We're fast approaching CFUnited 06, and time for another contest to give away seats! For those of you not familiar with CFUnited, it's a conference that's grown from its grassroots beginnings to become the premier annual ColdFusion event.

As always, it will be held in the Washington, DC, area - at the Bethesda North Conference Center to be exact (yes, it's metro accessible). This year's conference runs from Wednesday, June 28, to Friday, June 30, with an optional fourth "best of" day on Saturday, July 1. If you're a ColdFusion developer, this is the one event of the year not to miss.

You must be asking yourself, "Enough, Simon. I already know how great CFUnited is...what do I have to do to win tickets?" This contest is a little different from anything I've done in the past. Rather than having a coding contest, which tends to indirectly require anyone interested in entering to come up with a lot of free time and can be intimidating for newbies, I'm having an essay-writing contest.

It's been just over a year since ColdFusion MX 7, the most feature-rich release I can think of, was released. You've all had plenty of time to play with it, deploy it at work, and build great applications. Our contest is to write about your big success story with ColdFusion MX 7. How did it make you a hero at the office? How did it enable you to make your clients happy? How did it make your existing applications more feature-rich, better performing, and/or scalable? You name it: if it's a success story thanks to ColdFusion MX 7, I want to hear it!

Essays are not going to be judged on length or grammar. Length can be anywhere from about one to five pages in Word. Don't worry about format, spelling, etc. - that's not important. I'll take submissions in Word or plain text format, though Word is definitely preferred. If you want to include screenshots or code snippets feel free, but it's not at all expected - I'm after a great story. If your company wishes to remain anonymous, that's fine - just describe them (for example, "a large health insurance company based in central PA"). All entries should be e-mailed to me at simon@horwith.com. If you have trouble sending to that address (which you shouldn't), you can try sending your entry to shorwith@aboutweb.com.

In addition to the free-entrance-to-CFUnited prize, unless the author objects, I will run the winning article in an upcoming issue of ColdFusion Developer's Journal for all to read. As I'm hoping and expecting to receive many great stories, it's entirely possible I will choose first and second runner-up entries as well...and also send them to the conference! This depends on the number of submissions. I hope at least to also have honorable mentions when I announce the winner. The contest deadline is May 15. I realize this may be fairly close to when many of you received your issues (one reason to also visit the http://coldfusion.sys-con.com site) but I don't expect anyone to spend more than an hour on their essay, unless they really feel compelled to.

Next month I will most likely run yet another contest, with a deadline right up against the conference date, for those of you still looking for a last-minute chance to attend CFUnited. Good luck to everyone - I look forward to hearing some great success stories!