Hello friends of the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group!

Just a quick reminder that our next meeting is this Thursday evening!

You do not want to miss this meeting, thanks to Comcast Interactive Media, we are giving away 4 iPods, and courtesy of Adobe, a copy of one of the Adobe CS3 Premium Software bundles (your choice if you win), along with some other goodies!

Comcast Interactive Media is also sponsoring the event and providing pizza/salad/sodas

More importantly you do not want to miss our speaker for this event:
Arpit Mathur: , Lead Software Engineer for Comcast Interactive Media: http://www.cimlabs.com/
Arpit will be discussing Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications, we might even be able to talk him into showing off his DiggGraphr, Digg Flash API contest entry which has made it into the top 10 Finalists: http://digg.com/contest

More info about the event can be found here:
http://www.pfpaug.org/

If you plan on attending, please RSVP by dropping us a note via this link:
http://www.impossi bilities.com/contact.php

Event Summary:

Speaker:
Arpit Mathur – Lead Software Engineer for Comcast Interactive Med= ia

Topic:
Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications

Date/Time:
Thursday May 31st – 6:30pm-9:30pm

Location:
Comcast Interactive Media Headquarters in Center City
1500 Market Street - Philadelphia, PA 19102
Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/2o5v4w

Hope to see you there!

Regards,
Rob

The May 31 meeting of the Flash user group looks Comcastic!: Arpit Mathur on building large-scale Flex/Flash web applications. Arpit works for Comcast and will be talking about some of the incredible work they've done with Flex and Flash. Well worth your time if you plan on doing any serious Flex development in the near future. The meeting will be at Comcast HQ at 15th and Market (just about dead Center City!). All the details and registration info are on the Philly Flash Platform User Group site. I'll see you there!

Our next meetings: June 5 and July 10, 4-6PM (yes, for sure this time!). June: Spry and Unit Testing, July: Blue Dragon and FusionDebug. Subject to change, but that's what I'm trying to stick with. Mark them down now!

We have a Flex user group in Philadelphia! http://www.paflex.org/ is being managed by Mark Belsterling, who hopes to have a meeting again very soon. This group is in its infancy and would greatly appreciate your membership.

Conferences: CFUNITED June 27-30.

Our thanks go out to Tim and Adam for making the trek up to visit us last night for our CFUG meeting, presenting a massive amount of information about the next major release of ColdFusion (coming soon to a server near you!). We can draw the following conclusions from what we saw:

• The product team has been drinking too much caffeine
• Ben, Tim and Adam will have enough frequent flier miles by the end of the roadshow to go to MAX in Japan AND Barcelona first class
• There are enough new features in CF8 to make your eyes fall out...
• ...and so will a meeting that runs almost 3 hours :-)

The best meeting content recap I've seen today was posted by our very own Phil Duba. I won't do my own now - your notes are way better, Phil! Read it if you couldn't attend or couldn't read your own writing. Share it with your boss and say "gimmie a few grand to upgrade when it comes out...or I quit". This release is one worth buying, even if it's only for the performance and server monitoring tools. Absolutely amazing stuff that will make managing your box and tuning your code/JVM that much easier.

This meeting was worth every minute. Congratulations go out to Tim Carrington from Delaware.net for winning the Scorpio equivalent of CF7 Standard when it ships. I think everybody got some sort of goodie to take home with them (including a sweet Adobe messenger bag) which is always a good thing.

Special thanks to:

• Tim Buntel and Adam Lehman for traveling, finding a rental car (minivans aren't just for soccer moms!) and presenting the goods to us
• Terry Ryan, Dan Alig and the Wharton crew for hooking us up with a room yet again. We love Huntsman Hall and appreciate your efforts to find space for us.
• Ed Sullivan from Adobe who is the "man behind the scenes" of the user group program. He's the one who ships us all the goodie boxes and makes sure YOU are well represented at the mothership.

I would also like to mention that the food for all of our recent CFUG meetings has been sponsored by CounterMarch Systems, a Lehigh Valley-based consulting firm specializing in Rich Internet Applications using Adobe tools.

I look forward to seeing most of you again in 3 weeks when we have our next meeting!

Tonight, 5PM, be there!

Even before the release of the highly successful ColdFusion MX 7 two years ago, the ColdFusion team was already hard at work scheming, experimenting, planning, building, creating ... and the result is "Scorpio", the highly anticipated 8th major ColdFusion edition. Building on top of the powerful platform introduced in ColdFusion MX, and the solid feature set of ColdFusion MX 7, "Scorpio" piles on new features and technologies for developers, administrators, technical decision makers, and more. The official "Scorpio" release is scheduled for mid-2007, but you don't have to wait until then to see it for yourself. Tim Buntel and Adam Lehman will be demoing lots of Scorpio throughout an extended user group tour in the spring, where attendees will get to see "Scorpio" in action, as well as gain access to the pre-release beta, and get the chance to win Adobe software. And since our user group is part of the Scorpio tour, plan on coming out for this special meeting!!

The May 15 meeting starts at 5PM as previously planned, not 4PM as carelessly announced this morning.

I apologize for not catching this earlier. One day I'll manage to get a meeting announcement sent out that is 100% correct on the first attempt.

EDIT: The emailed version said 4pm - that's incorrect - the meeting starts at 5PM. Sorry about that!

Tell your boss you're leaving early, and it's not because it'll be a beautiful day. Tuesday, at 5PM, we'll be hosting our friends from Adobe as part of the Scorpio roadshow!

ColdFusion has come a long, long way and the next release will be yet another major step forward for productivity. Maximize your knowledge at minimal cost (the meetings are always free!) and come learn more on Tuesday evening!

The meeting starts at 5PM - the location and other background information is available here

Let's pack the room and give Adam and Tim a warm, 700-level welcome!

See you tomorrow-
Steve

Adobe is bringing the pitch to you in Philadelphia on May 15 when Adam Lehman and Tim Buntel will be appearing at Wharton to share everything that they legally can about the next version of ColdFusion.

Meeting information is here.

A few notable features that have been announced so far:

• CFIMAGE tag ( 50 functions for manipulation!)
• CFFEED tag for RSS/ATOM feed handling
• CFPRESENTATION tag
• per-application settings
• All sorts of PDF integration stuff

There are many, MANY more things that make Scorpio worth begging your boss for some money to upgrade. But how will you possibly be able to sell the idea to him/her without coming to the meeting and taking great notes?

I look forward to seeing all of you on May 15 - let's welcome the Adobe folks with a full room of enthusiastic folks (with lots of questions!)

Ben Forta gave a Scorpio presentation to the Dallas-Fort Worth CFUG that revealed many cool features of CF8 (Scorpio). You'd be well advised to read this as a preview to many of the things you'll see firsthand when you come to the May 15 meeting!

Ben's presentation writeup, as posted by Dave Shuck.

The May 1 CFUG meeting has been postponed.

We'll see you all on May 15 at the Scorpio launch event and at our June meeting!