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.

DZone just published my latest contribution to their Refcardz series, Getting Started with ColdFusion Builder. It's intended to be a quick overview on getting up to speed with ColdFusion Builder, and a tour of the major features.

This joins my Getting Started with ColdFusion 9 Refcard.

It's great to get ColdFusion content onto DZone, as they reach outside the normal ColdFusion audience. So check it, and their other Refcardz out.

For some reason, the ColdFusion Team is going on a tour in March and April, to spread the word about ColdFusion Builder, which is currently in public beta 3 on labs.adobe.com.

I'm hitting two cities for now; some other dates are still in talks:

Dallas
March 24, 2010 7:30PM - 10:00PM
To RSVP

Philadelphia
March 30, 2010 6:00PM - 7:00PM
To RSVP

I'm extremely excited about both of these events. I hit Dallas on the last year's User Group and they did a completely kick ass event with the Flex Group. As for Philly, it's where I live, and I haven't been to an event here since I've worked for Adobe. I'm always somewhere else, but not this time.

I've got some cool stuff to show, and I can't wait to see you all.

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.