Scotch is starting off well, I've started to put some more faces to names which one of the great things about Conferences and user groups. To anyone who is reading this though and thought that I was grumpy/gloomy this morning remember I was up at 4am which doesn't go down well with my body!At 9:30 it all kicked off Tim Buntel's Keynote on the "anticipated upcoming 8th version of ColdFusion". Going through quite a few of the new features and demonstrating how to use them and in some cases where to make the most use out of them, he gave some good insight to what's to be coming. One of the new sets of tags which looked interesting was the asynchronous calls made to populate your HTML providing a Flex style of interface for non-flash interfaces. Tim also covered the reports and PDF & presentation generation. Coming from a Financial company and seeing some of the new reporting features, though it didn't make me go WOW, I can defiantly see how they can bring along a lot of weight with my boss and any other managers. The presentation tags will also offer a great way to bring better eLearning material with the web as well as having dynamic up-to-date data available will make the PowerPoint slides look old, quick!CF8 is definitely going further to remove you from the drudgery of web developing making all aspects from creating/populating HTML table to Ajax calls, onto live dynamic presentations easier and quicker to produce. Next was Mark Drew's CFE session where he went through the many features that makes up the (four years in the making) 1.3 release. Along with covering the CFFrameWork and CFUnit plugings he also included a new feature, "SnipEx", an online library of snippets that can be shared across an in-house developer base or even online users. SnipEx is like a social network for snippets. You create a snippet while working on a project, you then can upload it to a designated server either localy or online, and all other users connected to that server can access/view and use it. One example Mark used was accessing CFLIB from within Eclipse, no need to go to the site and search for the snippet you need. Definitely cool!I missed the next sessions due to the chance to chat with Mark Drew and Gert & Michael (from Railo) which was a good chance to see what is coming in the future :o)