C’mon Adobe that makes no sense.

There’s no way I’m spending that much money on CS5 *and* not get my primary development tool (CF Builder) included in the bundle.

Very, very disappointed.

Enter Notepad++. It has been my tool of choice for a while now – it has excellent multi-file searching, loads in a flash and supports a boat load of languages with syntax highlighting (js, xml, css, asp etc). What I’ve always missed is syntax highlighting and dictionary support for CF.

Well I cracked today, did a bit of googling and found a solution! Howard @ DelayedInstantiation has put together language support for Notepad++ so big kudos to him for developing the plugin!

I installed it today and works like a charm – the little catch though (if using Vista) is to install the plugin in the %AppData%/Notepad++/ directory, not in the %ProgramFiles%/Notepad++/ directory.

So if you’re on the lookout for a quality, lightweight editor for CF, take a squiz at Notepad++. It seems to be regularly maintained (up to v5!), and now it has CF language support, it’s an indispensible tool in my armoury.

When I re-established this blog, I went with Wordpress which was evolved into a best-in-class blogging and general web publishing engine. One of the best things about WP as a platform is the sheer amount of community support for it via plugins and the like.

However recently I’ve been tasked with setting up a blog for our company project, and since we are a CF shop it’d be nice to keep the server as tidy as possible and stay strictly within the CF world. I could install PHP and setup Wordpress, but there it isn’t the most ideal option, regardless of how awesome WP is as a blogging engine. Alternatively, installing a CF-powered blog is just too easy – if it fits the bill features and maturity wise.

Adam’s post on FusionGrokker piqued my interest – moving from WP to Mango would suggest that Mango is mature enough to justify moving platforms.

So, I’m off to install Mango on our dev server and see what it’s like. The feature set certainly looks nice and since it’s CF I might get stuck into developing a plugin or two. I’ll report back on my thoughts regarding Mango after I’ve had a play.

I was just about to look into how to pass params LIKE and IN params via CFQUERYPARAM and this post popped up on the mxna aggregator – the timing couldn’t have been more perfect!

This is why I love the CF blogging community. Makes life as a developer much better!

Unfortunately there is no language support for ColdFusion built in. Happily, a few helpful blog posts later, I found a ColdFusion “brush” drop-in for SyntaxHighlighter. You can download the JS brush here.

Just drop it into the wp-content\plugins\syntaxhighlighter-plus\shlfiles directory and either modify the syntaxhighlighter.php file with references to ColdFusion or you can download my modified php file. You can either reference the language with either “coldfusion” or “cf”.

I will contact the plugin authors and see if they will agree to add the CF language file permanently to the distribution with the permission of the original brush file author.

Version 5 has just been released (I have been using Farcry for various projects since v2 – I think – if memory serves correctly!) and while I hadn’t really played with Farcry since v3, I’ve recently installed v4 and was pretty impressed with the improvements. V5 seems like another solid step forward yet again, particularly on the UI front.

One of the things I like the most about v4 is the reworking of the architecture – plugins and the like make the learning curve far less challenging for newcomers. The extensibility lends itself naturally to community contributed plugins and even “core” like objects such as dmNews, dmEvent etc are setup as plugins and makes more sense to me than the previous architecture.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the new Formtools yet, but I am looking forward to dabbling a bit more as time permits. Farcry really is one of the most powerful and (IMO) under-rated opensource CF projects out there. The simplicity is right up front, but the power that can be leveraged through the framework is very impressive – even more so in the latest two releases.

Oh and to celebrate the v5 release, the Daemon guys have relaunched the website!

If you haven’t played with Farcry yet, go check it out – it’s more than just a CMS now – it really is a very powerful web application framework.

Perhaps this is a little bit of blatant promotion, but I am working on a very exciting project at the moment that takes social networking to the film industry – Icewhole.com

It’s an entirely ColdFusion powered site with an MSSQL backend and On2 Flash encoding engine powering the film and music video sections of the site. It’s still in beta form with plenty more improvements to come in the near future, but the crux of the site is that it empowers independent film makers to network with other professionals in their industry to help them produce and showcase their films.

Short films can be uploaded and promoted on the site (much like youtube, but better quality and at a targeted audience), with various awards handed out each month for uploaded films as voted by a panel of judges including names such as Morgan Freeman and Richard Attenborough.

There are some great films showcased on the site already so do visit and check them out, leave a comment for these young, upcoming filmmakers and if you like the site, signup as a “Film Fan”. If you have friends in the film industry casting directors are already perusing the site for potential talent so it’s the place to be if you’re in the industry and want to get noticed.

It’s exciting to be involved in such an innovative, exciting project with much more to come soon!

• Web Developer Toolbar – I’ve been using this for years and it has never let me down. It just keeps getting better. When you don’t feel like firing up Firebug this toolbar is a lifesaver.
• Firebug – The best we developer extension, bar none for Firefox. I’ve recently been doing a lot of CSS layout and I think I would have been committed to a mental institution without this.
• FireFTP – I only recently discovered this gem. It seems like decent, free FTP clients are as rare as hens teeth (recent releases of FileZilla are good though) and I discovered this not long after FF3 was released. Works flawlessly as a full-functional ftp client right in your browser – brilliant!
• ColdFire – As mentioned in my earlier post. Like a diamond in the rough, polished while I wasn’t looking.

The only other extension I use every day is FoxClocks – not strictly development related, but seeing as I am an Aussie living in the UK timezones and world clocks are important to me and I haven’t found a neater way yet of keeping track of the time back home. Regularly updated, it just keeps getting better. One of the best general purpose Firefox addins yet IMO.

If there are any other firefox extensions other ppl are using that you regard as indispensible, let me know!

I already find Firebug a must for any web developer. When I don’t have it available to me, I feel like I am blind trying to find my way around the maze of CSS box floating left, absoluting right and positioning relative. I wonder at times if whoever wrote the CSS spec was on drugs. But I digress.

ColdFire hooks into the CF debugger so you can get access to the same debug info you would get from CF if you had debugging turned on. Problem is, I often have it off these days since it severely slows down page rendering on some frameworks (ModelGlue) or buggers up the rendering of CSS layouts.

ColdFire to the rescue! Apparently it’s just made the top 3 downloads on RIAForge. Why haven’t noticed it before??

Anyway I’m a happy camper. The more tools in a web developers arsenal, the better as far as I’m concerned!