German DevCon - Day 1

My day started out with Doug Hennig's "Developing VFP Apps for Vista." I first saw this at OzFox 2007 and have recommended every VFP developer should see this session. This session was very popular at Southwest Fox and Advisor DevCon too. I am also getting closer to purchasing my first Vista computer so the session has more relevance this time around. Doug has real world practical experience on the topic and is considered the authority. I think there are two key take-aways from this session. The first important ideas is security and not working around it, but rather work with it. The second is that even if you do not want to use Vista for development, note your customers eventual will be so you need to develop this expertise. Doug has lots of useful code to help make your applications compatible too. Still a six out of five stars.

Next up is the keynote. Alan Griver started the session by presenting Rainer with the VFP Lifetime Achievement Award as I posted yesterday. Alan also talked about "the announcement" from last March. Unfortunately Alan's machine was suffering from a serious hard drive problem. He was able to boot in Vista safe mode, but none of his demos were working because they have registry dependencies. This was a bummer since I have seen his keynote material at the Advisor conference and it was very interesting, and showed some key technologies VFP developers will use for years to come. Doug Hennig stepped in with some Vista demos, and Steven Black made some compelling points on why VFP developers will be successful for many years to come. Stability is reliability. I have enjoyed Steven's sessions over the years, but today I realized during this session that Steven could become a religious evangalist if his software career wanes. Steven basically whet the attendee appetite for his all evening session "FoxPro is dead! Now What? The Case for VFP."

After lunch I had to work on some projects so I skipped the first two afternoon sessions. My "Fishing with a ProjectHook" session was the last afternoon session. It was not attended by a lot of developers because it was against Christof's "Cross Platform with VFP and Guineu" and Andy Kramek's "SQL Server for VFP Developers Part 2." Personally I would have read the white paper for the ProjectHook session, and attended Christof's session (which I heard was top gun). My session went okay, but definitely was not the best I have delivered it. It could be the fact I am still suffering a bit from jet lag, or it could be that I thrive off more energy from more attendees. I really appreciated the attendees who selected my session. Thanks for coming.

Dinner was very good. The only disappointment is they did not serve smoked salmon. This broke my streak of smoked salmon at every meal. Marcia Akins and I hunted for it for a while, but there was none to be had.

I also skipped the evening sessions to catch up with several clients. Skype is a lifesaver.