Boston was home to the RIAUnleashed conference on Friday, November 13, and was jam-packed with Flex, AIR, ColdFusion and other RIA goodness.

What was so unique to me about this conference was the fact that not only were the speakers top-notch, but the people attending were also extremely talented. There were several attendees that I ran into that I happen to personally respect a great deal, which speaks volumes about the caliber of the speaker lineup. It was very difficult to choose which sessions I wanted to attend as all of the headlining speakers and topics sounded incredibly intruiging. Considering the price, as well as the fact that attendees were treated to first dibs on AIR 2.0, there was just no beating this event.

Fellow Adobe Evangelists Ryan Stewart and Adam Lehman joined forces during the keynote to build an app that was designed in Flash Catalyst, but was powered by ColdFusion. Ryan designed the UI and interactivity in Catalyst, Adam built the CFCs in ColdFusion Builder, and then Ryan returned to wire them together in Flash Builder. It was a great example of how future workflows will be handled (even though some of the code was pre-written) but the concepts were clearly explained and both guys are as fun to watch as they are skilled at presenting.

The first session I chose to attend was Jeff Tapper's "How Not to Code Flex Apps", which was a solid intro to best practices for keeping your code tidy and not misusing components. I learned some of the biggest pitfalls to avoid and was glad to see I wasn't the only one guilty of such Flex no-nos.

One of my favorite sessions was Jesse Warden's "Custom Components in Flex 3 and 4", as it was the first time I had seen Jesse speak. It's so rare that you are equally as entertained as you are informed by a speaker. Chuck Freedman put it best, "ATTN Flash conference organizers, make sure @jesterxl is headlining your next event. Dude rocks and his style is extremely captivating!"

I then headed over to Peter Bell's "Rad OO" session which covered some proven methods for rapidly building highly maintainable and easily reusable ColdFusion apps. I actually took away quite a bit from this session than I first remembered and will definitely be coding any future CF apps with the concepts that I picked up.

I headed back to yet another Ryan Stewart led session, and was treated to some low-level details of building iPhone apps with Flash CS5. Some very good questions were asked by the crowd, which filled in the gaps for what we will see as actual Flash-iPhone app development in the future.

Elad Elrom's session on "Designer-Developer Workflow With Flash Catalyst" was excellent, offering a very honest perspective to the real-world uses of Adobe's latest interaction design tool. It was very clear that Elad has done his research and has extensively gone through the workflow he promoted. He's an incredibly talented developer and speaker that you should go out of your way to follow.

The highlight of my RIA Unleashed day came during Andy Powell's "UX for the Development-Minded" session (albeit I'm a little biased being an experience design zealot). This was also the first time I had seen Andy speak, or seen someone present sans shoes. But I quickly was immersed when Andy began his presentation. I literally took notes on every single slide he showed, and was both utterly inspired and reminded again why it is I do what I do. I strongly encourage you to check out his slides and incorporate these concepts into your projects from here on out.

I had an absolute blast in Boston this weekend, and am still trying to digest all of the insanely useful material presented. For everything RIA Unleashed, be sure to check Brian Rinaldi's blog for the latest slides/wrap-ups as well as the RIA Unleashed Twitter List for those involved with making this fantastic event possible. Thanks to Brian and the support of the sponsors for such a terrific day of inspiration. Hopefully soon, we can start planning for RIA Unleashed 2010.

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