Gmail for Wildlife

I've got some Gmail invites laying about, and after seeing Andy Jarret's post on Gmail for a Joke, I thought I'd do something similar.

Sooo....head over to the National Wildlife Federation, give a donation of any amount, e-mail me a screenshot of your receipt, and I'll send you an invite.

Feel free to block out any personal info on the receipt.

Warning: invites are first-come first-served. If you donate, and I'm out of invites already, you will not get one. I'll keep your name for the next time I can invite.

3 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 9:22 AM - Categories: Site News

CF Posts: Sparse for a week or two

My posts are likely to be a little sparse and off-topic for the next month: I'm both moving to a new house and travelling a few weeks for work.

I'm going to try to pick back up with the Best Practices posts and (finally) deliver a jComponents 1.0 as soon as I get a spare parsec or two.

0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:52 AM - Categories: ColdFusion MX

I am once more my own search result!

Finally...it took a while, but Googling for "joe rinehart" finally returns me as the top result....instead of www.joerinehart.com!

No hard feelings, Joe. But I did e-mail you a while back to say that it was a cool coincidence that we both had the same name, both worked in IT, and both worked for a non-profit at the time, and you never replied.

3 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:50 AM - Categories: Site News

OT Friday: Luxury? Not at 7.99% APR.

Sorry, but my Friday off-topic post isn't going to be funny this week. In fact, it may get a little preachy or even offend some folks. It's actually just about some feelings I've been having recently. If I offend anyone, I apologize.

Read more...

5 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 1:43 PM - Categories: Off Topic

.NET eye for the CF guy

Well, the company has spoken, and it looks like I'm to learn the .NET way of doing things. I look forward to it, as I've been doing CF almost exclusively for nearly five years and I'd like to become solid in another school of thought. Not replacement of CF, just another process running in parallel; I'll likely be working on projects in both for years to come.

If anyone other CFers out there have learned or are learning C#/ASP.NET and have advice to give, please, bring it on!

8 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 11:25 AM - Categories: ColdFusion MX

Don't Fear the Data Type

When MX came out, I took the CF Advanced training class to learn about new features. There, a self-proclaimed "senior" classmate told me that he felt the training on arrays and structures was useless because they're unneeded in CF development. Egads.

Reading and posting to CF-Talk and the Macromedia forums, I'm beginning to feel that many CF developers seem to avoid complex data types, such as arrays or structures, out of intimidation or ignorance. However, they're some of the most useful tools of our trade. If you want to advance as a developer, you'll need to tackle these things eventually.

This post is a gentle, "executive summary" of the structure and array types available in ColdFusion.

Read more...

4 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 6:21 AM - Categories: ColdFusion MX

New Download: QueryTool.cfc (Query Transformer)

A quick utility CFC to transform queries into arrays of structs, structs of structs, XML, or delimited formats. Download at http://clearsoftware.net/client/queryTool.cfm

The original version of this was an amalgam of UDFs written my myself and coworkers at the National Wildlife Federation a while ago, but I've since rewritten it to be more efficient and use a more OOP style.

UPDATE:

1. Removed unnecessary function call to toArray() inside of toDelimited()

2. Made BlueDragon compatible (thanks to Vince Bonfanti for pointing out incompatibility)

3. Documented "linefeed" attribute of toDelimited()

2. Fixed typo in QueryToolTest.cfm (thanks to Vince Bonfanti and Johnny Boursiquot).

3 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 6:22 AM - Categories: ColdFusion MX