First, some numbers to put the conference into perspective. cf.Objective() runs for three days and offers you the option to attend a keynote by Adobe, 18 sessions (5 on Friday, 7 on Saturday and 6 on Sunday) and 3 BOFs. Although Sunday is mostly repeats of popular sessions, it's worth noting that there are 8 sessions (spread across 5 time slots) which are not repeats. So that's 17 slots that contain non-repeated sessions. That's a lot of material for just $629.

For comparison, CFUNITED runs for four days and offers you the option to attend two keynotes by Adobe and one by HostMySite, 20 sessions (4 on Wednesday, 5 on Thursday, 5 on Friday and 6 on Saturday) and 1 BOF. Saturday is all repeat sessions (and they are not posted yet), so that's 14 slots with non-repeated sessions.

Second, we're offering four workshops as part of the conference and I'll be covering each of those in the session focus posts over the next few weeks. Each workshop is two hours and will be hands-on for attendees who bring their laptops. We're working with the presenters to get lists of software prerequisites so we can make sure all workshop attendees are well-prepared. The workshops cover: Flex 3 for ColdFusion Developers (Mike Nimer), Agile Bootcamp - What ColdFusion Developers Need To Know (John Paul Ashenfelter), ColdSpring l337 (Chris Scott) and Advanced Techniques With The ColdBox Framework (Luis Majano). This is somewhat of an experiment for us this year but the workshops are proving popular in terms of selections in the online scheduler so we hope this will become a standard part of the conference going forward.

Finally, we've posted almost all of the Sunday schedule now so you can start making your selections for all three days. We've picked the most popular sessions - or popular sessions that conflicted with workshops - to be repeated on Sunday amongst the other non-repeated sessions already scheduled for Sunday. This will allow folks to attend more of the sessions that they are interested in. If you had a hard time picking what sessions to attend on Friday and Saturday, take a look at the new Sunday schedule and see if it helps you reorganize your selections to attend your "second choice" sessions on the other two days. Alumni will be pleased to know that we have four large rooms for the sessions this year so we will not suffer from the "shuffling" that happened last year at the Sofitel!

We were hoping to repeat Nic Tunney's session, An Intelligent Approach to OOP in CF Architecture, on Sunday but unfortunately he is flying out early. If Nic can find a suitable stand-in speaker, we will repeat his session.

Stay tuned for more cf.Objective() news (or subscribe to the cf.Objective-interest mailing list using the form at the bottom of the home page on the conference site)!