Once again I'm happy to be participating in an awesome Philadelphia based event.

On July 21-22 Wharton will host the Higher Education Web Symposium, an event that brings developers, designers and IT managers from Higher Education together to talk about making web experiences better. It's open to the public, so if you are not in Higher Ed, but it sounds interesting, feel free to sign up.

I'll be talking about Flash Catalyst, and showing how it can be used to quickly create interfaces for your web applications.

Can't wait to see you all in Philly.

We've introduced a student discount for MAX again this year. Price $199.

Details about how to obtain discount available through registration at http://max.adobe.com/

So yeah, the title pretty much says it all. If you are a student, faculty, or staff member of an educational institution, looking to use ColdFusion Builder or Flash Builder for educational purposes, they're free.

Go get them: freeriatools.adobe.com.

It's important to note, that if you are looking to set up a lab of multiple computers, you don't have to get a license for every machine or student. You can use the license we give you to install on multiple machines. Just let us know when you sign up that you intend to do so.

My old colleagues at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia are hiring for a ColdFusion and Flex developer position.

I have probably said this before but Wharton is an incredible place to work. It promises better than decent pay, interesting work, brilliant co-workers, and incredible benefits.

This got lost a little in the shuffle around MAX. If you're interested in teaching RIA development, or Flex development in general have we got a site for you:

Rich Internet Application teaching resources

We've brought together a wide range of resources for you here including small tutorials, course project ideas, best practice documents, and book recommendations. All it all, a one stop for designing RIA courses around the Flash Platform.

I thought I had seen the best discount for MAX a few weeks ago, when I blogged about the educational/governmental/non-profit discount. It seems that I was wrong. There's an even lower one for students:

• $199 for a full pass
• $99 for a day pass

That's a phenomenal price. If you are a student and want to take advantage of it:

• Go to the MAX registration page
• Use the discount code: STU691
• You'll have to provide student identification

We have educational/governmental/non-profit pricing for MAX this year. If you qualify as any of these groups, MAX will cost you $995. This is the best rate I've seen for MAX tickets to date, so jump on it.

To get the educational pricing, use the code EDU966, as noted on our Educators at MAX site.

To get non-profit or governmental pricing, email questions@max.adobe.com and they will assist you with a promotional code.

I've been working on a class for some of our higher education community members. I take the class from an Illustrator comp, through Flash Catalyst, then Flash Builder, and Flex to a Flex Application, then on to an AIR application. Because I'm starting in Catalyst, when I get to the AIR application I don't really want to use AIR's chrome. Rather, I'd like to go chromeless and let the UI handle things like closing the application and whatnot.

I found a good tutorial on doing chromeless AIR applications. But no matter what I tried, I couldn't get rid of this big blank whitespace in my application, despite following the directions to the letter.

After a lot of trial and error it turns out that the old way of making the Application background disappear using CSS (step 6 in the article) doesn't work with the new component model. Instead you have to use a custom skin on the WindowedApplication tag.

The following skin works for me. I'm by no means an expert at this skinning stuff yet, but it gets the job done.

Now let me make it clear. There may be another way to do this. There may be a better way of doing it. It's also possible that this is the flat out wrong way to do it. But when I searched for this, I got nothing. So I figured, I could at least help somebody just get the job done, and worry about "the right way" later.

We're now taking applications for the 2009 Max Awards. Of special interest... there's a new category this year dedicated to Education. I hope to see some familiar faces in competition for that.

Go to the Max Awards Site for more details.

I'm pleased to announce that Adobe has released the official curriculum for teaching ColdFusion today! There are two tracks:

• Introduction to ColdFusion 8
• Advanced ColdFusion 8 Development

Both courses are available for download at our education site: ColdFusion 8: Introduction and Advanced Development