I'll be honest - I wasn't terribly thrilled with the amount of coverage given to the new features in Blackstone. Don't get me wrong, between a full-day of hands-on sessions, sneak peeks, a couple of features shown off in the keynotes, and a "Birds of a Feather" one evening, there was plenty of information about Blackstone to be seen and heard. The fact that the entire server development team was there helped a lot. That said, if you were looking for new information about Blackstone that hadn't already been mentioned by Ben Forta on his whirlwind Blackstone tour, then there wasn't too much there for you. Obviously, by the time MAX 2005 happens Blackstone will be released and we'll see and hear it all, but that's almost a year from now. Fortunately, a few Macromedia employees have been granted permission to blog about new features in Blackstone and have volunteered their time and energy to that end.

You can learn about new features currently being planned for the release, hear about how they work, and sometimes can even see code and/or working examples! Never before has so much information been made available about an upcoming release - and personally, I like that personal blogs are being used as the format for delivering some of this information. Here are a few URLs, information on who owns the blog, and what type of Blackstone content has been blogged recently:

• Ben Forta (www.forta.com/blog/): Ben has long been the senior evangelist for ColdFusion at Macromedia and boy, has he been evangelising! Ben has blogged about so many new features in Blackstone, I can't list them all here. Recently, he's mentioned support for XML as a <CFFUNCTION> return type or argument type, and enhancements to the <CFPARAM> tag.
• Damon Cooper (www.dcooper.org/): Damon is in charge of the ColdFusion development team at Macromedia. Who better to talk about new features in Blackstone than the guy rolling up his sleeves and coding and testing on a daily basis? Damon has recently blogged about the power of an "Asynchronous Gateway" (supplying sample files and installation instructions), a Blackstone SMS application, and about other ideas for SMS use in ColdFusion applications.
• Tim Buntel (www.buntel.com/blog/): Tim is the product manager for ColdFusion at Macromedia. I'm no expert, but I believe product managers are largely responsible for deciding what features will go into a product. So we should all thank Tim for the cool new stuff it seems Blackstone will be able to do. Tim is spending a lot of time blogging about all sorts of great things to do with Blackstone. At the time of this writing, Tim blogged about the FlashPaper and Flash Forms application used in part of the keynote at MAX - and he has made some code examples and live demos available as well.

If you're interested in knowing more about new features planned for the next release of ColdFusion, I suggest that you visit the blogs mentioned in this article on a daily basis. In addition, expect to see more material about Blackstone in CFDJ as we approach the release - particularly upon its official launch. Next month begins a year of more in-focus issues each month...and Blackstone is sure to be a large part of that as well.