I am in Los Angeles today for customer meetings, and head back home tonight. This week's usergroup presentations went really well, and attendees seemed really excited at the opportunities made possible by Flex 2, and the clean seamless integration between ColdFusion on the server and Flex generated Flash on the client.

The only real gotcha occurred last night, when Flex Builder 2 (which had been working for me perfectly all week) started throwing JVM errors on startup. Normally I'd have repeated the steps, capturing error logs in the process, and sent them to the engineers to look at - after all, that is what beta is for. But with attendees waiting for me to get started - well, after the obvious fixes (-clean, deleting the workspace, removing most recent plug-ins) didn't work I uninstalled Flex Builder, cleaned up the folders, and performed a clean install. That did the trick, and the presentation started only 20 minutes late. To those of you sitting there patiently, thanks.

One question that came up repeatedly (in various forms) was "are Flex Enterprise Services needed for Flex apps to communicate with ColdFusion?". And despite explaining this repeatedly, there still seems to be some confusion about this one. So ... the answer is no. You can use <:mx:RemoteObject> and <mx:WebService> to invoke CFC methods in a Flex app built using Flex Builder, and you can deploy the generated SWFs which will be able to communicate with ColdFusion, without needing anything else installed on the server. Of course, you may still want to use Flex Enterprise Services as doing so exposes important additional functionality, but even without FES, Flex 2 can communicate with ColdFusion backends.

It just works, that's about all there is to say. This week I configured an internal server running Windows 2003 64-bit (on an AMD 64-bit box) and SQL Server 2005 64-bit, and ColdFusion MX 7 (I previously mentioned the IIS 6 tweak needed to make this work ). And it all just works using the default ColdFusion SQL Server driver.