Asked a few times in various places:

If I am a Flex Builder 3 Professional User, is there a way to upgrade and still get ColdFusion Builder, since ColdFusion Builder comes with a copy of Flash Builder?

If you are a Flex Builder 3 Professional User, you can upgrade to Flash Builder Premium for $299. Flash Builder Premium has a few key features above and beyond Flash Builder, including Network Monitor, profiling tools, and unit testing support. We made a handy upgrade chart for you.

To upgrade, you can head to the Adobe store.

I'm happy to announce that this morning, at 12:00 AM EST*  ColdFusion Builder has been released and is available for purchase. Before I tell you how kick ass ColdFusion Builder is let me answer the questions everyone has asked me that I've had to be coy about for the past few months.

When will it be released?

TODAY!

How much will it cost?

ColdFusion Builder Standalone will cost $299 and will include Flash Builder Standard. That's right; you get ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder for $299.

Flash Builder Premium will also include ColdFusion Builder for the price of $699.

Where do I get it?

http://www.adobe.com/go/coldfusionbuilder

Okay, that's out of the way. Let's talk about ColdFusion Builder.

I love ColdFusion Builder. Sometime during the betas I switched over to using ColdFusion Builder, and I haven't looked back. I've put up with reinstalling over and over and over again through 3 public betas, and several private alphas, and several private refreshes. I've done this because I was excited with every drop to see what our engineers added. With few exceptions every release was a phenomenal leap over the previous versions.

Of course I'm going to say this, because I work for Adobe, right? Well I've griped, but gripes go inward, not outwards. (At least in the written form ;) )

It's not hard for me to pick my favorite feature: ColdFusion Builder Extensions. Extending an IDE isn't a new concept. We chose Eclipse as the platform for ColdFusion Builder precisely because it was designed to be extended. But the fact that ColdFusion developers can extend Builder with the language in which they are expert instead of dropping down to Java and Eclipse development is huge. It makes the development of plugins have almost no barriers to entry. Have an idea? Write 50 lines of code and XML and there it is. We've already seen 30 extensions up on RIAForge before ColdFusion Builder is even out of beta. I am continuously impressed at what the community is doing in this space, and I can't wait to see what they do after today.

Check out for yourself what the community has done at the ColdFusion Builder Extensions section at RIAForge.

It's tough to get a sense of how good a product is when you are working this close to it. You don't know if you have something, or you're suffering from groupthink. But some people will always find fault, some people will always love everything. You have to throw away those opinions and focus on the rest. Doing this, I think the verdict on ColdFusion Builder is that it is a great product, an impressive 1.0 product, and it still has lots of potential for which to strive in future versions.

I think the engineers, and product manager (Adam Lehman) deserve a round of applause (and several rounds of whatever they want to drink) for their efforts.

Go get yourself some ColdFusion Builder today!

* Or possibly earlier.

I'm very excited to say I'll be doing the keynote at Capital Flash Camp 2010.

I've been trying to get to one of the Flash Camp events for a while, as I hear great things about them. However, I've had scheduling conflicts for almost all of them.

If you're in the DC area and looking to get into Flex and the rest of the Flash Platform here is your chance. Here's the speaker lineup:

• Adnaan Ahmad, Anaara Media
• Huyen Tue Dao
• Terry Ryan, Adobe
• Christian Saylor, Universal Mind
• Chris Scott, Universal Mind
• Carl Smith, nGen Works
• Jeff Tapper, Digital Primates
• Dave Watts, Fig Leaf Software

It's a monster lineup that I'm proud to be a part of. So go register for Capital Flash Camp.

So, buried in the documentation around ColdFusion Builder is the fact that you can write extensions in Flex. I decided to fool around with this for a bit.

If you want to skip all of the demo and explanation and just try it out, feel free to pull down the extension:

Builder Stats at RIAForge

Builder Stats - ColdFusion Extension with Flex from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

So doing it is pretty easy on the Builder side:

• Create a remote service CFC for all of the information that you want to expose to Flex
• Have your ColdFusion Builder extension pass information to the Flex generated SWF
  • Pass any variables to the SWF just like you would pass URL variables

On the Flex side:

• Pull in the remote service cfc as a WSDL* using Flash Builder's Data/Services
• Write your Flex app to use the services that get created
• Alter the generated ActionScript classes to use a WSDL that is passed into the SWF via the URL (Flash Params)

One more thing:

I'm not sure if this is a Flex thing, a ColdFusion thing, an OS thing, a webservices thing, or a me being dumb thing, but the automatically generated WSDL for my remote service CFC was different on Windows and Mac. Consequently the SWF could call the Mac hosted WSDL but not the Windows hosts WSDL. My solution? Create a static WSDL file that had the service spelled both ways. Maybe a hack but worked like charm.

Anyway, if you want to see the code, it's available on github:

• ColdFusion Builder Extension
• Flex Front End

*WSDL? Why not Flash Remoting (or ColdFusion in the Data/Services list)? Remoting needs to be configured to each system's configuration, and isn't very discoverable. WSDL doesn't require knowing about the Extension user's AMF setup; it just uses a URL, which can be easily discovered.

I'm doing an eSeminar on Flash Builder and ColdFusion 9 on Wednesday February 24th at 11:00AM -12:00PM PST (2:00PM – 3:00PM EST.)

I'm going to show off the features that the ColdFusion team have added to make ColdFusion work easier with Flex as well as the features in Flash Builder that make working with ColdFusion ridiculously easy.

You have to register in advance so head on over to the Online Events page and register.

The timeout on the Flex Builder for Linux has been extended, and can now be used until sometime near the end of 2010. No new features, but the hardcoded timeout has been extended.

The catch?

No catch, but if you're using the most recent previous Alpha, it expires on December 1st. Go get the updated bits on Labs.

I'll be doing an eSeminar, tomorrow, Thursday, November 5th at 2pm EST /11am PST.

The topic will be using ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder together. Flash Builder obviously is the best tool for building RIAs with Flex. However Flash Builder added a lot of extra functionality. On top of that ColdFusion Builder adds even more.

This session will explore these integration points, and show you just how fast you can build your applications.

To register and get all of the info you need to participate go to our Online Events site.