Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Check out what the presentation I offered today, "What's Next In CF Zeus?" (PDF of slides), which I presented at CFCamp in Munich.

(I had mentioned last week that I would be presenting this and another presentation, as well as a daylong class. BTW, the daylong class was popular, with 13 students. Great to meet all those who attended.)

I explain in the slides how I gathered the info, from 5 public Adobe Zeus sessions I've seen so far. None of those had yet cataloged ALL features that had been shown in the other sessions. There were certain things mentioned in all 4, but then also each showed things (or in more detail) that the other did not. I enjoyed pulling this all together in this talk.

As I also note in the slides, I was not permitted to show live demos (only Adobe employees can do that), but still the listing of features and brief discussions (including some code) should still be valuable. I also point to the URLs for the 4 currently available recorded public Adobe sessions, which do in fact offer more code and live demos.

I suspect I'll offer the talk soon on the CFMeetup. I may also present them in another form. But until then, enjoy the slides.

Do let me know if it's a useful list for you, or if I left anything out!

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

At the event, I'll be giving 3 talks. Well, two are sessions in the one-track conference, and one is a day-long class the day before.

The two session topics will be:

• What's Next In Zeus, aka CF10
• Continuously improve CF code quality, server availability & application stability

The descriptions for each of those is on that page for the conference program". As you'll also note there, the other speakers are Mark Drew, Gert Franz, Gary Gilbert, Luis Majano, and Bilal Soylu.

The day-long class I'll be doing (separately purchased, and nearly sold out) is:

• Understanding and Using FusionReactor 4 and FusionAnalytics

If you haven't heard, both Fusionreactor 4 and FusionAnalytics have been released in recent weeks. They're powerful tools that I help people use all the time in my independent CF troubleshooting consulting. If you haven't checked them out yet, do. And note the availability of both a live demo (nothing to download and install) and a free 10-day demo for each.

See you in Munich, or in the future

I'll note that I will likely give both the talks in other venues and formats (whether in-person or over the web) in the future. If you may be interested, let me know.

And if you'll be in Germany next week, I hope to see you there. (Sadly, my wife didn't get to come this time.)

Thanks to all the sponsors for helping make the event happen, for me and for all who will be attending.

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

The "good" news is that there are at least a few really common explanations of what may have happened, which I'll explain them here. Once you consider them, you may find either that you can confirm this is what happened (and fix it), or if nothing else you can keep it in mind if you're ever applying them yourself in the future.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In this second entry, I'll address the separate but related problem, particularly if you're running CF as a Windows service, that you may find you get timeout errors from the Windows Services panel itself. I'll share some tips to help with that, which I share often with clients of my independent consulting as a CF troubleshooter.

The first thing to understand is that there is indeed a timeout (configurable) for how long the Windows Services control panel is willing to wait. Beyond that, though, there are some 3 more tricks you can use to avoid that timeout. (And I would say again that sometimes you really want to focus instead on WHY CF is taking so long to startup or shutdown, but until you do, the following info may help give you some breathing room.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

First, this one will help you perhaps find why it's so slow. You may just have been looking in the wrong place for that diagnostic information. Second, the next entry will offer tips to handle on better handling the situation (that the Windows service is slow to stop, and timeouts in the Windows Services panel itself) which you may need to consider until you do solve the root cause problem (or in case it happens again for other reasons).

(Note that most of this info will apply as well if your problem is that CF's taking a long time to start, also.)

As some of you know, I do CF server troubleshooting as an independent consultant. In helping several people a week, this is a fairly common complaint. This also came up on a mailing list today, so I decided to offer these thoughts here.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

If you're looking for how to configure CFBuilder to open htm files with the CFML editor, see that other entry. This one instead is about the related idea of having CF (the server) process htm (or other) file extensions. There are certainly pros and cons.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

The solution for getting CFB to open an HTM file in the CF editor is not too hard, but since he was thrown off a bit by some things he saw (when I suggested simply that the answer was in Builder's Preferences>General>Editors>File Associations page), I offered the specific steps. I then decided to go ahead and blog it, since I don't find anyone else having done so (feel free to comment if someone did).

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Update, Recording: Note that this session was recorded. You can view it here, but note that you must login with an Adobe ID to see it.

And I'm presenting a session tonight, Tuesday September 13, at 7pm Eastern, on "Understanding and Using the ColdFusion Server Monitor".

As many of you know, I'm pretty much a fanatic about the monitor, especially about truly understanding elements of it that many miss. And so in my talk this will not be just a dog and pony show, but I will talk about practical experiences with it, though presented to either those new to it or experienced with it.

Note that the times for all these devweek sessions is shown (on the Adobe site) as being Pacific time, so again mine is at 7pm, not 4pm, Eastern.

And yes, the sessions are being recorded and seem to be made available the next day.

Finally, beware that there is no one URL you can use to join in on all the Connect sessions, nor can you get the Connect session URL by going to the event page (via the first link above). Instead, you must register for each event (free) from that first page, to get each session's Connect URL--and you'll want to do that at least several minutes in advance of any session to have time to register, get the email, login, etc.

See you then.

PS Hey, while we're talking monitoring, note as well that if you've not heard, FusionReactor has come out with its new release 4, which has lots of great additions, especially FREC (or the FR Extensions for CF) which cause FR to grab and log lots of great info that the CF Server Monitor only shows and never logs. I'll be blogging about FR 4 soon, but plenty to see on their site. and FusionAnalytics is also just about to release, really!

I won't be discussing these at this talk, focused solely on the server monitor, but as I always tell folks, each tool has its use and often a single shop can benefit from having both (like I do, as do many of the clients I help with troubleshooting). You can find more from me about FR here in my blog. And I'll have lots more to say about FA and FR4 more soon.

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

This was happening to me until today. Here's how I found out and what I did about it. Hope it may help others. (Maybe this is old news to some, but it was a surprise for me and a classic bad news/good news situation.)

Update: Problem now understood

Since posting this entry, I've learned an explanation for what I was observing (thanks to Dan Switzer and others sharing their comments below to understand it). It was a case of "new" versions of the apps being created which meant that the "old" version i had was no longer being updated, and I had simply missed news of the new app. Hope that may help someone. I leave the rest of the blog entry below in case the details may interest anyone.

How I found out

So I have a couple of iphone apps I use all the time which until today, I was annoyed that seemingly obvious annoyances/limitations were not being resolved by updates. Was no one else annoyed by these? Really? Or was the developer perhaps being lazy? I lived with them. Hey, most of the apps are free or cheap.

But then today I got an email from one vendor highlighting new app features to consider in a recent update, and I noticed that they referred to enhancements to one of the very features I wanted, but they wrote as if it was a "long-standing" feature. How could I have never seen it then?

What I did to check it out

So I wondered if perhaps somehow I was NOT getting word of updates.

I remembered how when you visit the itunes store and click on an app you already have, it says "installed". I wondered if perhaps I may find that I could in fact "install" these apps, which I already had, but which seemed to have become long in the tooth.

Sure enough, I could do so (for at least two of several I checked). And holy smokes: the apps had indeed improved quite a bit.

Wow, what a shame that I've been limping along with older versions that lacked features I'd long-wanted.

Lesson learned

So obviously it's possible for apps to somehow become disconnected from their update stream. The app names had not changed, so that's not it. I don't know what happened. (For those who may wonder, in my case the apps were Harvest--for time/expense tracking--and Tweetdeck.)

And therefore I wanted to share this with others in case it may be an issue for you.

Want to help others with this problem?

Finally, does anyone know if perhaps there's some way to automate this investigation? Maybe there's info on the phone that tracks updates, and perhaps can indicate if the connection to itunes updates has broken. I suppose that's not likely.

But maybe there's a place on the phone (or in itunes on the computer it's synced to) which lists installed apps in order of last update. That would at least help highlight which ones to focus on?

Better still, perhaps there's "an app for that" which helps identify and resolve this very problem.

If you know more about this issue, feel free to share.

Bashers not welcome

One last thing: often when I write on a subject to share a solution to a problem, some folks are compelled to use the opportunity to bash whatever it is that I found the problem with. That's really not the point here, folks.

So if you're a delighted droid user, or perhaps just an apple-hater who loves the chance to give 'em a smack, or whatever, please withhold such comments. I'm serious, and I will delete or edit any comments that ignore this warning and are only about that. Let's just focus on the problem at hand, and any helpful solutions/suggestions.

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

My session will be "CF911 ColdFusion Performance Report 2011", a new talk/concept I've created. Here's the description:

Starting a new tradition, veteran CF troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will present a review of the performance aspects of making various choices when working with ColdFusion, especially in recent version(s) of ColdFusion. Leveraging the important value of real load testing (as opposed to the less accurate conclusions from "large loop" testing), Charlie's annual report will help attendees appreciate the performance-related improvements of new/changed features, as well some older features where choices can make an important impact. Depending on the timing of the release of "CF next", the session may cover its new features, but it will certainly cover some things new in CF 9 and 9.0.1.

As I note there, I hope this may become an annual event which I might present at this and/or other conferences. (It's an idea rooted in a similar presentation made by a former colleague, from my first IT career from 1982-1997, where he presented the annual "Jim Damon model 204 Performance Report".)

About RIACon

As for RIAcon, I hope you're considering it. Phil Nacelli and the folks at AboutWeb have been working hard to put together the conference, which in some minds is kind of picking up where CFUnited left off. It will be a more intimate event, much like CFunited was when it first started.

Indeed, some will recognize that the location for RIAcon is across the street from one of the hotels where CFunited was held in its early years, right next to the Twinbrook Metro station in Rockville, MD.

A Personal Connection to the Hotel Location

Even more of a delight for me personally is that the hotel (The Legacy Hotel) is right on the land that was once the location of Congressional Roller Skating Rink (until the late 70's), where my sister and I (and many friends) spent our teen years pretty much whenever we weren't in school. Yep, I was a skating nerd: dance, figures, freestyle, and more. Here's incriminating evidence!