Thursday's keynote was from Bill Staples of Microsoft on "IIS7: The Future of Microsoft's Web Server Platform?" There are some interesting things to look forward to. Web configuration is going to be much more flexible and portable with configuration being stored in XML that can be moved from server to server. It also provides more control of the components of the Web service, such as the ability to plug in your own authentication instead of using the OS. It will also provide better metrics so you can tell what is going on in the Web server.

There was a birthday party for ColdFusion (10 years old) Thursday night on the hotel patio with a mammoth birthday cake as well as drinks and games, courtesy of TeraTech and HostMySite. There was also a band called Boxcar Collision and a video message from ColdFusion creator Jeremy Allaire.

Friday's keynote was presented by Peter Amiri of MySpace and Charlie Arehart of New Atlanta. MySpace is one of the most trafficked sites on the Web, coming in at number five just under eBay. A relatively new site, it's only 22 months old and already has over 20 million members. Some of the more distinguished readers may not be familiar with the site, as it's an online community with a target demographic of 16-24 year olds. They are in the process of converting to New Atlanta's Blue Dragon CFML compiler and got a 50% performance increase from the port. It's a good example to show people when they ask about the scalability of ColdFusion; however, the presentation did generate some controversy. During the presentation Peter said that the site had architectural issues and they were just throwing hardware at the problem. They have poor practices and do several code releases a day directly into production with the excuse that they have a "forgiving audience" that wants more features and doesn't care about the bugs.

All in all the conference was great. TeraTech Programming did an awesome job of organizing the conference and keeping everything running smoothly - kudos to Liz Frederick, the conference coordinator, and Michael Smith, who created the event. The Montgomery County Conference center was great and the Marriott staff was very helpful, especially with setting up the sponsor area with the booths and the community area.

For those of you who couldn't make it, you should definitely try to attend next year when it will be even bigger and better. As Ben Forta says on his blog, "[CFUNITED] has become the premier CF specific event." I hope to see you there at CFUNITED-06 in June 2006!