I'm on ColdFusion 9, are you?

So, as everyone is well aware of by now. (I guess I am late to the party). COLDFUSION 9 is available! This release brings with it MANY improvements, and anyone who hasn't looked at CF in a while, well it is time to look again! My top features?

• ORM
• CFScript
• Component improvements
• Office integration
• ColdFusion as a Service

Um, yeah, while you are downloading or installing CF9, don't forget to grab the ColdFusion Builder Beta as its integration with CF9 is superb! Oh, and head on over to riaforge.org and see some of the AMAZING extensions you can put into CFBuilder to make the development process, um, easier :)

PDF Printing Follow-Up

So, I haven't had a chance to test this with CF9 yet to see if the problem still exists, or even if anyone but me thinks it is a problem, but I have at least worked through a process to not try and flatten a PDF that doesn't have any form fields.

So:

Pretty straight forward after all, but I am still going to look into the PDF functions with CF9 to see if they handle any of this stuff better. the errors thrown by are obtuse, and not really helpful. I would think that it would be able to continue processing if there were no fields to flatten, or it would be able to handle a PDF with no form fields a little differently (the error message is actually missing a space).

Anyways if anyone has been experiencing issues with PDFs with form fields and printing with CF8, I hope that this post and my last one will be helpful for you.

Weird PDF Printing issue - CF8

So, I have been trying to print off some PDF reports that are made with ActivePDF and Visual C++ 6, however, EVERY time that I print the PDF, parts of it are light blue/light grey, instead of black (as they appear when opening the PDF, in say Reader). Anyways, I have been banging my head on the wall for some time, and hitting up, well everyone I know and lots of folks that I don't to see if ANYONE had the answer... and I got very little.

A couple of weeks ago, Steve Withington offered his help with my issue. I sent him a sample PDF and the code etc. and the only thing that he noticed was form fields, and that the PDF had some that were 'read-only'. I thought, 'OK, I will set them to not be read only, and blamo, it'll print properly!'... uh, nope.

The long and the short of this story? ColdFusion does not play nice when printing with form fields in a PDF file. So, what do you have to do? well, use the command and that will remove the form fields from the PDF. Now, I don't know if this is a bug or not, cause nobody but me has ever experienced it :(... Maybe I should fire up my CF9 beta and see what happens?

The only thing that I have yet to figure out is how to determine if the PDF has form fields or not...

ColdFusion Win7 Themepack

Well, as you can see from my last post I have made the move to Windows 7 (RC) (although I have already made the decision to get the full version when it comes out). One of the neat things about Windows 7, is what they call themepacks. A nice little way to bundle up some desktop images, sounds and desktop icons too. The images you can set to change at specific intervals.

As I said last time, I was making a ColdFusion themepack, which was composed of just some of the different backgrounds that Andy Matthews created for CF9/CFBuilder etc. as well as one that I did, just cause I thought it would be cool :)

I have now taken it one step further and added new desktop icons that are CF themed. There is a 'My Computer' icon, and icons for the Recycle bin (full and empty).

Here's the link to the download ~ 2.6 MB

And the My Computer/Recylce Empty and Recycle bin full captures (in case you don't have Win7 or you want to look before you leap)

Let me know what you think. Also the ICO files that are contained should work for Vista....

Cheers!

And as requested. a full screen - screenshot - here

My Move to Windows 7

So, after one of the Updates for Windows XP, my system started to suck, horribly bad. It was slow, poor screen refresh etc. Which is not what I would expect from a laptop that is only 6 months old. I made the decision to do a clean install (which for me, was not an easy one, being in the middle of a huge project - but I fugured the delay caused by reinstalling the OS would be better than the delays caused by an unstable OS).

Anyways in prepping my system for the move (I had a few files to move over to an External HD) I was thinking about what else I could do. I was chatting with Paul Kukiel about some choices, as I was adding VMWare to the mix as well, so I could run Ubuntu if I felt like it. Paul suggested that I perhaps go with Windows 7. Well I was just in time! The download for the RC was taken down on August 20th. I made my download on the 19th!

So at 11pm on the 19th, I started, inserted the Win7 Disc (64-bit btw) and began the process. Now the format/install took maybe 30-40 minutes in total, I am sure it was done before midnight. I then spent the next couple of hours installing CF, CFBuilder, Flex3, downloading Office, VMWare, and getting more familiar with Windows 7. So, within about 3 hours, I had a working system again. (so I packed it in, although I felt like I could keep going, but figured I needed some sleep!)

Anyways, its been a few days now, and I have had a few issues, but in general Win 7 is quite nice, and fast! Of course the speed could be related to my change from 32-bit to 64-bit...

Now, the things that bothered me:

1. Icon Size on the desktop - they were huge, and I could find NO way to reduce them, but Paul (who has been running Win7 successfully for some time now) said that it was a combination of holding the right-ctrl key and then using the mouse wheel to scroll out. I thought it was a bit weird, but it worked!
2. Permissions! - Okay, I have never worked with Vista, but wow, the permissions thing (which will be advantageous I am sure) sucked! I copied all of my website data over etc, and I could not edit anything, as I wasn't the owner, so I had to take ownership, then restart (to apply that ownership change) then I had to change the permissions to allow the CREATOR/OWNER full control over the files. To allow me to change the permissions, I of course had to turn off UAC.
3. UAC - I left it on while I was first setting up the system, because it seemed fine, but as soon as I needed to change the permissions on files, I HAD to turn it off. It really wasn't a big deal though
4. Configuring the IIS to accept CF files. Pretty easy following Paul's guide, except that IIS still needs to be told about index.cfm, oh, and it didn't work the first time for me, so I had to remove IIS and then do it all again.

Now, for the things I like:

1. Task bar - you can basically put all of your favorite programs down there, and access them via their icon. If there is more then one window open from the program you can access any of them visually
2. 64-bit - OK, I was 32-bit before, and 64-bit is awesome!
3. Themepacks - kinda ot important, but really cool. I have made a CF one, using the backgrounds that Andy Matthews made, as well as one of my own :). Maybe I will post it, although I think it needs a little more work.
4. The fact that except for the touchpad and some of the HP drive guard stuff, all of the drivers were found without my interaction, and the system just worked. Which I thought was pretty damn sweet. I had just re-formatted a system at work (that didn't need anything carried over) and after the like hour of install, I still needed to get all the drivers so that the network/sound cards would work.

All-in-all, I am satisfied with my move to Windows 7, and it seems to be a nice stable, fast platform, with some nice improvements to my ability to manage programs etc. I think I am going to experience a productivity boost. Now I just need to replace my 2 - 2GB RAM sticks with 2 - 4 GB sticks :)

CFUnited 2009 - The cheap way

Alright, so, I was not able to attend CFUnited this year, although I REALLY wanted to! It just sounded sooo good, and following what people say on Twitter is not nearly as good as being there, or so I have heard!

Anyways, I am still attending, just after it is all done by using SlideSix, this is the BEST website for presentation sharing and it seems that the majority (if not all, I haven't done an in-depth comparison of sessions scheduled vs. presentations available) of presenters at CFUnited have posted their presentations to SlideSix.

It seems that the CFUnited site will also have all those presentations as well, although I would venture to say that SlideSix would make more sense, seeing as some of the presentations are already there. I think that the CFU gang should just upload them all there... (maybe Todd doesn't want that.. server overload :P)

Anyways, if you are like me and didn't get to go and have fun and get a head full while you were there, at least the presentations are available.... now to figure out how to get beer and the pool party over the internet....

SQLite and AIR

So, I am spending some time, playing with AIR and the built in SQLite database. I am working on a small project that is for my benefit, but hey, I may share it later on :)

Anyways, last night I was going through the examples on Tour de Flex, and I am the kinda guy that learns by example, so I just copied the code that was there, modified it for my liking, and then tried to run it. I continually got the 1009 error, you know the not really telling you what is wrong error.

Anyways, after a quick Twitter talk with Andy Matthews, Jason Dean and Simon Free I changed the extension of the SQLite database to something other than the .DB that was in the sample code.

Now, with further discussion, it seemed like this was something of a rarity, and no one seemed to know why it wasn't working. (i.e. a .DB extension worked for Jason, but not me, Andy had issues with the .DB extension at a point) It just really seemed odd.

So, I went a little deeper. It seems that if you already have a .DB extension registered on your computer, you cannot make the SQLite database use that extension! This causes some concern I would imagine for installing programs on certain computers. Who knows what kind of extensions ppl have registered. Of course, as Jason tested, you can make ANY extension for your SQLite database.

So, if you are having issues with creating your first ever SQLite database, this may be the problem, however un-illuminating the 1009 error is. All of my AIR programs are going to use the agfusion extension for their database... so you should come up with your own.

**After some further testing, it seems that it is not just due to the fact that the file is already registered, but more due to the fact that there are no actions associated with the file type.

If you go to Windows Explorer > Tools > Folder Options > File Types, you can see what actions are associated with each file extension, by selecting the file type and then hitting on Advanced. Now for me the .DB extension had no actions associated with it, due to, well who knows. Anyways, I guess the point is, is that it really should work, but I am still keeping my unique file extension, to make sure that it doesn't.

In the Ag industry there are programs that already use the DB extension (as witnessed) and if I am making an AIR app to do something, it needs to work regardless of what might have already happened to a system, so I will play it on the safe side!