CF: CFCamp 2011 presentation and sample code

A long day at CFCamp came to a social conclusion at the Marriott-bar. This again confirms the impression that the ColdFusion community is approachable by old and new hands alike.

Another interesting fact about the CF community emerged. According to the custodial support staff, the CFCamp attendees consumed three times as much coffee as crowds of a similar size. Definitively a mark of distinction.

Thanks to the organizers, presenters, and attendees for making this a solid CF event.
Overall, learned new things from all and had a Pretzel to boot.
As discussed, I posted the the presentation slides and sample code for download.

Cheers,
B.

CF: Munich in the Fall, CFCamp 2011

So, you just missed Oktoberfest and were wondering what else there is to do in Munich in the Fall. Well, you happen to be in luck, especially if you are a ColdFusion enthusiast.
It so happens that this year a few fellow believers in the art of the Pretzel and motivated ColdFusion learners are assembling on October 28th for CFCamp 2011.

Even yours truly will make the trek down  to Bavaria's Capital to chat and learn from others. Will also do a talk on application security, sharing some nuggets of the school of hard knocks etc.

As far as I understand it, it is not too late to signup and the Beer and Pretzels are beckoning....

Cheers,
B

.NET: wddx.net library revision

Before web services, before JSON, before many other things or people ever thought about it,  there was this other way to exchange data across platforms via the Internet using XML. It was called WDDX (Web Distributed Data Exchange).

According to Wikipedia this its definition:

WDDX (Web Distributed Data eXchange) is a programming-language-, platform- and transport-neutral data interchange mechanism to pass data between different environments and different computers. It supports simple data types such as number, string, boolean, etc., and complex aggregates of these in forms such as structures, arrays and recordsets (row/column data, typically coming from database queries).

Support for WDDX is available natively in several languages including ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, and Python. Other languages implement this through add ons. .NET belongs to the later category, thus needs a library to process WDDX. Unfortunately, this library has not seen updates in a long while. It is open source and was created by Joel Mueller early in the 2000s and not much happened since then.

First, Kudos for Joel taking on this project and making it available. It is well documented and executed; unfortunately, as with any software, there were some issues. Having discovered these and "fixed" them, the question of getting the fixes back into distribution came up. After several attempts to contact the current maintainer of this project and several months of wait time I got very frustrated and decided to take over some of this.

Rather than branching this on Microsoft Codeplex site (this is Microsoft's site for maintaining open source projects) I used Git Hub. The main reason for me to use another site for maintenance was that Codeplex seem to not get any attention from Microsoft. Bug messages were being ignored, documentation did not match to what the site did or operated.

Download WDDX.NET library: https://github.com/Bilal-S/WDDX.net

So I hope that if you need WDDX support in .NET you will check out this project.
As usual please let me know if you find any issues.

Best,
B.