While development on the next version of FarCry 5.2 has been proceeding at a furious pace, there has been a whole raft of small fixes, and enhancements for the current FarCry 5.1 release. Get the latest cumulative roll-up of enhancements, bug fixes and tweaks.

While not specifically anti-IE, most web developers are nearly all pro web standards.  By and large the developers I jostle with are building in some incarnation of gecko or webkit. Then it's hack and slay till it's tamed to work with IE in order to satisfy some random stake-holder.  The mounting frustration inevitably leads web developers to use their influence to reduce IE's footprint.

We've recently released another public beta for FarCry 5.1. There's a full community distro, complete with FarCry CMS for your installing pleasure. What was originally just a series of UI improvements, i18n updates and friendly URLs overhaul has blossomed into a very significant release - over 200 issues resolved.

The webDU 2009 Call For Papers is open. If you'd like to be a speaker at our annual, antipodean, web gab-fest in Sydney feel free to throw your hat in the ring. On the other hand, if you "like to watch", be part of our social, agenda building experiment at UserVoice.

Only a couple of days till the inaugural conference. Aral Balkan has put together a tremendously ambitious virtual conference, delivered from multiple conference hubs and online over Adobe Connect Pro. Tickets are pretty good value. There's a stellar cast of web aficionados, talking web-tech for three days, across four tracks, covering all manner of topics. has something for everyone. If you miss a session your ticket gives you access to the recording of every presentation delivered post-conference.

The Jump Start Course for FarCry development should be your first stop for getting to grips with your new FarCry web application. Daemon has released the course free for personal use under the Creative Commons License. On-site and online instructor led courses are available.

Despite our best efforts, the Daemonites still struggle at keeping documentation up to date. Documenting tags and functions is tortuous. Maintaining that documentation on an evolving code base is even worse. Might as well attempt to turn back the tide, or change global temperature by eating tofu.

We work with UUIDs a lot. If you have to work with application code bases that are cross platform and support multiple database servers its the most flexible primary key you'll find. But not all universally unique ids are the same. For example, ColdFusion uses an algorithm for generating them that is not the same as MS SQL Server.

While XML is a great format for structured data, its not ideal for configuring code frameworks. When working with a framework your code is often broken up into smaller segments that are coordinated at run time. All to often this coordination is wired together using XML configuration files. Its this separation of configuration from code that makes XML so sucky. Embedding metadata into the code itself seems like a much more natural way to manage complex configuration.

Seems like a silly thing, but one of my favourite FarCry 5.0 features is the ability to add inline documentation and icons to the webtop. We've been busy making things look pretty in the backend. It's weird how if it looks good, it "feels" good and its just more fun working with the framework.