I was just reading a post on ColdFusion Muse on what Mark Kruger's motivations for blogging are, and it got me thinking. Why did I really start blogging? Sure I have noble intentions of sharing the knowledge and experience I have accumulated over the many years I have been developing with other ColdFusion developers. Sure I may find myself referring back to my blog entries to remember how I did something from time to time. And it may even bring me a little bit of business once people start to recognize who I am. All those things are reasons why I wanted to start blogging years ago, but they never really pushed me over the edge and motivated me to write my first blog entry.

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I came up with a little short cut earlier today when I was commenting on an article Ben Nadel wrote and he thought it was pretty clever, so I thought other people might find it useful as well.

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I just went on to cast my CFEmmy votes and was a bit suprised to see my blog listed under the best newcomer! Thank you for the nomination, it gives a little validation to know that I'm not just talking to myself and other people are finding what I am writing useful.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on Enhancing CFWindow with JavaScript, and it was recently asked if there was a way to identify all the windows and their visible status that currently exist on a page where you are using the ColdFusion.Window.create function to create new CFWindow instances. It took a few minutes of digging with FireBug, but I found that there is a ColdFusion.objectCache object that holds information about the various ext object that get created with the ColdFusion AJAX features. I created a function that loops through the objectCache and finds objects that have a "cfwindowname" property. Then used the Ext.BasicDialog.isVisible() function to determine if the window is currently visible.

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CodFusion 8 adds three new attributes (characters, file, and array) to the CFloop tag that make it a little easier to loop through the contents of files and arrays. The array attribute is pretty cool, but the file/characters attributes are really exciting for me. In previous versions of ColdFusion, to loop through an array you would create the loop to basically count from 1 to the length of the array, then access each item in the array within the loop like:

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ColdFusion 8 has a new attribute in the CFLocation tag called StatusCode. In previous versions, if you wanted to do a 301 redirect, you had to use a combination of two CFHeader tags to accomplish it. As you can see by comparing the old method to the new method below, the good folks at Adobe have saved us 57 keystrokes per redirect by adding this new attribute. As a typical lazy programmer, I sincerely appreciate their efforts.

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The Ext.QuickTips functionality provides attractive and customizable tooltips for any element. Adobe didn't add any QuickTips functionality to ColdFusion 8, but the JavaScript files to support it are included with the other Ext related files in the "CFIDE/scripts" directory, so I am going to show you a couple simple ways you can utilize them to enhance your tooltips.

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ColdFusion 8 added the CFWindow tag which creates a pop-up window in the browser, which is not really a pop-up window, but rather it is a div layer that looks like a window and can be hidden and shown via JavaScript. Today, I am going to demonstrate a couple ways you can expand your use of the CFWindow tag by incorporating some JavaScript that interacts with the underlying Ext.BasicDialog object.

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