This is a reminder of a great developer resource right here in our community. If you ever find yourself looking for a list of blog aggregators, hosting providers, job listings, code formatters, database tools, cf tools, editors, debuggers, time tracking apps or anything vaguely related to programming, you don't need to look much farther than

You may have a full-time DBA where you work, but a lot of us share the CF developer and DB developer hats. Your SQL Server's performance can be an easy thing to overlook if your database is very small, or your website gets very little traffic. The easy (but not always correct) answer to most performance problems is "add an index". Some indexes are an obvious help, but how do you tell if the less obvious ones are really being used? It is possible to have too many indexes. In addition to bloating the size of your database, they take time to update which can actually slow your application DOWN on inserts and updates.

A recent thread on CF-Talk brought up this very good topic. It deals with the performance hit you can get when SQL Server implicitly converts your data to nchar and nvarchar for you when you have enabled Unicode support in your data sources. Unicode text cannot be stored in normal char or varchar fields. It must use nchar or nvarchar. These data types use two bytes per character, which means you can only store half as much text in them (limit 4,400 instead of 8,800). The problem is two fold:

1. SQL Server cannot directly compare a varchar and nvarchar value so it must convert one.
2. String manipulation or conversion on an indexed column will render the index useless

I feel like a dork. I posted a tip last night on remotely managing services on your Windows servers. I wondered why it didn't get many hits, and I finally realized tonight that an inadvertent change in my server's time this morning effectively unpublished the post so no one could get to it. Doh. You can read it here now: http://www.codersrevolution.com/index.cfm/2009/2/11/View-ServicesManage-Your-Servers-Without-Ever-Remoting-In

I've noticed a theme this past week in CF blogs. More and more people have been commenting on the usefulness and proliferation of ColdFusion and just generally railing against the whole CF is Dead mentality that incessantly dogs us. I'm kind of curious what has gotten us stirred up lately. Whatever it is, I'm enjoying the passion it is revealing in the community.

If you are using Windows, chances are you find yourself remoting into one server or another on a regular basis to start and stop services or to take a gander at the event logs to figure out why the box mysteriously rebooted the other day at 2 am. You may not realize it, but you can access anything in the Computer Management console for your servers without ever remoting into them. This includes, users/groups, IIS, SQL Server, and device manager.

As of ColdFusion 8 we have been able to pass a struct into a method so it becomes the method's argument collection without knowing the individual keys in the struct. myObject.myMethod(argumentcollection=myStruct); The other day I needed to do this in JavaScript. It took me a short while to figure it out, so I thought I would blog it here for others' benefit.

My busy schedule has kept me away from the blogoshpere the past couple months. I had heard of Adobe's layoffs but I was kind of depressed for a bit last night when I read that they had affected Jason Delmore, former Product Manager of CF. What a blow to the community that was-- and I just had the pleasure of meeting Jason at Adobe Max this year. I'm feeling better now though. As I continued reading, I went on to see that Adam Lehman, who followed in Ben F's footsteps as ColdFusion Evangelist, has stepped up into the role of CF Product Manger. I absolutely loved what he said on his blog. What hit home to me was when he likened the advance of CF to a Revolution.

A couple days ago Ray posted a screen shot from Adam L showing some new cfscript syntax in Bolt. I personally am excited about it. I certainly don't use cfscript for everything I code, but I definitely have gotten to the point where all my business logic is in cfscript. I just think it is cleaner. I have some questions of my own out the new Centaur syntax though. Here is my best stab at what the code in the screen shot looked like: