German DevCon - Day 2

The fun continues here in Germany. I woke up this morning with a headache. I do get the occasional migrane, but the timing could not be worse for this one since you have to be on the top of your game to consume all the great sessions offered today as well as giving one this morning. No, I do not have a hangover. I have not even tried the German beer yet. So a couple of Tylenol with a bottle of water and off to breakfast.

I started out my day listening to Steven Black discuss the art of Application Metadata. I am a huge fan of driving different aspects of a software solution via metadata. Steve provided a prospective on this subject like few people in the Fox Community. Steve did a great job. He showed many examples of real world metadata solutions he has used with some of the commercial frameworks, created on his own (MsgSvc), and others he has implemented and extended for his customers. The key take away for me was reaffirming my approaches and getting a nice refresher on how cool MsgSvc is.

Next was Andy Kramek's Advanced SQL Queries session. In case you did not know this, Andy is one of my favorite presenters. He is one of the few people I would go to see to talk on the Form Designer, and he does not even do user interface code {g}. We all use SQL queries in some fashion and Andy taught me a couple new tricks with the new VFP 9 SQL syntax. The key take away from this session is to try out different queries that solve the same question. There were several examples of how one can get the same result set with two completely different queries. I can't wait to read the white paper from this session.

My Developer Tools: Build, Grab, or Buy session followed Andy's session. I took another couple of Tylenol before the session with another bottle of water. The session was well attended (I always say the more attendees the better). The session went better than yesterday's. I always learn something each time I give a session. After the session I was talking to a developer who is doing some very cool stuff with Event Binding and Visual Source Safe. This spawned off all kinds of ideas for me and the people I enjoyed lunch with after the session.

The session after lunch is the toughest to give and toughest to attend, especially after the types of lunches provided at this conference. So I decided to sit in on Rick Strahl's Using AJAX with ASP.NET. I have a project scheduled which should be perfect for ASP.NET v2.0 so I figured it would be a good idea to get some instruction from one of the leaders in our community. Rick's sessions never disappoint and this one was no different. He provided a real good overview on the topic. This material is definitely going to take some time to sink in (no surprise after reading his blog for a long time). The key take away from this session was Fiddler. This is a tool which shows the interaction between the Internet browser and the information returned from the Web server. Nice.

I played hooky from the next two sessions to call back home, and later to catch up with a couple of developers to discuss Fox Community related topics. At dinner Igor Vit (VFP MVP from the Czech Republic) presented me with a copy of What's New In Nine: VFP's Latest Hits, written in Czech. The book title is Co je noveho: ve Visual FoxPro 9.0. Talk about cool. We took a picture with myself, Doug Hennig, and Igor and Jan Vit (who are tech editors for the translation). My sincere thanks to the entire translation team who made this possible. The more people who can learn about VFP 9, the better the Fox Community will be. It is very humbling to see your work in both German and Czech. Knowing these are the number two and three markets for Visual FoxPro we can expect a large number of VFP developers to read our book.

I am writing this blog entry while listening to Ken Levy's presentation on What's New with XML in Visual Studio 2005. Ken started his presentation with a nice video interview he conducted with Rainer Becker (conference organizer), Doug Hennig, Craig Berntson, and Steven Black. It was humorous. The session was very informative.

It was a great day, but only one more day to go. And good news: the headache is going away.