In April I will be presenting a lot of things at cf.Objective(). Here is a short list:

Secure CFML training

We will start with an application that is full of vulnerabilities and we are going to hack that applications. We are actually going to deploy real attacks against the application to see how it works. We'll even use some hacker tools to automate attacks. By doing this we can better learn how to think like a hacker, which better enables us to code while thinking "how could this be exploited?".

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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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At cf.Objective() this last week, one of the topics of discussion after Samer Sadek's excellent Adobe AIR presentation was about cross-domain restrictions in Adobe AIR applications written with JavaScript. I do not know if this discussion is relevant with AIR applications written with Flex.

As many may know, and if you don't you should read up on this, most browsers implement a "same-origin" policy on JavaScript run within the browser. This means that JavaScript is free to use any resource available from within the domain that it is running, but it cannot use remote resources.

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I don't know about you, but I am REALLY excited about cf.Objective(). I only get to go to one conference a year, at cf.O() is it! I went last year, for the first time, and it was incredible. The sessions were fantastic, the networking was unparalleled, and the people there were so much fun to talk to and learn from.

I am anticipating that this year will be even better. Last year, I did not know anyone in the community. There were only one or two people there that I knew before the conference began, but that changed quickly. This year, it will be like getting back together with old friends.

This year I will be more involved with the conference, I have one presentation, and I will be "hosting" (if that is the right word) one Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session along with Bill Shelton. I am really looking forward to both.

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One of the best times I had during last year's cf.Objective() conference was when a large group of us went to see Iron Man.

This year, Troy Pullis (The manager of the Twin Cities ColdFusion User Group) is organizing an outing to see the new Star Trek movie at the IMAX Theater at the MN Zoo. I think this is a great idea and I have already signed up.

It will be next Thursday Night @ 9:00, I plan on driving so I will be more than happy to take up to 5 people out there with me, so hit me up if you want a ride.

Here are the details: http://www.webdh.com/startrek/

Last year, after attending cf.Objective(), I became really excited about blogging and learning more, and presenting something at cf.Objective() 2009 because a personal goal. I even added it to my list of goals for 2009 on my annual review at work. Now it looks like I will achieve that goal. Sweet.

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cf.Objective() ended yesterday and I have to say that it was an amazing experience. I have never been so overwhelmed by info and yet excited about it all at the same time. The sessions and the speakers were outstanding, the accommodations were good, and the camaraderie was the best around. I got to meet many of my favorite bloggers, meet some of the super-talented experts in the field, and make some new friends. I really had a great time and I can hardly wait until next year.

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Well day 1 is over and it was great!

I spent the entire day at the conference and I was able to hear some great presentations and mingle with some really knowledgeable and friendly people.

As I said yesterday, Kurt Wiersma's Local Dev Presentation was great. It showed me a few things about setting up multiple CF environments about which I was not previously aware.

I then went to John Paul Ashenfelter's Agile boot camp and it was incredible. I'm not sure I have ever crammed in that much learning in so little time. I am already sold on Agile Development, and I am definitely going to try to put some of the practices into my personal projects.

I finished the day with Mark Drew's Dreamweaver CFEclipse Reloaded presentation (those brits are a funny bunch). He showed a great many tips and tricks and advanced features of CFeclipse. If you are using CFEclipse, you should attend this session.

I am still trying to sort out my schedule for today. We'll see how that goes.

So far cf.Objective() has been awesome. I spent Wednesday and Thursday in Mach-II training with Kurt, Matt and Peter. That was great. I have been looking at the CF frameworks for a while, but I have been unable to hit the ground running becasue I could not get over the hump of learning how the control interacted with the model. Well, Team Mach-II really helped clear those things up for me and helped make much of this OO stuff just "click" with me.

Today begins the breakout sessions of the conference. The Adobe keynote was OK. Someone had a medical issue during the keynote, I hope he is OK. I'm not sure what happened, and since it is none of my business I am not going to inquire, I just really hope he is OK.

Kurt Wiersma is presenting on setting up a local production environment this morning. Really a great presentation. Some great resources on Source Code Control, Web Server setup and Multi-instance CF installs.