Two weeks ago Adobe unleashed a public beta of ColdFusion 8, the first major release of the technology since Adobe acquired Macromedia. One of the new features in version 8 is native support for .NET objects, which makes it simple to build business logic in .NET and still utilize ColdFusion for the user experience layer. Thus, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to ColdFusion developers – you can now easily use the very powerful .NET framework as part of your applications!

If you’d like to get your hands dirty, you can download the beta here. Then check out this code example from Ben Forta, Adobe’s Senior Technical Evangelist. He shows you how to use .NET to retrieve information about the hard drives on your server.

I asked Jason Delmore, Product Manager for ColdFusion, for his thoughts on adding .NET support. Here’s what he said:

I think the point that our .NET capabilities emphasize is that there are strengths to each development technology…and an environment that allows for heterogeneous development can leverage the strengths of each of those environments at the same time.

It’s a good point: ColdFusion provides another option for integration. Of course you’d like to use .NET all the time, but if you have to use some Java perhaps to integrate with an existing system, ColdFusion lets you combine both pretty easily. It also allows you to take advantage of PDF, Flex, and other technologies if you’re so inclined.

Unfortunately Jason declined to share what the next version of ColdFusion will bring, but it sounds like Adobe will make calling ColdFusion code from .NET much easier, with a “.NET Gateway.”

The new release of ColdFusion is obviously good news for CF developers, but I think .NET developers should be happy about it too. Any technology that makes it easier to use my code in another way is a good technology in my book!

Read: Adobe Labs