Wow. Things have been busy and I have been neglecting my blog. I feel bad about that. My blog is so important to me, and things have been keeping me away.

I am a teacher at heart. I love to teach. That is why I blog, that is why I present at conferences, and that is why I am going to grad school. So the fact that I have been unable to blog for a while upsets me greatly. But I want to tell you a little bit about why. This is not about making excuses. This is about what is keeping me busy and what I am learning about. It will also motivate me to blog about these things, and that's the important part.

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This last weekend I attended, and spoke at, NCDevCon 2010 in Raleigh, NC. As expected, NCDevCon was a great conference put on by an amazing crew of dedicated volunteers.

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Right now I am on my way to NCDevCon (Yay for free inflight internet!!).

If you are going to be at the conference this weekend, please do not hesitate to introduce yourself. One of the main reasons I go to conferences is to meet others.

On Saturday I will be speaking about Security in Adobe AIR applications. I will point out that this session is targeted toward experienced AIR developers (either Flex or HTML JS).

Anyway, I am looking forward to the conference. Last year's CFinNC was amazing, and I am positive that this year will be just as good.

Tomorrow night at the Twin Cities CFUG meeting, Kurt Wiersma and I will each be presenting one of our cf.Objective() presentations. I think we each have three presentations to give at cf.O(). This is your opportunity to see two of the six early (or at all if you are not going to the conference for some bizarre reason). :)

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We had a great response to our contest to give away a seat at our "Building Secure CFML Applications" training at cf.Objective() next month. A total of 42 entries.

And the winner is

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I hope everyone is aware of the cf.Objective() conference that takes place in Minneapolis/St. Paul every year. In case you are not, you should know that it is an absolutely AMAZING event.

cf.Objective() is touted as "The World's Only Enterprise Engineering Conference for ColdFusion Developers". I have been to two cf.Objective() conferences so far, and this year will be my third. I am very excited about it.

Two years ago, there was a two-day pre-conference training session held on the Mach-II framework. It was a very successful training (I believe they sold out every seat), but beyond that, it was a fantastic training. I attended it, and I loved it. I learned a lot. Last year they had ColdBox training prior to the conference. I did not attend that one, but I hear it was also great.

This year, the organizers of cf.Objective() are trying the pre-conference training again, but with more training sessions. This year there will be six!

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I received word last week that two of the topic proposals I submitted to the cf.Objective() planning committee were accepted. I am very excited and honored by this. It's nice to know that people think what I have to say is worth while.

You may have guessed that I will be talking about security, since that seems to be what I enjoy talking about most. But this year will be a little different.

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Bleh. I have been sick for the last week and have spent a lot of time away from the keyboard and from blogging. But I was able to give both of my presentations at the MN Government IT Symposium last week and they both wen toff excellently. I got a lot of good feedback for both. Even my application security presentation, which was the last session on the last day managed to draw 20 attendees, which, I understand, is pretty good.

Anyway, here are my presentations in their original formats and in PDF format.

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Last year I spoke at the Minnesota Government IT Symposium on application security, and I thought it went really well. I ended up with 75 or so attendees (for a 2.5 hour presentation), which I thought was fantastic.

This year I have been honored with being selected to speak again on application security (this time for only one hour) and also on Adobe AIR.

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I found out late last week that I am one of several people to have had a presentation topic selected for CFUnited 2010. This is very exciting for me and is a great honor.

The selected topic title is "Understanding Security in Adobe AIR Applications" and here is the description.

Wait... You mean AIR applications have different security concerns than regular web applications? Yes, they do. Since Adobe AIR applications are desktop applications we have new security considerations to think about. Come learn how to ensure that your AIR applications are secure. In this presentation we will go over the Adobe AIR security model and some security best practices in Adobe AIR for both Flex and Ajax applications.

I am really looking froward to putting together this presentation and presenting it to one of the many fantastic conference audiences in the best developer community in the world.