Well, it's all over for this year...

Web on the Piste has come and gone.

Day 0

I flew in to Queenstown on Tuesday, and we had "User Groups on the Piste" @ 4pm - 6pm that evening.

This was an event put on by New Zealand's ColdFusion and Flex User groups.

About 30 people ended up attending, which is good, as that is the number I had got catering for!

Kai and I talked about the user groups, and Robin talked about why it is such a great thing to be in a user group.

After that we got the original "Flex Daddy", Andrew Spaulding to talk about Flex3 ColdFusion!

He gave a good overview of the product, and showed some of the new features.

Then Matt Voerman started talking about Flex3.

The talk took a bit of a tangent though, and questions and answer ran thick and we never got in to the new features of Flex3 before time ran out.

Having Andrew and Matt there was great, and thanks to them for being there, and answering the questions from the group.

After the meeting, most people stayed in the bar and had dinner together, which is exactly what we hoped would happen. :-)

Campbell Anderson, who co-leads the Flex UG couldn't make it, but provided the Wii. we had a very short moment of silence because of his absence.

Between the time I said "Lets have a moment of silence for Campbell", and every one laughing was about 150ms, but I'm sure it counted! Campbell was attending the meeting virtually, so hopefully wasn't toooooo insulted!

Day 1

The next day I had my 2 sessions. The first session was on "Dynamic Image Manipulation", using CF8. I was filling in for Ray Camden, as he couldn't make it to WOTP due to family commitments. (Talk about big reputation to fill!)

The talk went well, and it's amazing how quick an hour fills up. About 8 or so people attended, amongst them some members of the NZ CFUG, and also Geoff Bowers of FarCry and WebDU fame was there. Him and I go waaaaaaay back, about 18 hours, having meet @ "User Groups on the Piste" the night before!

I took a picture of the attendees, as it was my first EVER presentation at a conference.

The next session I did was "Intro to ZoomFlex", which is a plug in for Shado CMS, which is the Commercial Enterprise CMS flagship product of Straker (where I work). The session went well.

The sessions I made it to was

- Thomas Burleson (he blogs here) on Advanced Flex (Lots to look in to from this one)

- "Taming the Code" by Geoff Bowers - about Version control.

- "ColdFusion 8: Integrated Flex Data Services" by Kai Koenig

After the sessions where over, there was a panel discussion with Andrew Spaulding (Adobe), Matt Voerman (Adobe), Scott Barnes(MS) and Nigel Parker(MS) talked about the "Future of the Internet" or "What will an Internet page look like in 2009". Interestingly enough, the only 2 people in the room (of about 60) who didn't use Google. They were the same people who are employed by Microsoft...

It was an interesting talk to listen to, but could of done with being a bit longer, as the Adobe guys didn't get much of a chance to respond to one of the questions, and I think there was only 1 question from the crowd...

...then it was off to dinner with clients and partners...

Day 2

The sessions I attended where:

- "Introduction to AJAX and SPRY" by Andrew Powell. I helped run this session, and it was done via Adobe Connect, and went really well.

- "Continuous Testing with ColdFusion and Flex Projects" - Thomas Burleson

- "Introduction to Apollo SQL" by Robin Hilliard. For some reason Robin got me to say "Six" allot in this session... I wonder why? :-p

- "ColdFusion 8: .NET Integration" by Kai Koenig and Ben Amor. This was an excellent session on the .NET integration with CF8, and much more detail than the presentation I did for the ColdFusion8 launch.

- "It's not the technology, stupid!" by Mark Stanton. This was an excellent session about the development process, from spec to project completion. Mark made some great points about the development cycle. This is the session I made the most notes in.

I had a great time at the conference, and learnt a lot. The atmosphere was awesome.

See you there next year! (Hopefully!)