Michael Smith

Editor's Note: With so many new programmers getting interested in ColdFusion, CF Advisor felt it was time to have more articles addressing the concerns of beginning programmers in ColdFusion, much as we had in Leon Chalnick's Essentials column last year. Michael Smith, the president of TeraTech, who addresses the needs of beginners as part of his work for the Capitol PC User Group in Washington, DC, provided us with this, the first in a new series for beginners. What is ColdFusion? In this article we explore what ColdFusion is and what it can do for dynamic website creation. We will do some basic ColdFusion code examples to get you familiar with the language, and then we will discuss how a ColdFusion program works. We will also be covering where you can learn more about ... (more)

Top 10 Web Security Tips

All data-driven Web sites are potentially vulnerable to hackers, whether they are written in ColdFusion or another language. Fortunately, a few simple steps can make your site much more secure. 1. Have an Error Handler By default ColdFusion displays a detailed error message when there is a problem in your code. Yes, I know - your code has no bugs in it - but what if a hacker deliberately ... (more)

Creating Dynamic Websites With ColdFusion

In this article we continue to look at what ColdFusion is and how you can use it for dynamic website creation. We cover using SQL to dynamically retrieve and display data from any database along with testing and debugging techniques. What is ColdFusion? In case you missed the previous articles that introduced ColdFusion, let me explain what it is. ColdFusion, which was introduced by Allai... (more)

Upsize from MSAccess To SQL Server

If you're using ColdFusion with Access today, then it's likely you'll be using it with SQL Server tomorrow. Luckily, Microsoft has provided some tools that make upgrading to SQL Server a relatively easy process. You'll be surprised to learn how simple it is to upgrade and how easy it is to work with. This article covers the basics of using these tools and helps you plan an easy database... (more)

CFContent With Images

Many of us have used the CFCONTENT tag that comes with ColdFusion to serve up files to browsers, but very few ColdFusion developers are aware that the CFCONTENT tag can be used in conjunction with the HTML tag to serve up graphics, such as JPEGs and GIFs. In this case, the why of doing this is perhaps just as interesting as the how. It turns out that using this technique is perfect ... (more)