I offered to talk about my experience at WebManiacs for the guys at the Flex Show (Jeff & John).  I actually haven't had time to listen to the cast, but I hope it was useful.  It's my first time on a podcast, even though Jeff and John are very laid back I was a bit nervous ;)

WebManiacs overall was good, I had a couple small suggestions on the food and length of the conference, but overall the sessions that I attended were very informative.  You can listen to the cast for all the details.

I recall that I said I would upload my notes from the conference, unfortunately two things occured.  I procastinated a little bit and didnt get them up before I left for business travel and my notes are on my macbook which is at home. So I will have my notes from the conference uploaded by the weekend (if nothing crazy happens). I will update this post and include the file here, so stay tuned in a couple days.

Day 1:

Ben Forta kicked off the event with a couple charts on where CF is now, and where its going.  He emphasized more on LiveCycle integration, Flex Integration and BlazeDS.  There was some confusion as to what exactly the difference is between the LiveCycle DS ES & Blaze DS... Adobe really needs to fix that so it's not so confusing.  He also talked a little bit about the CF Open Process Initiative.  I wont get into the details, but he basically talked about a bug tracker, a improved enhancement request process and a custom advisory board.  Ben Forta also hinted at some future CF 9 improvements one that I thought was being hinted at was AIR integration in CF 9.  He also "hinted" at a CF IDE, basically he said improving the developer experience... so you can read into that how ever you want.  I basically read it to say "CF IDE".  Enough said.  Overall Day 1 for me was pretty good, I attended a couple classes later in the day that I really liked.  One was ColdSpring, I learned more about the AOP capabilities of Coldspring than I knew before the class thanks to Matt Woodward.  I also attended a couple sessions on the new cfdocument and cfpdf capabilities.  I already have a couple use cases for the cfpdf capability when combining multiple pdfs into one.  I hope to have a sample on this blog in a couple days.

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Here in DC for webmaniacs conference.  Looking forward to it.  I have been doing the whole site seeing thing for the past 3 days and am ready to get back to work :)  I am staying @ the Homewood Suites (Hilton) off of 15th/Mass.  If anyone is interested in getting a beer, email me through the contact page of this blog.  I found a couple good beer places, Logan Tavern is pretty good.  They dont have draft beer, but they have a nice selection of bottled micro brewery beer. 

I need to go up and check out the conference venue sometime today, so I know where I am going tomorrow morning.  Anyway, I will see all you maniacs tomorrow.

I fly out this Friday to prepare for the webmaniacs conference next week.  My wife and I are doing a little site seeing prior to the conference over the weekend.  Should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to getting away from work for a little bit and spending some QT with my wife. 

I took some time and put my "current" agenda on my google calendar.  They have a useful print option that saves the calendar to a PDF.  I have uploaded my schedule if anyone is interested in seeing what type of sessions I signed up for (see below), I may modify it a little.  I am not thrilled on some of the topics I signed up for the first two days of the conference and may make some adjustments.

I plan on posting my notes daily next week on either the days summary or a particular session.  I haven't decided, it really depends on how much time I have and how much time I want to invest in blogging all the cool stuff I hear about in the sessions and talking with other developers.  So stay tuned.

Download my WebManiacs Session Agenda