Two posts back to back about the same SDCFUG meeting? Yes! In addition to talking about Lazlo and WebOrb, Charlie Arehart will be giving us an update on integrating .NET with CFML on BlueDragon. This is a welcome and timely update for our group as several of our SDCFUG members work in shops where both .NET and ColdFusion are used side by side, with varied levels of success.

For anyone who missed Phil Cruz's presentation to the San Diego ColdFusion User Group in January, you can catch up by reading his 3 part series about it in the CFDJ and by checking out the FAQ and email list on his CFEverywhere page.

As previously blogged, Charlie Arehart spoke about running BlueDragon on .NET at the SDCFUG meeting last night. Charlie had a running copy of it on his laptop and showed us some pretty neat stuff. Here are a few of the many things I learned about BlueDragon for .NET:

• BlueDragon for .NET extends the .NET framework. This means that once you've installed BlueDragon on your .NET server, all your .cfm pages are processed by BlueDragon through the .NET engine.
• You can CFINCLUDE .aspx pages in .cfm pages and vice-versa. Since BlueDragon for .NET extends the .NET framework, it's all compatible and interchangeable.
• BlueDragon for .NET is essentially BlueDragon re-compiled on .NET using Jscript J#. Yes, changes had to be made to make this work correctly, and it's still pre-beta and not perfect, but it's pretty cool that virtually the same code can run on .NET and J2EE platforms.
• You can CFIMPORT .NET classes and use them in your CFML code. Charlie demonstrated this using a calendar control, but there are endless possibilities.

These are a very small percentage of the cool stuff I saw last night at the SDCFUG meeting. If I have more time I'll post more...

Note: I am not a .NET developer, so please excuse any misuse of terminology and feel free to submit corrections in the comments.