German DevCon - Day 1

I want to start out by stating the German DevCon has already lived up to the hype I was given before I arrived. The sessions have been exceptional, and the food - well this could be a blog all by itself {g}.

I started out the day sitting in on Doug Hennig's Mining for Gold in XSource. I learned several new things, but the topic that stands out is the exposure he provided on the Builder framework included in XSource. I recall hearing about this before, but it was simply explained during this session and Doug showed how you can build a simple, yet powerful builder in less than five minutes. Now I have to update my Builders Made Easy session, which I am giving on Saturday.

Ken Levy provided the keynote at the conference. I skipped this since I have seen Ken do the keynote at several conferences this year. There was a lot of positive feedback after the session during lunch so I can only assume it was good.

My first session went okay. Deployment is a dry material session and it was scheduled right after a big lunch. Tough to do on the best of days. One of the things I learned during my session is to never give a session that depends on interaction with the attendees in the audience in Germany. After I submitted this session for consideration I learned the German speaking attendees typically do not ask questions during English speaking sessions. The session went fine, but did not meet my high standards. Fortunately, the other three sessions I am giving do not depend as heavily on the interaction.

The next session I attended was Dan Jurden's Introduction to SQL Server Reporting Services. I have wanted to get an introduction to this product for a long time. Dan did a good job of introducing this topic and giving me the jumpstart to get this installed when I return home. The product looks promising and works with all kinds of data including SQL Server and VFP DBFs. Dan demonstrated several examples of creating reports via the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, but also ran the reports in a VFP form.

The last regular session of the day was Lisa Slater Nicholls' Advanced VFP Reporting. It was a typical Lisa session. Enough said.

Well, off to dinner and probably adding another Kilo to the waistline and learning more about developing in VFP. More later...