So here are the sessions I will be attending at Max this year:

MONDAY

11:30 - 12:30 ColdFusion Server Monitoring and Troubleshooting - Brett Cortese
DESCRIPTION: Have you ever wanted to know what was really going on inside ColdFusion? Have you ever wished you could see what specific threads were up to and how processing time was being used? In this session, you'll learn how to do all this, and more, using the new ColdFusion Server Monitor and the Monitoring API.

2:00 - 3:00  Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype - Jared Spool
DESCRIPTION:The speed and ease at which new applications are being built is getting people very excited about the potential of the Web 2.0 world. People with a little skill can create new applications using common elements found lying around the Web in almost no time at all. Web 2.0 isn't a 'thing', but a collection of approaches, which are all converging on the development world at a rapid pace. Come hear how these approaches, including APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking, suddenly give application developers a new way to approach hard problems with surprisingly effective results.

4:00 - 5:30 Hands On: Building ColdFusion Powered Ajax Applications - Ben Forta
DESCRIPTION:If you are intrigued by Ajax but don't know where to start, this hands-on session is for you. Learn to take advantage of cutting-edge ideas and techniques for building user interfaces, all powered by the simplicity and productivity of ColdFusion.

TUESDAY

9:15 - 10:15 ColdFusion 8 Crash Course - Kevin Schmidt
DESCRIPTION:ColdFusion 8 is the most ambitious and capable version of ColdFusion to date. Join us for a crash course on everything that is new and exciting in this latest release of ColdFusion.

1:30 - 3:00 Hands On: Component Development in ColdFusion 8 - Glenda Vigoreaux
DESCRIPTION:ColdFusion Components (CFC) can be deceptively simple. While basic CFC usage is easily learned, many ColdFusion developers fail to fully leverage the power of inheritance, persistence, encapsulation, access control, and more. In this hands-on session, you'll learn these vital skills firsthand.

4:00 - 5:00 Search Engine Optimization - Steve Drucker
DESCRIPTION:Search engine optimization can have a real impact on traffic to your sites and applications. Learn how to optimize your applications for Google and Yahoo searches, as well as how rich Internet applications affect search engine placement strategies.

WEDNESDAY

9:00 - 12:30 Boot Camp for ColdFusion - Ben Forta, Tim Buntel
DESCRIPTION:Write code together with the ColdFusion development team in this three-hour collaborative session. Boot Camp provides a mixture of short presentations, workshops, and free-form coding. Make sure to bring your laptop, your best questions, your most desired features, your coolest projects to share, and be ready to learn something new.

And then I'm headed straight for the airport to make my 2:45 filght back home.

If you guys want me to find out anything in particular at any of those sessions let me know. I'll post anything interesting I learn on here.

OK so here are my notes on what I did at adobe max this year probably way more than you wanted to know but hey you asked for "Jucy Details" and I am here to provide
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SUNDAY

I got on the plane and watched Spaceballs on my laptop while I was in flight. That movie always cracks me up.

I arrived in chicago. registered at the hotel (Hilton Chicago), went to McCormick Place and got my conference badge and my Adobe "Man Purse" full of paper SPAM. Then a little later filled up on free food and beer while they had a bunch of people going up for 5 minute presentations of all kinds of uninteresting things. then I went  back to the hotel to the after hours lounge to eat more food and drink more beer while playing Halo 3, and Quake 4 until Midnight on a couple of LANs they had setup.

MONDAY
I woke up late (still on california time) so I missed breakfast and the keynote, but I heard it wasn't too exciting for the coldFusion people anyways so I'm' glad I got the extra Z's

11:30 - 12:30 ColdFusion Server Monitoring and Troubleshooting - Brett Cortese
This was a good introduction to the new coldfusion server monitor in CF8. The most important thing to note is that if you are using the server monitor in production , "Memory Tracking" should stay off as it uses a lot of recources and can bring a high traffic site to it's knees.
I also learned how to use the server monitor to analyze slow requests and find long running queries and stuff like that. I have already used that info to find that there was a table in my database that was not indexed properly and all the queries associated with it were going very slow. I added the index and those queries run much faster now. Overal this was a good session.

12:30 - 1:30 - Lunch

2:00 - 3:00  Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype - Jared Spool
This session was not particularly usefull but the speaker was entertaining. Basically he said that "Web 2.0" is not tied to any particular technology like AJAx, flash, etc as some people think, but rather it is defined as "A shift in attention towards the experience of the user". It's all about knowing your audience and creating a site that engages them, and provides a comfortable and pleasant experience that keeps them coming back for more. He gave several examples of what he considers "Web 2.0" sites, suprisingly one site I never would have guess would be classified as "Web 2.0" yet was high on his list, was craigslist.com. He says that craigslist really knows their audience and even though the site is very basic, the way it works lends itself very well to the "Garage Sale" community. It does what it is supposed to do and it does it in a way the the useres find engaging, and has the newspaper companies trembling ad they are loosing a ton of personal ad business. Another site he mentioned that is just a lot of fun is http://persistent.info/overplot/ it is a mashup of overheardinnewyork.com and the google maps api that is hilarious. You can see right on the map where everything was being overheard.

4:00 - 5:30 Hands On: Building ColdFusion Powered Ajax Applications - Ben Forta
Ben walked the class through a few examples of some of the new coldfusion ajax features. Pretty neat stuff, but unfortunately it was a little more basic than I had hoped and all the examples were of things I had already discovered on my ownd the last couple months. I actually ended up speeding ahead of the class and finishing the optional extra example that he gave at the end of the packet. There was a misnamed variable in the last example so it wasn't working, but I figured it out and fixed the variable name and all was well. I did get the chance to speak to Ben and show him his mistake (to which he smacked himself on the forehead and thanked me for catching it), even the great Ben Forta makes typos =). Then I got to shake his hand and say hi for about 3.5 seconds before he moved on the the next person in line. This teenage kid was there and asked Ben to autograph his Web Application Construction Kit book... I think Ben's great and all but I'm not sure I would bother with getting his autograph, but I guess geeky kids need their Idols too, and to him Ben's probably a rockstar.

5:30 - 7:30 -  There was yet more beer and food and socializing with my fellow geeks

8:00 - midnight -  Even more food and beer and more killing my fellow geeks on halo/quake



TUESDAY

Amazingly I was able to get myself out of bed in time for breakfast.

9:15 - 10:15 ColdFusion 8 Crash Course - Kevin Schmidt
Kevin was obviously not accustom to speaking in front of large crowds and I was a little disapointed by this session because I was hopeing to learn something I didn't already know about CF8. He basically just read through an outline of all the new features that you can just read through youself here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/features/
The only feature he mentioned that I didn't notice before (but is still listed on adobe.com), that I found interesting is that ColdFusion 8 supports common JavaScript operators such as ++, ==, ||, <, and > so they can be used in CFML expressions (< and > can only be used in cfscript since they would break the tag syntax).

1:30 - 3:00 Hands On: Component Development in ColdFusion 8 - Glenda Vigoreaux
Glenda walked the clas through making a VERY basic CFC. I worked ahead and did all the examples in about 10 minutes. The only thing I learned is that there are a lot of CF developers (even ones tha have been developing in CF for years) that did not know the first thing about CFC's or how to use them. I was pretty amazed as I use CFC's a lot. Also according to both Glenda and Ben Forta.... If you don't use application.CFC but are still using application.CFM....you are basically an idiot (my term not theirs, they were a little more tactfull) and you need to get with the times. There are many advantages to using application.cfc and I whole-heartedly agree.

4:00 - 5:00 Search Engine Optimization - Steve Drucker
This was a very good presentation on how to improve your natural search ranking. Here are his twelve steps to better search ranking:
1.      Put keywords in the <title> not the name of the company
      a.      40 chars or less
      b.      pick keywords that are going to result in sales
2.      have releveant 40-word page <description>
      a.      will increase the click through rate
3.      Organize your content hierarchically
      a.      Subsite
      b.      Use Heading tags <h1><h2><h3> (use style to make it look how you want)
      c.      Put most important content at the top of your pages (preferably in <h1> tags)
4.      Update your content frequently (the more often you updated it the more often search engines will crawl your site.
5.      Implement Google/Yahoo site maps
      a.      www.google.com/webmasters
      b.      http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
6.      Use Cross-Linking
      a.      Text Site Navigation
      b.      Hyperlink Keywords to relevant pages
      c.      Link Keywords, not images
7.      Try to get pages containing similar content from other websites to link to you
      a.      Link sharing
      b.      Link affiliates
      c.      Press Releases (PRWeb)
8.      Create a Blog (and have your friends create blogs too!)
9.      Put keywords in your domain/page name. Use _ as separators
10.      Leverage Social Networking
      a.      Digg
      b.      Technorati
      c.      Del.icio.us
      d.      Stubleupon
      e.      Slashdot
      f.      Professional indexes/trade associations
11.      Put links to your website/pages in your online signature and advertise your site through public facing sites
      a.      online-forums
      b.      comments on other peoples blog
12.      Persistance pays off

5:00 - 7:00  - Free Beer!! And they had an awards show honoring the best AIR applications. eBay won the peoples choice award with their eBay air, buyer application. If you haven't heard of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) it is a pretty neat product. Basically it allows you to create desktop applications using html and javascript.

7:00 - 11:00 - The BIG party... there was food and beer and break dancers and a GIANT game of Operation (I fixed the wrenched ankle) and a BMX/Skate show (Those guys did some pretty cool tricks) and video games and consoles everywhere from all time (from pong to Halo 3) and a bunch of other stuff. I ate and drank and hungout for a couple hours then headed over to the after hours lounge at about 9 where I .......


9:00 to Midnight - You guessed it!! Ate even more food and beer and participated in more killing my fellow geeks on halo/quake.

WEDNESDAY

Woke up a little late so missed breakfast and the first 20 mins of my only session of the day:

9:00 - 12:30 Boot Camp for ColdFusion - Ben Forta, Tim Buntel
This was a bunch of people getting up and showing what they did with coldfusion 8...nothing was particularly interesting... after a while I got bored and left a little early...I ate some very good cookies and found a nice quite spot to sit down and check my emails. picked up some giant hostmysite.com foam fingers for the kids,  

And finally a I got in a cab to Midway airport to catch my 2:45 filght back home. I watched "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" on my laptop on the way home(I love Mel Brooks movies).

Well that's all you needed to know an then some.

-Scott