German DevCon 2006 - Day 1

German DevCon starts with breakfast. There are no sessions in the hotel restaurant, but no "RainerFest" is complete without the best conference food on the planet. In case you are wondering, I had scrambled eggs, some mushrooms and potatoes. I had a busy day today because I presented two of my four sessions.

I started the actual conference by presenting my session Debugging Essentials. This is the same session I recorded for www.FoxCast.org with a few tweaks. A couple minutes before the session only a couple of attendees were hanging out in my room. I suspected Rainer's 10 minute opening session went a little long and my room was the furthest from the auditorium. Sure enough the room filled up before I completed my "Who am I" slide. I only forgot to demo one thing, the ability to filter the Locals window by data scope/type (Public, Local, Standard, Object). I believe the session went well and have received some positive feedback since the session ended.

Next up was wOOdy's (Jürgen Wondzinski) session VFP 9.0 und VFPX/VFPY. The session was in German, but amazingly I understood what he was trying to convey. wOOdy showed the GotDotNet and CodePlex Web site and then went through the various projects and demoed several of the projects in development. Some of the stuff he showed reminded me why I think this is such an important part of the VFP community. Not that I have forgotten, rather he reminded me of the cool projects people like Carlos Alloatti, Craig Boyd, Cesar Chalom, Bo Durban, Nancy Folsom, Doug Hennig, Randy Jean, Andrew MacNeill, Emerson Reed, and Arto Toikka are heading up and actively working on. They have volunteered and are actively working on the future of VFP. I really appreciated the plug he gave for the yet to be finished White Light MenuDesigner too. Thanks wOOdy!

Lunch was next. The smoked Salmon is very good!

My afternoon started with my presentation called Best Practices for Error Handling. This was a tough session to prepare because it originally was three hours of material crammed into 90 minutes for WhilFest 2006, and I had to cut out 15 more minutes to fit it into this session slot. I felt the session went pretty good. My programs crash during the session, but the good news is, they are suppose to trigger errors. {g}

The next slot I ended up catching up with my friends (Alan Griver and Beth Massi), and all the pictures of Jeff Zinnert's son (from Stonefield).

I attended Marcia Akins' More than Office Automation II session. Marcia showed us how to automate MapPoint, Visio, and CDO. Marcia presented these topics in her usual straightforward manner. The best thing about her sessions is her code examples. Reviewing the code is a treat. Her examples are not the standard examples you normally get at conferences. Her examples are near or at a production ready state. This was a really good session.

Dinner was next, and the food was very good and very plentiful. In case you don't know this, Rainer is trying to add kilos to each person attending this conference.

After dinner I attended the Stonefield Query vendor session. Doug has really added a lot to this already cool product. I am mentoring one developer who is a user of Stonefield Query and occasionally asks me if I have any expertise in it (which I don't). Earlier in the afternoon I was talking to Jeff about an idea I had to add reporting to a vertical market application I use. I figured this was a perfect time to get more familiar with the newest version. Time well spent.

We headed to the hotel bar after Doug's session. This is definitely Germany and I was watching the bartender while I was talking with some friends. I swear the only time she stop drawing beer from the tap was to wash some glasses.

More to come for day two...