I’ve been wrestling with a bug in Dreamweaver MX for the past few weeks, and I’m beginning to think Macromedia doesn’t care much about it.

I’m not the only one either. Take Aral

for example, he found this problem a month before I did. Truly annoying. This is the company that “merged” with my beloved Allaire, a serious “listen to your customers” type of company, and while they’re hyping up the MX empire, they’re not doing what contributed a lot to Allaire’s success: paying attention to the customer.

It’s even more annoying that the ColdFusion MX server, out of the box, seems pretty shakey. It took me forever to get it to work with Apache 1.3, and that was after trying to get it to work with Apache 2.0 only to find out it wasn’t going to happen. The potential for CFMX is huge, but it’s hard to win customers with something that seems unstable.

I’m saying “seems” alot because most of what I’ve found wrong with CFMX are my own fault. Trying to use it with Apache 2.0 being one of them. If I’d done some research, I would have found that it couldn’t be done. If I’d done some more research, I’d have found out that if you don’t turn off the friendly errors in Internet Explorer, you get the standard IE error for normal ColdFusion errors. So when I thought CFMX was simply dead, I spent an hour trying to figure out why it was “dead” on one CFML file, only to realize that it was simply some bad syntax. My beloved CF 5.0 would simply spit out an error, rather than provoke IE to show me it’s own errors.

Still, my stupidity doesn’t mean Macromedia doesn’t have a problem. I’m not the only one, and with enough people like me falling into these stupid pits, Macromedia will end up with a serious reputation problem. Perhaps not of their own doing for CFMX, but certainly with not addressing issues.

I’ve been a diehard CFML programmer for over seven years now, and let’s just say that JSP and PHP are starting to get a little more play, just in case.