Of course there have been numerous blogs about features announced at other meetings (I liked this one, and this one, among many others) but tonight I attended our very own CFUG meeting, and not only that, it was my first. Among all of the new tags and functionality announced, I think I'm most excited about the return of the debugger, the new image handling, the ability for CFLoop to natively parse files (by line, or by bytes), the server monitoring utilities, and of course the AJAX tags. I would have liked to have seen the debugger in action, but we were pushing 3 hours as it was with fairly few questions, and had to bail before they started drawing names to give away schwag (including a copy of Scorpio itself!), since my carpooling buddy was out passed his curfew. The CFPDF tag set looks interesting and very useful, but my current clients don't do a whole lot with PDFs and my past clients only made limited use of PDF forms. I can see that it has great potential, but I don't see myself putting it to great use for a while. One thing that this has reminded me of, for sure, is that I have become very comfortable inside my box. For the most part, the things that I've been developing could run just fine on CF5. (I blame the customer!) I have come away from the meeting inspired to learn some of the great things that MX7 made available, but at the same time, I feel like I'm already spoiled and have absolutely no motivation to try and learn AJAX "the hard way." Why should I bother, when I've seen how easy it will be in just a few short months? I'm not sure how much of this has already been announced, but here's a list of stuff that caught my attention enough for me to write down:

• New Database drivers: SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g, MySQL 4 & 5 (finally!), PostgreSQL 8, and more!
• Nested CFTransactions!
• <CFDBINFO> – Interrogate a database for its tables, procedures, views, etcetera.
• Even though there is a heavy (unofficial) lean towards Eclipse being the standard IDE, they are continuing to develop RDS, i.e. the new security features and user roles. Am I mistaken, or does Eclipse not work over RDS? Is this just an effort to support both, or some sort of unresolved confliction within the team?