BFusion

• What: A full day of beginning, intermediate and advanced hands-on ColdFusion training
• When: Saturday, September 11, 2010

BFlex

• What: A full day of beginning, intermediate and advanced hands-on Flex, AIR, Catalyst training
• When: Sunday, September 12, 2010

• Where: Both events take place at the Kelley School of Business Godfrey Graduate and Executive Education Center on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington.
• Why: Because you will not find this kind of instructor-led, hands-on training cheaper anywhere.

How Much?

“So what’s it cost?” you might ask. Now to the complications. I always prefer transparency, so here’s where we stand. Last year we instituted a cost for the events because we had too many no-shows in previous years and there was too much wasted food, materials, time, etc. Last year the event cost a whopping $10. It turns out that did little to get some people to feel they had an investment in the event and we still had a lot of no-shows. See the following good posts about why that might be (1|2). So this year we’ve discussed upping the fee to maybe $20. Yes, I know that’s doubling, but it’s still not a lot compared with the training you receive. We also want to respond to calls for better food and “free” drinks. We intend to give you increased value for that increased investment and we also hope to get move of you here.

If only it were that simple… Here’s why it is not so simple and why I can’t say exactly what the cost is at this time. The university has a new policy that all events that charge a fee must use our university conference bureau to handle registrations. I won’t go into all of the whys and wherefores, but it’s the law of the land. Here’s why this matters to you. The conference bureau charges something like $15-20/person just to process the registration! That means you could be looking at $35 or $40 for one day, $55 or $60 for two days. (Presumably we only have to pay that overhead fee once per registration). We have a meeting with them next week to see if they will let us use our own payment collection system (already university and PCI DSS compliant) and thereby avoid this additional cost. Believe me, we’re as anxious to know as you are and will post as soon as we know.

What’s on the (Learning) Menu?

We try to make every single session, from beginning to advanced, hands-on. As the presenters/instructors get used to that we get better at it each year. While I’ve already reached out to many of the rock stars who have taught for us in previous years, I will only be posting the official call for proposals today. That means we won’t have a final slate of sessions until mid-August. Here’s what I can tell you know though.

• We have “Pure Beginner” and “Beginner” tracks on both ColdFusion (Saturday) and (Flex) Sunday. These are full-day intensives. The Pure Beginner is for attendees with no programming experience whatsoever. Never heard of a variable or a loop? No worries. Come and get a great introduction. We’ll have you building your first apps by the end of the day. Beginner is for those with programming experience who are just new to ColdFusion or Flex.
• On Saturday we will have an intermediate-level ColdFusion track on Mach-ii. This full-day session will move you from a procedural to an object-oriented ColdFusion programmer using one of the most popular ColdFusion frameworks. If you’ve never experienced the power and convenience of developing with a framework this is for you.
• Also on Saturday we will have a series of offerings to help you learn about setting up and developing with a completely open-source ColdFusion environment. These intermediate sessions can be consumed a la carte or as a full-day track.
• This event is not just for our programming sisters and brothers, but the designers as well. On Sunday we will have a full-day Flash Catalyst session so designers and developers can map their magical (to me) skills into functioning Rich Internet Applications. Very cool stuff!
• Sunday’s Flash Platform offerings will include a lot of Flex 4 as well as AIR 2 development. It doesn’t matter if you develop in ColdFusion, .NET, PHP, Java, Ruby, etc. You will love the speed, power and beauty of the user interfaces you can develop using Flex. We will have a range of Intermediate and Advanced topics. We’ll post the schedule as it gets built.

There is more to tell, but I’ll save those for future posts. If you are a speaker/instructor and would like to be on the giving end of all this techno-goodness, please see our Call For Proposals page. The deadline for proposals is August 7.