I got up nice and early this morning (4.30am), got my stuff together and headed for the station to get myself to Edinburgh for this years Scotch on the Rocks Coldfusion conference.

Arriving nice and early in Edinburgh, Julie, James, Colin(all RGU) and I had a quick coffee and then it was straight to the George Hotel for Registration and the Keynote from Adobe, namely Ben Forta and Adam Lehman who went through some bits and pieces about coldfusions role with RIA, namely Flex and Air (no surprises there then), some interesting stuff but largely nothing much to report that is not already public knowledge. Nice surprising moment when Ben Forta asked the 100+(don't know exact number but definately more that 100) delegates which tool they used for writing coldfusion and the result was a massive show of hands for CFEclipse compared to a handfull of Dreamweaver and Homesite users. Mark Drew who was sitting close to the front must have felt rather proud of himself!

I chose Mark's session on ColdSpring to get the day off to a flying start and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have read and heard about ColdSpring but in all honesty really had no idea what it was about so on the back of James Buckingham's constant "I'm going to learn coldspring" ramblings that have been going on for a good while now, I sat in on the session. Pretty interesting stuff and something I'll add to the ever growing list of "must learn" technologies. Mark's style of presentation was fantastic, humorous and engaging, I didn't feel too out of place on this one. Good work!

Next up I chose Ian Bale's "Wormhole: A Flex/Coldfusion Messaging Manager" which was a wee bit lost on me, Ian did a good job considering it was his first ever public presentation but I guess I wasn't ready for it. I'll be checking out the website to dowload it and explore it more, certainly looked interesting.

A tasty posh lunch in the hotel was next up and then it was back to the action.

Sean Corfield's "Getting Dynamic with Coldfusion" went WAAAAY over my head....I mean wow, that was some advanced stuff!....I'm not experienced enough in coldfusion to get my head around that yet but he presented well and I did pick up one or two bits and pieces, I'm sure that people longer in the tooth with coldfusion would have understood this much more than I did, but I know my limits....swift exit for coffee!

Next up was Vianney Baron and Nicolas Yuen's "Introduction to LiveCycle ES" which, although there was a little server trouble, filled my head with ideas...don't know why I haven't investigated this stuff more thoroughly yet but I bloody will do now!

And so to the final session of the day, Neil Middleton's "jQuery in a Nutshell". Now, anyone who's been around me recently will be aware that jQuery is my new shiny toy and I like to try and use it for everything. It's the old "if you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail" situation but hey ho...I love it! The presentation covered everything from the ground up and it reinforced what I already knew, taught me some stuff I wasn't aware of and Neil's style of presentation was excellent as well.

So day 1 past relatively quickly and for me was a mixture of medium to advanced topics, I was told before that it was likely that I wouldn't learn too much per se but instead would get a ton of ideas...and that's very true. I consider day 1 a very "worth it" experience and look forward to day 2....now...am I having beer tonight or not ;)