OzFox 2007 - Day 2

The second day of the conference started with a review of "Get More Productive with VFP" session at 5:00am in the morning. I have been waking up around 4:30am to 5:00am each day no matter how tired I am. For a while this morning I tried to understand the rules of Rugby which seems to be on most TV stations here in Sydney. I learned that there are four different versions of the sport played, which solved much of my confusion. I also tried to understand Cricket, but have no clue how this game is played. It is nice that the American morning shows are played between 5:00am and 7:00am so I can catch up on the news from home. Some American shows are played in the evening, but they seem to be a season behind in some cases.

It has been raining the last couple of days. This is unusual from what I have been told and the Aussies have been very apologetic (like they control the weather {g}). Our sightseeing was not interrupted with bad weather and since we sit in the conference all day the rain has not affected any activity. Perfect timing. Therese has not been very sympathetic since Sterling Heights was hit by an ice storm and I am in very warm temperatures.

Busy conference day with six conference sessions, and two bonus sessions crammed in:

• Doug Hennig - "Installing Applications Using InnoSetup"
• Colin Nicholls - "Extending VFP 9.0 Xbase Reporting Components"
• Rick Schummer - "Get more productive with VFP"
• Bing Bao - "Security and the VFP Developer" (bonus session during lunch)
• Lisa Slater Nicholls - "Reporting in Sedna/SP2 - A Tour"
• Mark Crichton - "Getting a Visual FoxPro application to Market"
• Colin Nicholls - "Data Visualization in Reports with VFP 9.0 SP2"
• Andrew Coates - "Creating Office OpenXML Documents in VFP" (bonus session)

All the sessions were good. I missed most of Doug's session because I saw it in Pheonix and wanted to catch up on some work I needed to do. The reporting sessions are causing lots of brain cramps with the large volume of information and exciting new functionality. Each of the sessions are building on the previous sessions. Extendibility is getting the doors blown off again.

Bing Bao (from Sydney) came in and tried to scare us all with some insecurities with applications and VFP data. It was a great way to spend lunch. Mark Crichton is also a local speaker and talked about some history of his app, business decisions he faces, the processes and tools he uses to get his vertical market application to market. Interesting ideas to consider if you are into this type of application.

Andrew wrapped up the day with an excellent session on the new MS Office file formats and showed us how we can create the files from VFP without any automation. It is all XML files and ZIP technology. This is the second time I have seen this topic only this time it had VFP used to create the files. I think this has lots of potential, but I also believe this is going to be very complex once you get past the fundamental and trivial examples. That said, I think it is great because you can build in scalability without worrying about Office being in the way, or licensing concerns, and the file formats are an open standard. This means other office vendors will be compatible in the future and the world just got a little smaller.

Excellent Thai food for dinner - finally (Doug and I have been looking since we arrived). We walked in the rain to a small little place down closer to the harbor. Conversation at dinner was more shop talk. The day was long and most of us have full skulls.