't like my chameleon color-shifting background. I thought it was fun, but I've ceded to the boring and replaced my blog look with something less exciting.

Oh, and IT picked up my machine to upgrade it to an NT level operating system finally!

While this isn't MX related, I felt like it deserved mention. Some folks are reporting problems with the cflocation tag after applying Microsoft's recent cumulitive security patch to IIS. This is the preliminary information I've found so far:

Server redirect URLs are limited to 471 characters under the recent cumulitive security patch issued by Microsoft. This appears to be something intentionally coded by Microsoft (not a bug). There are a few curious items though, and a greater understanding of these items will undoubtedly shed more light on this:
* Some reports are that this affects only IE. Netscape, Mozilla and Opera seem to work ok. Very odd.
* One person reported that he put rand=#rand()# into his and it fixed it, but others didn't have success with that.
* One person reported that ASP doesn't seem to be affected by this. Curious!

Some CF customers are asking us to fix it, but at first look by our team, it doesn't look like it's something that can be addressed by anyone other than Microsoft. We're still gathering info, so I'm not declaring that as gospel just yet.

On a side note, a search of Google.com for "URL Length Browser" turned up a number of various issues that can arise from the use of lengthy URLs, so it may be something worth avoiding if possible. (Maybe this is why Microsoft didn't see it as a potential problem?)

Got it fixed! If the color changing is annoying, let me know (yes, I realize I'm not publishing my address, but it's around in my forum posts and other places, just keep an eye out! =)

OK, so I'm new to blogging. I'm trying to get my page look right, and I seem to be having some trouble doing it!

*sigh* I'm still waiting on our IT department to upgrade my machine to Win2K so I can get Neo installed. But, I'm very excited that my new personal machine, sporting Windows XP Pro, will soon be here, and I'll be able to get Neo set up there!

Meanwhile, I'm helping to prepare the launch of the Preview Release of the upcoming MX family of products from Macromedia.