On May 3 I'll be packing my bags and trekking north from New York to Toronto to participate in CF North, the only Canadian developer's conference for ColdFusion. A large chunk of the ColdFusion world will be heading up that way with me, both those in the area and those elsewhere looking to network between now and the Macromedia DevCon this fall. It's a worthwhile event - enough for me to leave my new dog at home. (Say Hi to Max, the world's cutest pug and the first dog determined to learn CFML.)

Taking place at the Toronto Eaton Centre Marriott Hotel on May 4-5, the event will consist of 40 high-quality CF sessions on a wide variety of topics. The conference has been smartly divided into the following five tracks to make scheduling easier throughout the intense two-day period: ColdFusion Bootcamp, Best Practices, Geek Out: Advanced Technologies, Flash and ColdFusion, and Fusebox Methodology. Classes will be taught by many experts in the CF world, including many whose articles you see here in CFDJ every month. For more information on the sessions offered, and for registration details, visit www.cfnorth.com.

A series of keynote addresses by such industry luminaries as Jeremy Allaire and Ben Forta will be among the highlights of the conference. A special keynote is planned by Bruce Scott, president and CEO of Pointbase, Inc., mobile database leaders in the Java industry. If you aren't familiar with Bruce, who cofounded Oracle, maybe you're familiar with scott/tiger, the original user login/password combo for Oracle. He is also the coarchitect/author of the first three versions of Oracle.

One other keynote, a panel discussion led by yours truly and members of the CFDJ Editorial Board, will also be on the schedule (small, shameless self-promotion, but worthwhile). We'll be covering and discussing the hottest issues of the day, as well as taking questions from the audience in an interactive format.

Even if you can't make it to the conference, you can still be a part of it. We'll be accepting advance questions via e-mail, so if you have questions about ColdFusion, about the magazine, about the industry as a whole, we're assembling a good group of folks who are right in the thick of it. Drop me a line at the e-mail address at the bottom right of this page, and we'll try to fit you in. We'll be covering the panel keynote and the rest of the conference in future issues of ColdFusion Developer's Journal.

Back to the magazine. This month we're introducing something brand-new. Simon Horwith, a senior developer and Macromedia-certified ColdFusion instructor at Fig Leaf Software, contributes CF Community: "Tales from the List." The column, which will appear monthly, is devoted to the latest happenings on the CFDJList. Simon is the new manager for the list, one of the most active ColdFusion discussion communities on the Net. For more information on that, jump on over to www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/list.cfm.

Also in this issue: Hal Helms writes "In Praise of Simple Tools"; Bruce Van Horn explains some techniques for querying e-mail addresses and porting applications; Galen Winchip writes on "Real-Time Database Validation of Form Inputs"; and Eric Brancaccio covers some often overlooked techniques in "A More Thorough Debugging."

On the heels of last year's successful CFDJ Readers' Choice Awards, the upcoming month will have news regarding this year's nominations.

Hope to see some of you at CF North in Toronto, and the rest here and online.