Are you moving up to, or considering a move to CF2018, or perhaps CF2016? If so, might you have skipped over one of the previous releases, whether CF2016, CF11, or CF10? And you might you wonder “what changed in those previous releases” that you may have missed? Can you name the top 5 or 10 features/changes in those three previous releases of CF? or key hidden gems? Are you aware of compatibility concerns in moving to any of them?

Or maybe you moved to one of these releases some time ago, but you may only have been told to “make sure things worked” but not consider taking advantage of the new features of that release, or of the other previous version you may have skipped. I’ve certainly seen that. And FWIW, I’ve helped people recently jumping even from CF7 to CF2018(!) and all other permutations of CF versions.

Here’s good news, I did a presentation on this very topic back in 2016/2017, and I want to point it out here for those in this situation:

Presentation: What was new in CF 10, 11, and 2016 that you may have missed?

You can see there both the PDF of the presentation slides (with substantial content, not just pictures) and you can view a recording of one of the presentations of the session.

In it I highlight the top features of 10, 11, and 2016, along with some hidden gems, as well as compatibility issues and more. (Whereas my classic “hidden gems” talks have gone deeper to uncover a few dozen features per release, this talk necessarily focuses on just a couple dozen or so key ones in each release.)

It includes links to resources for learning still more, and of course the CF docs always contain information on what’s new, and beyond just what’s in the CFML Reference.

With information on what’s new and changed in each release, you’ll be in a better position to take full advantage of your new CF implementation, whatever  version of those or later that you may be on. (And I may at some point create a new blog series here to pull the info out of the presentations, to make it more widely accessible to readers.)

What about a new book in the CFWACK series?

I was asked recently if there would be an update in the “CF Web Application Construction Kit” series of books. I don’t think there ever will be, which is another reason I wanted to point out this presentation.

As some may know, after creating 3 books per version of CF for each of CF 9, 8, and earlier, we co-authors opted in CF10 to create a single book, focused only on what was new and changed. It definitely made for a simpler and less expensive book, and also was easier to do than re-reading past chapters to see what needed updating. 🙂

Sadly, there was never another for CF 11, 2016, or 2018, and I don’t expect there will be another. First, the market for books in general has changed, especially tech books. Second, many of the past authors have moved on to other tech (which is natural: those with the moxy to write about a given tech are mostly people who are motivated to learn, and they tend to eventually grow weary of “old tech” and move on to what seem greener pastures.).

The good news is that there are indeed still people writing about CF, just not in book form. Check out other posts here in the Adobe CF portal, where both Adobe and community folks currently post many blog entries weekly.

What about CF2018?

If you’re wondering why I don’t mention CF2018 in the title here, it’s not that I have forgotten to mention it. 🙂 Indeed, I have an entire separate series on “Hidden Gems in CF2018” going on here in the portal. Check out the Part 1 overview, which also links to the other parts as they are being released, about weekly:

Hidden Gems in ColdFusion 2018, part 1: Series Overview

But again the focus of this post is on what changed in CF10, 11, and 2016. I hope you get value out of reading about (or watching) that in the presentation above, and perhaps in a future blog series here on the topic.