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Hurray! ColdFusion 2016 no longer uses Akamai Download Manager

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Here's some news that Adobe may not herald, but many users certainly would want to know and celebrate: as of today, when you download ColdFusion 2016 (whether the trial edition, developer edition, or on buying Standard or Enterprise, or the Express edition introduced in CF11), you are no longer forced to go through the Akamai Download Manager! :-)

For many, that's all they need to know. For others, there are some more points worth discussing. Read on, if that may interest you.

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Tending the SQL Server garden: tuning and maintenance resources (updated and useful)

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Often in my role as an independent consultant providing ColdFusion server troubleshooting services, I find myself helping folks determine whether or that a problem is in their database.

And though it may surprise many, I generally do not find the problem to be very often with the SQL they are running. More often it's about configuration issues. For instance, it may be that they have not been keeping their indexes or statistics updated, or it may be that they need indexes that they don't have, or have too many that they don't really need. Or it may be that they have not done any tuning at all and the default settings for their database server are not be well suited to them.

And though such problems are common to any database server (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on), I find that an awful lot of my clients (for whatever reason) do run on Windows and do use SQL Server (and that doesn't make them stupid or lazy. Different strokes for different folks).

So in this post I want to focus on some SQL Server resources, related to such matters, which I find that I refer folks to often. Some are blog posts, some are code you can run, and some are tools (mostly free).

People using other DBs would do well to read along and could find corresponding resources/tools for the same problems in their respective DB servers.

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Version numbers of libraries underlying ColdFusion 2016

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Are you wondering what updates (in terms of version numbers) have been made to the libraries underlying CF2016?

For instance, what's the version of Solr? (It's considerably upgraded over what was in CF11 and 10). What about Java, Tomcat, Hibernate, ehCache, Quartz, jQuery, and so on?

In this post, I offer a rundown of what seem the most significant libraries and their versions, as deployed in the first release of ColdFusion (2016 Release). I also explain how I found these version numbers, which isn't always obvious, in case that may help others. But I also offer some commentary on why this is an important issue to some, and I offer some counterpoints to the demands some have that every library should always be the absolute latest version (and why that's just not practicable).

If you just want the version numbers without the "waffle", look for the bulleted list of them below. :-)

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Released today: CF2016, or 'ColdFusion (2016 release)'. What's new, and more

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
If you're not following the Adobe CF team blog, you may have missed the announcement there today of the newest version of CF, ColdFusion 2016. More on the name in a moment.

And while that Adobe blog post mentions a few of the main new features, as is nearly always the case it leaves out many other new features which may interest folks. It also doesn't point to resources to learn more. I do those things here in this post.

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Stuck running the ColdFusion 'Migration wizard'? Here's how to get past that

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
CF Admin migration wizard screenSomeone presented a problem on a discussion list where they found that upon installing CF, they got to the "migration wizard" screen, and though it offered the option to "continue" if it hung up, it did not continue for him.

In this post, I'll share how to get past that prompt, if this happens to you. (And despite that image on the right showing ColdFusion 11, this could conceivably happen in CF10, CF9, and so on, and this same solution applies to all.)

For the anxious folks who want to "skip the waffle" and context/setup, the solution is at the very bottom. :-)

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Great set of substantial, practical, but brief videos on IIS

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
This isn't "new" information, though it was new to me this week. I came across this excellent set of youtube videos, 50 substantial yet brief overviews of key IIS topics from IIS/.NET/Windows guru Scott Forsyth.

I offer the list of topic titles (and links to them) below, and have even created a YouTube playlist with them, but note that the links below go to pages that the author had created where he offered a helpful introduction to each video (more than appears in the Youtube description for each).

I had also wanted to offer here this brief overview of them, to set the context and encourage you to view them, so as not to dismiss them if other tech video series haven't impressed you. Whether you're new to IIS 7 or 8, or an old hat user, there really is something for everyone, including wonderful little tips he shares in passing during most videos (which average about 10-20 minutes each).

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Finding resources on ColdFusion's mobile development features

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Have you wondered where you can find more about ColdFusion's mobile development features? (Did you know that CF11 had added such features?) There are several resources provided by Adobe and others. In this post I highlight those various resources, with a focus on the many (and many kinds of) Adobe-provided ones.

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Monitoring ColdFusion web server connectors, more on Tomcat 'Status Workers'

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
If you've configured your web server (IIS or Apache) to be connected to CF--which can be done using the CF "web server configuration" or wsconfig tool--did you know that there is an optional monitor to observe the status of that web server connector? That connector is technically the Tomcat "AJP connector", which Adobe implements for us. And this monitor, called the Tomcat "Status worker", is an optional feature which we can configure (the CF wsconfig tool doesn't do it for us).

In this post, I discuss the tool, elaborating on a post that Adobe offered about it last month (July 2015: for future readers, note that the feature remains essentially unchanged and just as potentially valuable in 2025, when I have tweaked this post just a bit, adding a table of contents and changing the order of some topics).

You may well want to consider enabling the "Status Worker" feature, which the Adobe post shows is easily done. Still, in this post I elaborate on some observations and caveats not covered in that brief post, which you will want to consider before enabling or trying to understand the output of the tool.

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See you at dev.Objective() in mid-May (I'll be speaking)

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
Just wanted to share word (sorry it took so long) that I'd been selected as a speaker at the upcoming dev.Objective() conference, in Minneapolis in Mid-May. Hope to see lots of my fellow CFers there, and of course new folks who were not CFers.

While the conference name has changed (from cf.Objective()), there are still plenty of CF-oriented topics, and of course as nearly everyone would point out, it's good for everyone to expand their reach and focus.

To that end, I'll be doing a topic a bit different than my normal focus of CF server troubleshooting. Instead, recognizing that there will be folks there who either use other servers, or develop web apps or mobile apps, I'll do a bit of a "soft" topic on how to troubleshoot performance problems more generically, in:

Hey, my web app's slow. Where's the problem?

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Looking to buy ColdFusion? Get it at a discount from the FR folks, and an additional discount off FR

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
If you're in the market to buy ColdFusion, whether a full license or an upgrade from the prior release, you can get a discount off the retail (Adobe) price by buying from www.buy-adobe-software.com, which is a site by the fine folks who make FusionReactor, who are an official Adobe reseller. Why pay full price for CF if you can save, up to 10% currently?

Even better, for a limited time (as of this writing in Mar 2015), folks making such a purchase of CF there will get 20% off a purchase of FusionReactor Standard or Enterprise Subscription, if purchased at the same time. Such offers come and go, if you may be reading this later.

So if you're looking to buy CF, you can save money on CF AND get a great monitoring solution for CF. I work with it daily, using it on my sites and nearly always recommending it as the best tool for solving CF problems. (It also works with Lucee/Railo, and BlueDragon Server JX, as well as Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, GlassFish, and indeed any Java application.)

See my FusionReactor category of blog posts for more I've shared on FR over the years.

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