JohnBs personal blog

Whenever there’s a new release of FarCry (the CMS) or BlueDragon one of the hot questions is - will it run on BlueDragon? Well - if you’re not subscribed to the BlueDragon interest mailing list you’d not have seen Vince’s post saying the BD7 runs FarCry - this is great news!!! Bad thing is, we have to wait 3 weeks to get our hands on the release candidate and then a further 3 weeks to purchase license keys for the final release….wow, an almost real date to work to for a product release - that must be a first in the CF world

When Sean makes the public Beta on Fusebox 5.1 available he’ll also be adding to the release notes to say it’s not compatible with BlueDragon.NET 6.2.1 - due to the new way of determining last modified dates of file on disk using a Java object. Anyway, all is not lost as I’ve just tested it on the upcoming BlueDragon 7 release and it works just fine - and damn is that thing fast!! I’d seen various blog entries recently regarding performance of upcoming BlueDragon, Railo release but hadn’t yet tried it for myself - worth checking out if i were you!!!

Over on the New Atlanta blog Vince Bonfanti presents a compelling argument for introducing strong typing to CFML without making big sacrifices. I’ve certainly never thought about what goes on under the hood even for the most simple of code….boy I must be keeping my CFML engine busy - which by the way is BlueDragon.NET

This came up on Cf-talk and i thought I’d post it here…probably best just to read it off the New Atlanta site as I found it quite hard to believe at first, but a neat idea to get the product out there!

Read More

I was working on a ASP.NET application lastnight and noticed when I published it up to my server (i was RDP’ed into it at the same time) I noticed a file got created named app_offline.htm in the root of the site, certainly not something in my application. When i then browsed to the application (Whilst Visual Studio was still publishing it) i got a really nice message saying the application was offline….so i did some digging.

Turns out app_offline.htm was introduced in the .NET 2.0 framework and the second one is found in an IIS application folder then the application is unloaded and SQL connections are dropped…pretty damn handy if you ask me! So being powered by BlueDragon.NET these days i thought i’d see if it worked in a CF app (no reason why it wouldn’t since afterall it bd.NET!) and sure enough it works….! What’s more the app_offline.htm can be made pretty so it’s not just a plain error message but can follow the look and feel of your website whilst maintenance is being performed!

Previously I’d been using a Virtual Server from CFX Hosting to bring you this site - CFMX7 etc but for $230 a month it was always going to be a little hard on the wallet….but now and for the past few weeks I’ve been hosting the site with GoDaddy.com. In fact the package I’m on still seems too good to be true, a Windows 2003 Virtual Server for sub $40 a month…so good in fact I got two, one for IIS and the other for SQL 2005. The package comes with all the usual stuff, RDP access - Plesk Unloaded for a few extra bucks, 500Gb bandwidth, 10Gb of space and so far it’s been well worth the change.

As well as changing hosts I changed the ‘Powered By’ icon in the right bar as I’ve now changed over to running on BlueDragon.NET thanks to guys over at New Atlana. There’s a number of reasons behind the decision to go over to BD.NET primarily I’ve been doing more ASP.NET development - my work is an MS shop at the end of the day! So look out for more reports on my exploits with BlueDragon.NET - I’m really looking forward to playing more this year!

A post I’d starred in my Gmail from the BlueDragon interest mailing list may be useful for others…orginially posted by Paul Bonfati

In 6.2.1 and the August Hotfix for 6.2, you can disable the displaying of the license key by editing bluedragon.xml and adding the following element under the system element:

<display-licensekey>false</display-licensekey>

If you are using BD.NET and have installed BD.NET globally then you’ll want to make this modification to the global bluedragon.xml which is located in the config directory under the installation directory. You’ll need to restart IIS after making this change.