Advisor DevCon - Day 2

The Advisor Summit continued into the second day in the heat of Arizona. The sessions rooms are air conditioned in the very nice facilities here at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge.

I started out my day attending Doug Hennig's Integrate RSS and Visual FoxPro. Doug did his usual excellent presentation on a subject I think is starting to mature. More and more developers are integrating RSS feeds into their desktop and Web applications. Doug demonstrated some example code I believe can be used right out of the box. It was a great follow up to the session Rick Borup gave last year at Southwest Fox. Definitely five stars.

The second session slot of the day included a couple of sessions being given for the second time at the conference and I have seen both so I took some time to catch up on some emails I owed a couple of clients, and wrote and post the day 1 blog entry.

I picked Cathi Gero's .NET with Visual FoxPro in Action session for the third slot of the day. Cathi is extremely knowledgeable on both .NET and Visual FoxPro, and the session delivered on my expectations. I don't really do .NET development. Doug Hennig has referred to my experience as it being a "read-only language", meaning I have only read about it. So I like to attend session like this one every once and a while to get a little more exposure to the product. Five stars.

After lunch I decided to absorb Lisa Slater Nicholls' Interoperability Scenarios using XML and Visual FoxPro. Lisa's session took several different XML concepts and addressed each one during the session. Lisa started the session with a walk down memory lane and some of her writings about reporting and her inspiration for the session. One of the ideas demonstrated is how reports will be extendible in the future using concepts similar to member data. Interesting ideas, four out of five stars.

Next up was Alan Griver's Integrating Visual FoxPro Data Sources with Visual Studio. As noted earlier in this post I am not a Visual Studio developer, but I already saw Toni Feltman's InfoPath session in a rehearsal at the Detroit Area Fox User Group. Alan did his usual top-level presentation and gave us some insight into the Fox Team's implementation of DDEX for the VFP provider. What DDEX does is tell Visual Studio 2005 how to interact with a VFP DBC and the tables inside the VS Data Explorer. It will simplify interaction with VFP data in the VS 2005 IDE. It made me wonder how many Visual Studio developers use DBF files as a data store. Four out of five stars.

I finished up the break out session slots by attending Toni Feltman's Visual FoxPro Client-Server Data Access Techniques. Unfortunately I was a little late in arriving because I had to attend to a client matter just as her session got started. This was Toni's third session of the day and she still had the same energy you expect from her regular session. Toni detailed all the pros and cons with the different data access methods (remote views, SQL Passthrough, Stored Procedures, and CursorAdapters). She was right on as usual, but was non-committal on what was the "best" approach for VFP developers. This was key from my perspective. I have listened to different developers say approach X is the only way to go with remote data. They are willing to argue to the death to defend the decision. The truth is (at least from my perspective) is a combination of the techniques is going to best serve the VFP developers. I am looking forward to reading her white paper on the subject. Five out of five stars.

After dinner I attended part of Ken Levy's Developing with the Windows Live Platform bonus session. I really don't have a lot of knowledge about Windows Live other than using the Messenger so I was hoping to become enlightened on the subject. Unfortunately I was late because it took longer to get our dinner than we expected, but it was still interesting, and I learned something about bots. I hear how Microsoft is planning on making money from this, but I have not determined how I will, nor have I seen anything that hit me as a serious productivity booster to make me more profitable. The jury is definitely still out on this. No rating because I did not attend long enough to make the call.

More to come on day 3, but the post will definitely depend on my access to the Internet and it might be posted later tomorrow before I head out for a four day weekend to recover from the standard conference exhaustion already kicking in.