Along with a few other speakers, we'll present sessions in Munich (May 21), Zurich (May 22), Paris (May 23), Brussels (May 24), and Amsterdam (May 25). See the tour dates page for details on the locations and agenda for each city.

Pretty sweet! :-) I always love going to Europe, and this will be my first time in Paris and Brussels. I'm certainly grateful to have been invited. I'll leave cf.objective on Saturday afternoon to fly right to Munich. Sadly, my wife couldn't join me (for reasons that I'll explain in a moment.)

Some may know the Scotch on the Rocks event has traditionally taken place in Edinburgh (where I had the pleasure to speak previously). And the "Scotch on the road" moniker has been used before when it's happened in another city or cities.

Hitting the road in a tour bus!

This year, the event is different in that I and the other speakers (and the organizer, Claude Englebert of Adobe, EMEA) will be traveling in a tour bus: meaning a motor home essentially, much like the other "road tours" that have happened for other Adobe products in the past.

This is not an official "CF10 Road Tour", but with the release of CF10 yesterday it makes it a de facto one. :-)

Anyway, it's because we'll be about 6 guys in a bus for 5 days that my wife's not coming along! :-) Still, I'm looking forward to the cities (if but briefly), the dinners (at least we'll get some "taste" of each city), and of course the people at the events. As for the guys on the bus, well...hopefully we'll all come out of it as friends, for better or worse! :-)

Tripping back in time, to 2003, and "Hidden Gems in CFMX"

It's also kind of a neat anniversary: 9 years ago I also presented in Munich, at the first CFEurope event in 2003. And yes, that links still is about that 2003 event. A fun time-warp. In fact, it took place in the same OlympiaPark area where we will have the first session next week at the Adobe offices in Munich.

And guess what was my topic then? "ColdFusionMX Hidden Gems"! Of course, that's "CF6" for those not around then, but yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. ;-) (Hey, one of my first articles in the old CFDJ magazine was "Hidden Gems in 4.0.1" in 2000. Yes, I love sharing hidden gems in CF!)

Some concluding points

Just two final points of information: first, for those coming, note that on a couple of the days I'll be presenting a talk about FusionReactor and FusionAnalytics, in place of one of my other talks. See the schedule for details.

Finally, some will note that the tour dates page above lists London. That's a month later, in late June. For now, I'm not aware of any details on that (including whether I'll even be invited).

If you'll be there, see you then! If not, Claude intends to be posting content as the week progresses (perhaps videos, pix, tweets, etc.) Keep an eye on on the main site to see what may turn up. And here's hoping for safe travels, to, from, and on the road!

First, I'm giving two different sessions on Thursday and Friday:

• Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 10
• What's New and Different About ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat

See the links above for details on each talk. And as always, I'll post these talks (after presenting them) on my presentations page.

Then, on Thursday evening I'm giving a Lightning Round talk. Last year I did one on "Lies, Damned Lies, and Request Timeouts". This year, I will again do a CF-centric talk--someone has to talk about something other than beer, love, and other heartwarming or life-expanding talks. :-) This year, it will be "10 Things That Plague Most CF Servers, with Solutions". Yep, even in 6 minutes, I hope to share some surprises that many miss, but which I see daily in helping people in my CF server troubleshooting consulting services.

I'll be posting the presentation for that as well, but it will have additional detail (in terms of resources to learn more) on each topic.

Looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones. Please come say hello, and be gentle with me if I may not make an immediate connection of face to name. :-) With the blessing of attending and speaking at so many conferences comes the curse of meeting lots of people, only briefly, and often only once (or once in a great while!)

Finally, I'll note I am also presenting the first two talks above again next week, in a 5-city European tour. More on that here: Speaking May 21-25 in 5-day European #ColdFusion Road Tour, Scotch on the Road.

I want to highlight a few of those things, to save folks having to dig around.

You can see for yourself the comparisons in at least a couple of places:

• Product Comparison (Standard vs Enterprise, in HTML format)
• ColdFusion 10 Feature improvement history (CF 8, 9, and 10, in PDF format)

What's new in CF10 but only in Enterprise?

• Some (though not all) of the CF10 scheduling improvements (such as listeners, chaining, app-specific tasks, clustering, and exception handling)
• HTML 5 charting
• ORM search
• Dynamic custom fields in Solr my bad, I just read the column wrong. This is not restricted.
• the data import handler for Solr

I obtained this list by looking at the first page above, noting what was listed as "new" or "enhanced" in the CF10 Enterprise column that was listed as "not available" in the CF10 Standard column. This may NOT be the complete list. We can for now only go on what's shown. There may be more, there may be less.

What's new in CF10 but "restricted" in Standard?

Similarly, some of the things that are "new" (or "enhanced") for CF10 may be available in Standard, but are "restricted" in some way. Typically, this means that the feature is throttled by the "Enterprise Feature Router" or EFR that was introduced in CF8. This change then meant that now such features were no longer limited to CF10 (as those above) but are available in Standard but throttled, so that only one concurrent request at a time can use such a restricted feature. There can be another kind of limit, too. See below.

Again, going by the list on the page above, we see these new or enhanced features are "restricted":

• MS Office 2010 PowerPoint file generation (new)
• PDF file conversion from MS Office 2010 Word and MS Office 2010 PowerPoint (new)
• MS Office 2010 Excel support (new)
• Support for web socket protocol on server (new)
• Interface for publish/ subscribe using web socket (new)
• Support for Microsoft Exchange 2010 (new)
• Microsoft Exchange server integration (enhanced)

Again, I'm basing this on what things were listed as "not available" in the CF9 Standard column, but are listed as "new" or "enhanced" in the CF10 Enterprise column but listed as "restricted" in the CF10 Standard column. That's an imperfect way to judge things, but they didn't choose to list what's "new" or "improved" AND "restricted" in the CF10 Standard column.

Some of the limitations are not what they appear at first

There's been a fair bit of consternation today among some who saw that limit about web sockets being limited. The document there (in the footer) says that "Data can be pushed to no more than five clients on Standard, unlimited on Enterprise".

Here's good news: I've heard directly from the CF team that this limit was lifted to 100 before the final release, but this and other docs have just not yet been updated.

Finally, let me say also about the MS Office features above that although they list them as "new", I think what they're saying is that support specifically for Office 2010 is new. The features to create Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and such files (in older Office formats), such as CFSPREADSHEET or enhancements for Office docs in CFDOCUMENT and CFPRESENTATION were actually introduced in CF9.

Hope that's helpful.

Again, I may have something that will need to be updated. Feel free to leave a comment, and share the news of this list with others to help them learn more about the subject.