So its the saturday after the conference and I am sitting here in Starbucks in the Haymarket in Edinburgh mulling over what an excellent conference this was (and nursing a cold. Now I know why I lost my voice on the last day!).

Lots of cool people turned up and Andy Allan, Stephen Moretti andKev McCabe did a most excellent job at sorting this out (and a big thank you to Stephen for letting me share a hotel room!)

Overall I think this conference was a coming out parade for ColdFusion 8, which is now on Adobe Labs and both of the keynotes and one of my presentations had to do with the new features in the "Highly Anticipated Upcoming Version of ColdFusion" as Tim Buntel put it!

Pros of the conference:

• It was a nice and intimate conference, it felt that you could get to talk to everyone there
• Speaker's VIP room. An excellent idea, since it gives speakers a chance to finish off their presentation etc, in peace
• The goodie bags! I love those Fuzzy Oranges!
• The venue (and the garden for us smokers) was excellent, and as a note, did you know that the "European in Scotland" Building used to be Adobe's headquarters in Scotland, and they put the lift in?
• Great to see the Railo guys next to the Adobe guys!

and actually, overall this was a superbly organized conference, I cant complain about much, but some constructive criticism I am sure can be welcomed...

Cons:

• Name badges! I am terrible at remembering names (including my own some mornings) so it would have been great to have the delegate/speaker's names on the badges
• Aircon: now, I cant really be nasty about this, since the temperature in Edinburgh went from pretty damn warm to cold, but in one of my sessions (the AJAX one I think) the room got really hot, but they did sort this out the following day

And that is about it!, Well done guys!

Presentations that I gave in the end: When I was asked to speak at Scotch, I was going to do my "usual" CFEclipse presentation and that was it, but with a couple of weeks to go I was asked to also do a CF8 AJAX presentation, which went well considering and even I learned a fair amount as I was giving it! Despite some of the changes in the language with the latest release!

After talking to a few of the delegates, I asked Andy and Kev if they minded swapping one of the sessions out on the last day so that I could do (not prepared!) session on Coldspring as I thought this would give a lot of benefit to the delegates. Thankfully this went down fairly well (I think!) despite the fact that I was loosing my voice! And I hope people got a lot out of it!

So, another great conference done and dusted. Andy can now have a very well earned rest!