At today's keynote, Ben Forta "unofficially" announced the next version of ColdFusion MX, code named Blackstone. No details on the development cycle, or when alpha/beta would be available for testing.

According to Ben, the most requested feature for this version is enhanced reporting/printing. In my opinion, it would be a waste of time and resources for Macromedia to try to come up with their own reporting engine, especially when enterpries class engines such as Crystal and Actuate already exist. What I'm hoping is that they add intgration into popular reporting engines, as well as built-in support for generation of PDF files (via Apache FOP and XSL-FO, perhaps?). I would also think that some level of advanced report formatting could be achieved via CSS, so I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Other features hinted at were improved performance, more deployment options, and the ability to "protect" source code. My guess on that one is some sort of obfuscation scheme.