I just arrived back in the US, and am now online for the first time in over a day (staring in horror at my rapidly enlarging inbox). Last night I presented a Flex Sneak Peek to a combined CFUG/MMUG in London. The room was full, but we started late because of snowfall that almost brought London to a grinding halt (I'm going to have send some Michigan snow over their way, the overreaction to less than an inch of snow bordered on comical).
I demonstrated a sophisticated shopping-cart application created by Christophe Coenraets, an impressive app, and one that all assumed would be really difficult to create. And then I walked through building a ColdFusion powered Flex application, starting with a simple SOAP call, then displaying the data in a grid, then working with formatting, adding edit fields, binding the elements together, adding boxes and tabs for better control, and then some MXML embedded within a .cfm page. Once done we looked at the shopping-cart code to see that it was really not much more complex that what we had built interactively. The crowd was visibly impressed, I asked "how many of you can see yourself building applications this way", and just about every hand in the room went up.
The biggest hassle was the number of questions that I could not answer (including price, release dates, and packaging issues, all of which were asked repeatedly in various forms). But, despite that, the response was incredible, and the event a major success.
Pictures of the event have been posted at http://www.mmug.co.uk/index.cfm?objectid=6261A8FD-50DA-4D01-8798C287139113DB.
The whole snow thing was a joke - 1 tiny 30 minute burst of a small amount of snow and the entire capital grinds to a halt. Commical is an understatement.
:)
Aussies and Kiwis at MXDU were equally well impressed with what we saw of Flex. Drag and drop on a web page? Yep - Flex can do it! And Blackstone is looking very promising also (CF user since 1995).
And the support given to MM User Group managers by Ed Sullivan and the MM Oz Pac team was exemplary. Hope you can make it to MXDU 2005!
Sydney, and most of Australia, was sweltering in a record heat wave just days before MXDU. Once the conference started it rained non-stop and the temperature plummeted. But we really needed the rain so... I think Tim is on his way home as we speak.