I really was convinced they'd wait until 8/8 to release it, but Adobe released ColdFusion 8 today. There are lots of new features in ColdFusion 8—a few of which everyone has been waiting years for (image manipulation, programmatic threading, per Application settings—such as mappings!) Adobe's also worked hard to make creating AJAX applications faster and easier by providing lots of built-in tags that make use of the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library (as well as many other DHTML/AJAX libraries.)
If you haven't played with the betas, you should definitely download ColdFusion 8 Trial or Developer Edition and fire up your favorite virtual machine and give it a test drive. Lots and lots of new functionality to explore—and oh yeah, it's much, much faster.
Yahoo! has just released a new Firebug plug-in called ySlow. I just finished installing it and playing around with it for a few minutes and it definitely looks like it could be one of those must have web developer tools. It provides the following:
The Performance Report card is pretty slick. It provides lots of tips on improving performance—such as ways to minimize HTTP requests, removing duplicate tags, adding expiration headers, etc.
I'm starting to get real pumped up about the upcoming football season. The Steelers new Head Coach, Mike Tomlin, gets me more excited every time I hear him speak. He just says all the right things. The real measure of a Head Coach is how they handle things on Sundays, but I think Tomlin will prove to be the next great Steelers Head Coach. I can absolutely see why the Rooneys were impressed by his interview.
For a 35 year old HC, he sure seems awful old school. From listening to his football philosophies, you'd think he was a 60 year old HC coaching in the 60s. He certainly fits the mold of a Steelers HC.
Training Camp starts this Monday, so more and more news should start rolling in every day. To get you started, here's a summary from Tomlin's news conference.
I've been working on some code for a contracting client which involves a really cool drag-n-drop interface for building forms on-the-fly. While working on the project, I ran into an issue in IE6 when dragging a <div /> element that form fields and there values had been changed by the user, the values were not properly reflected when I'd copy the node using the cloneNode() DOM method.
It turns out IE 6/7 doesn't properly clone some form elements when you use the cloneNode(true) and the form element is a checkbox, radio or select element. My suspicion is this is because MSIE stores the element in a non-XHTML way (if you do an innerHTML on the source element you'll see that checkbox elements have a "CHECKED" attribute with no value.)
I was able to work around the issue by doing the following:
The Live Search Team just released released Mobile Search v2. Windows Mobile Live Search is one of the few programs I frequently use on my Windows Mobile 5 phone. I'd recommend this as one of the first applications you install when you get a new Windows Mobile phone.
Here's a list of some of the new and improved features as defined by the Live Search Team:
Occassionally you come across something in a language you never knew existed, but always needed. Today I discovered a stored procedures included in MS SQL that I didn't know existed, but in the past have just used work around for.
Today I discovered the sp_refreshview stored procedure which updates "metadata for the specified non-schemabound view." In plane english that means if you've made changes to your tables that invalidates the view, it should refresh the view (this is problem if your view uses a select * from table—which should be avoid at all costs.) In the past I've always just done an ALTER VIEW to refresh the view—not very elegant, but it worked when I needed the view to pick up changes in the schema. This stored procedure provides to do the same thing.
For a simple explanation of the sp_refreshview see Vadivel's post on "Sp_refreshView explained..."