Shedding Some Light

Sunday started out with back spasms as I opened the hotel room door. It was painful. Fortuntely my wife Therese was also heading out for the morning and was able to carry my backpack to the first session I wanted to attend. Several people joked how she was carrying my backpack, as if I was being spoiled. I am spoiled, but not to the point where she carries my computer around for me. {bg}

I sat in on Doug Hennig’s session Adding Intellisense to Your Application. Toni Feltman presented a similiar session a few years ago at Essential Fox, but it never hurts to get a second perspective on a session, and I have seen the other session in this slot. Doug showed us some very interesting code he implemented so the runtime Intellisense only shows public property, events and methods from the custom objects he is exposing. The timing on this session was perfect for me as I am working on two applications right now I think Intellisense will have a roll in the user interface. I am absolutely positive I will be able to leverage Doug’s examples. Another session that paid for the conference for me.

Next up was my final session of Fishing with a Projecthook. It was definitely not my best presentation as my back as giving me all kinds of pain. Basically it felt as if someone had a voodoo doll of me and was sticking a knife in my back. I am suspecting Craig Boyd was doing this so more people would attend his already popular VFP World Domination session in the same session slot. He probably handed out other dolls to Nancy Folsom, Rick Borup, and Bo Durban too {g}. Talk about a powerful line-up to go against! The attendees were very gracious and asked excellent questions and were very forgiving when I made mistakes.

The closing session was filled with prize give-aways. Several of the drawings had to be pulled multiple times because people skipped out early. So if you left the conference to get a head start home you might have been a winner! Big wins thanks to people like Fred Taylor who is a VFP MVP and gave away one MSDN Premium subscriptions. This is the same thing Craig Boyd gave away during the keynote. Chick Borheim also reaffirmed the attendees from last year are still getting a copy of FoxFire 8.0 when it is released next month, and new attendees this year are also getting a copy. Rick Borup gave away a copy of Final Builder from VSoft Technologies. I gave away a couple of books from my Hentenwerke stash. The fun continued when Cathy Pountney hosted a quick “baby shower” for Toni and Mike Feltman from many of us in the Fox Community. That officially wrapped up the conference.

A bunch of us went out to lunch afterwards. My back was still in pain, but one way to get rid of pain is through laughter and I was laughing a lot during lunch.

Always good to see friends at these gatherings. This is one of the underrated things about conferences. It the intangibles that always make the conference so beneficial. I already mentioned several sessions I attended that made it worth my “donation” of 60 hours of session preparation and giving up 4 work days of billable work as a presenter. Absolutely more than worth it. I would be at Southwest Fox if Bob did not ask me to speak. At the conference I talked to several people who are interested in doing business with me in the future. Made some new friendships, and spawned several new ideas for projects in the future once the MenuDesigner is completed.

I cannot say enough about the job Bob and Sharon did to pull off this conference each year. I actually understand the quanitity of work it takes to put on this event. He is a trooper and his contribution to our community is very important. Southwest Fox is the not the only conference, but based on location, timing, quality of speakers, and cost, I believe it is best conference of the year here in the USA. I am not saying the other conferences are bad, in fact I believe the other conference are great and have their own advantages, I just happen to love Arizona in September and/or October.

I am already looking forward to next year’s Southwest Fox!

Afterwards Therese and I headed up to Sedona for some rest and relaxation. We met a couple of Fox friends up there for dinner and spent the day on Monday showing one of them the beautiful sites in Red Rock Country. We have attended our corporate retreat every year after Southwest Fox and hope to continue doing this for years to come. It is a great way to recharge the batteries and relax, but I always get a chance to review ideas from the conference and get even more ideas staring at the natural beauty. This year was abundant with inspiration.

I hope those who attended the conference had as much fun as I did this year and hope to see everyone return next year, For those who did not get a chance to go to a conference this year (German DevCon is still available) I hope to see you at one of the many ones available in 2007.

Saturday started out with a couple more informal sessions. I really wanted to attend Bo Durban’s session Using GDI+ with VFP. Bo, Craig Boyd, and Cesar Chalom have done some really cool stuff with the GDIPlusX class library. I listened to Bo Friday night at the go-kart race when he was telling us how he and Craig initially architected this and how important it was for them to replicate the same functionality from .NET. These three guys are very energetic when it comes to this project so I am disappointed I missed this session..

On the way to Jim Booth’s session XML/XLST, DOM and VFP Build Web Pages session I ran into Dave Bernard who was doing the UT coverage along with Bo Durban. These guys really worked hard on the coverage. I talked with Dave for a while and missed Jim’s session. I was really looking forward to seeing Jim speak. He has been a favorite of mine since I started attending conferences in the early 90′s. I have been messing around with his topic for a little bit so I am hoping to read his session white paper now that I have returned home. As you know from reading this blog, often the adhoc sessions outside and during sessions are very valuable. One of the things that came up was a discussion about Mike Feltman’s Where do you want to go today? session. Several people recommended I attend it the second time Mike presented it. Normally I would just ask Mike to present the session at DAFUG as both the Feltman’s are regular presenters at our local user group. But the next opening is several months away.

Lucky enough Mike presented Where do you want to go today? during the next slot. I really enjoyed it. The core message I got out of Mike’s session is quite simple: there is nothing wrong with using VFP and nothing wrong with looking at other development tools and languages to meet your customer needs. The second message, and more important message he gave us is something I have said for the last several years: make business decisions based on business reasons, not on emotional reasons. Hatred and anger are emotions that need to be purged from the business decision process. He started out the session reinforcing the fact that he loves VFP and plans on using it for a long time. Mike presented all the pros and cons of each of the development languages he has investigated over the years and how the job market is for the language. The real interesting thing Mike showed is some help want ad statistics for each of the languages. This is a very interesting set of statistics. Mike tracked help wanted ads for the last 6 months. Java has the highest percentage of ads over this time period and currently shows a strong growth position. .NET was down the list a bit, but more importantly showed a decline in the last six months. In fact, Mike said the chart on help want ads shows a correlation between the growth of Java and the decline of .NET. Java took a dive when .NET was on the rise, and now the reverse is true. A real interesting presentation and one lined with pure common sense and facts to back up the common sense.

Lunch was next and perfectly good food.

Next up is Christof Wollenhaupt’s session Crashing VFP and Preventing Crashes. The good news is Christof is finding it harder and harder to give this type of session with each version of VFP. Many of his examples are version specific. Christof’s humor throughout this session was great. He would point out how this particular “crasher” is broken in version X, so you can avoid this problem by simply upgrading to version X+1 or higher. I think the part of the session that impressed me the most is how Christof demonstrated determining which DLL (maybe VFP or a completely unrelated program) caused your VFP app to die a brutal death by viewing the Dr. Watson error dump via Visual Studio. How many sessions can pay for a conference before one asks if they can buy another conference registration {g}.

The last session I attended Saturday was my Professional Developer’s Toolkit. The room was packed and the group very interactive, which I really, really appreciated. I was the only presenter between them and the end of the day, yet they wanted me to intentionally exceed the 75 minutes to cover more material than I normally can fit into the session (something I guarantee when I start the session). I was really pumped.

The speaker dinner was Saturday evening and as others have noted in their blogs, the food was terrific. Thanks Bob for hosting the dinner. We discussed many things including the learning curve of .NET, and why many of us feel it is not in our clients’ best interest for us to learn .NET until Microsoft gets data integrated correctly. I also enjoyed listening to others perspective’s on CLR integration in SQL Server, and how migrating to .NET 2.0 barely broke the apps already developed in v1.1. I have been reading many articles on how 2.0 is not backwards compatible and how bad this affects ongoing projects. I am always interested in real life experience and getting the other side of the story. I am sure the truth is somewhere in the middle as is usually the case.

The evening ended with numerous discussions in the bar. Fortunately, the first Sunday session did not start until 9:00am which is a whole hour later than normal.

I woke up still energized from the keynote, but I also knew it was going to take a lot of energy to get through what was the busiest day of the conference (at least for me).

The first session I attended was one I was really looking forward too attending: The Security Cookbook by Christof Wollenhaupt. I recommended to Bob Kocher the last couple of years to bring Christof to Southwest Fox. I have seen Christof speak once before and did not understand a word he was saying. It was at the German DevCon and he was presenting in German. This time around I understood everything he was presenting and quite frankly, Christof made me feel a wee bit insecure. His session was fantastic! His knowledge of Visual FoxPro may be unsurpassed. This topic is very serious and Christof not only made the attendees think seriously about security in their applications, but his humor interjected in the session was terrific. His material on password strengths, how to hide passwords, showing us how to register COM objects with simple user privileges, encrypting error logs, using FLLs from the EXE instead of ones on the hard drive, and working with hash values was awesome. Seeing VCX code from a ReFoxed encrypted EXE using the Report Designer was some what scary, and reaffirmed my entire thinking on ReFoxing apps – it is pretty much useless. I have read Christof’s forum posts, his contributions to the Advisor column, and some of his whitepapers over the years and really appreciate his contributions to the Fox Community. This is one of those sessions that paid for the entire cost of the conference. Very well done.

Next up was Doug Hennig and his session on Installing Apps Using Inno Setup. Doug gave the attendees a complete tour of Inno Setup and showed some of the advantages of using this tool over something relying on the Windows Installer. Besides not having to hassle with the quirks of a Windows Installer deployment package, Inno is faster to build the package and faster at installing your application. This is something I noticed right away when I started using Inno Setup. My clients love the speed too. I have been using Inno Setup for a short time and learned a lot from Doug’s session. One of the really cool things is the GetFileVersion script call to include the version number from the EXE you are distributing. This means I no longer have to worry about synchronizing the Inno Setup script with each build of my applications. I was able to update some of my scripts during Doug’s session. Talk about immediate impact to the job. Fantastic session and exceeded my high expectations.

My first session on the Professional Developer’s Toolkit was next. I had a great crowd who was willing to share their experiences. This session is much better when that happens and I learned several things about different applications and different application categories. I plan on sharing these when I present this session next month in Germany. I have been blessed with positive feedback as well.

Lunch was good. I appreciate the vegetarian-ness of the meal and only half-listened to Ken Levy present his session on Windows Live because I saw it at the Advisor DevCon.

The first session of the afternoon was Rick “The Professor” Borup’s session called RSS: Catch the Wave. My nickname “The Professor” comes from the feeling I get when I attend his session. Rick makes me feel like I am back at college in one of my Computer Science classes. His style of presentation is calm, informative, clear, and educational. Rick did his usual great job. I have been incorporating RSS into my applications and some Web sites and feel the same importance of the technology that Rick conveys in his presentation. I appreciated his explanation and examples of Simple List Extensions (SLE) and Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). This is also the first time I have seen Internet Explorer 7. Rick demonstrated the nice implementation of MS Feeds and how Microsoft has tightly integrated RSS into IE7. I was impressed and hope the FireFox team integrates similar capabilities into my favorite browser.

The last session I attended in the afternoon was my presentation of Fishing with a Projecthook. When Bob asked me to speak this year he asked if I was willing to present something on Projecthooks because several people asked for it in the evaluations from last year. I was excited that this session was requested because I really like projecthooks and find them a big part of my daily productivity. It was a smaller crowd this time around because I was up against heavyweights like Christof, Jim Booth (speaking at his first Fox conference in years), Cathy Pountney, and Craig Berntson. Again, the session attendees were great and I learned a couple of things during my session.

The schedule included in the conference nametag was not completely bug free. My session on Fishing with a Projecthook was scheduled twice in a row in the same room. A half dozen attendees showed up hoping to see the session after I finished the first presentation. In hindsight, I should have presented it again and apologize to those who wanted to see it at that time. On the posted schedule on the Southwest Fox Web site, Bo Durban’s session on Creating Custom Report Controls was next in the same room, but he ended up presenting in a different room.

I missed the last session of the day (I was going to attend Bo’s session) to take part in one of the many informal sessions going on during the conference. These informal sessions are sessions that take place outside of the session room, and are a small group of folks talking VFP, software development, conference goings on and a million other topics. These sessions are as valuable as the regular sessions, and some times even more important to take part in. In this case I was talking with Craig Boyd and Rick Borup about some business topics. Thanks guys, I really enjoyed the discussion.

The day ended with go-kart racing. It was a blast. I started near the end of the pack and ended up with the second best lap time for the group we raced with, but was beaten by a girl – Cathy Pountney kicked all of our behinds in the race. Her time was 3/100ths of a second better than mine. I did have the best average lap time by two seconds over everyone else, although Doug Hennig’s time was crunched with one of his laps being more than two normal laps. He spun out when trying to pass someone. It was really a fun evening and look forward to doing it again next year. Next year Cathy is going to get some competition as we all have a year to practice {g}.

More to come on Southwest Fox – Day 3 (Saturday)…

VFP: Past, Present, and (most importantly) Future is the theme of this year’s conference, and was the theme of this year’s keynote.

No baloney and no marketing (with one little exception), and lots of pure fun is how I describe the keynote delivered by Craig Boyd, Doug Hennig and myself.

Craig started out the keynote with a story of how the three of us got in an accident driving over a cliff and into a ravine, and crashing into a tree. Dave Bernard and Bo Durban recall the details of the story better on the UT Coverage for the conference. The happy ending is the story was a story and Craig makes the point that fear is not good, spreading fear is definitely bad, and we should all not be fearful about our future with Visual FoxPro because it is very bright.

We did not want to focus much on the past for two reasons. People usually get all nostalgic about the past when some one dies and we all know VFP is not even close to dead. The second reason is we had more than enough future to consume the entire keynote. But we came across some super secret video via the FBI, CIA, the Department of Home Land Security to prove Microsoft has a plan to market Visual FoxPro. Well, before I start all kinds of rumors, we came across some vintage video of Fox Software marketing the all new FoxPro for DOS. Lots of gurus from the past like Walt Kennemar, George Goley, Pat Adams, Rich Grossman, Adam Green, and of course Dr. Dave Fulton (the father of FoxPro and president of Fox Software) to name a few. Listening to the video and removing some obvious references to older hardware technology, you can clearly listen to the message and hear the numerous competitive advantages mentioned and know even 16 years later that they still apply today. Fast, powerful, easy to use, fast, works on less than state of the art hardware, modern user interface, fast, extendible, backwards compatible, and many more. I personally enjoyed this video and was glad this last minute addition to the keynote was enjoyed by the Fox Folk attending the session.

The present section was also very short. Craig outlined how VFP 9 is very stable, how you have mainstream support through January 2010 and extended support though January 2015. I think it is obvious many developers have already upgraded to VFP 9 and are getting excited by SP2 and Sedna CTPs released last week.

The best part of the night was next: VFP Future.

Craig talked about Service Pack 2 and demonstrated the new reporting enhancements worked on by the Fox Team and their core contractors (Lisa and Colin Nichols). Craig show some of the really nice additions the team has added to simplify things like rotating text on a report, and some of the dynamic properties report expressions can have. I personally think the implementation is elegant and look forward to using these enhancements to make the report output be more flexible without writing any code. The new reporting extensions write all the code for you that you previously had to do under the VFP 9 release. Nice work by the reporting team. I also think we will be reading more and seeing more demos about Service Pack 2. The timing of the release days before the keynote made it hard to incorporate into the keynote, but Craig did a great job.

Next up was Sedna.

Doug showed off the My Namespace and Upsizing Wizard. If you have not seen the My Namespace, it is a class library which exposes various Windows API functionality through Intellisense. But this is only what it does initially. My is extendible (naturally, because we are talking about FoxPro here). My comes with a builder so you can add your own classes to the My Namespace. Not only can you add your own classes, but you can add classes from a any framework. Think of this as a way to include shortcuts to functionality without needing to write a lot of code.

The Upsizing Wizard is an upgrade to the existing one, but really is new and much improved. Lots of changes to simplify the steps to upsizing a VFP DBC to SQL Server (2000 or 2005). I have been testing this for a while because I integrated it into the Data Explorer for the Sedna release. It is easy to use and very fast! I upsized one of my client’s databases to SQL Server in less than 10 minutes. Granted, the database is not huge from a record count perspective, but Doug has even improved the data import speed by a factor of 10 or better using the SQLXMLBulkLoad. The engine is separate from the user interface and Doug demonstrated how you can programmatically upsize databases. This will be very handy when you are upsizing vertical market apps or implementations where you have several copies of a database. I think you will be impressed with the changes he has implemented.

Next up I gave a demonstration of the enhancements I have made to the Data Explorer. I have more than a half dozen bug fixes and almost a dozen enhancements rolled out in the current CTP. All of the enhancements came from the suggestions from the community. There are several changes to the Run Query dialog including showing ShowPlan details (Rushmore optimization via SYS(3054)) on the query results and the number of rows returned for VFP data (the row count is displayed only for SQL Server connections currently), and expose the F5 key which is in the current release, but not obvious. View nodes now have the option to display ShowPlan details (configurable on the Options dialog). There are better sorting options for the treeview so you can sort the tables, views, stored proc, etc., but the column names are now separate from the object sort feature. I also demonstrated how you can call the Upsizing Wizard direct from the Data Explorer, and previewed a couple more ideas I have been working on in the last week since the CTP was shipped including a Database Documenter feature output to HTML with cascading style sheets to control the presentation, and a copy column to the clipboard so you can build SQL Select statements or CREATE TABLE/CURSOR easier. I did not get to show all the new stuff and plan to blog more about the complete set of changes in the future.

I then covered the NET4COM object. This is a DLL helping you expose .NET framework classes to your VFP application. I have read plenty of posts online how developers have been underwhelmed by this part of Sedna. Sure some of the features in the component can be done in VFP without the “overhead” of the .NET framework. I believe those complaining are missing an important aspect of this. It is not the features exposed, it is how it is expose and the code examples of how to do this. This is designed so those with little .NET experience can see how you can take advantage of the thousands of .NET classes. For those with experience, it gives you a leg up on the exposing even more classes. So think about this as a tutorial of how you can expose functionality you can do easily in .NET that would be hard to do in VFP natively. I have only a little .NET experience and appreciate how Microsoft approached this feature.

I then talked about the cool stuff DBi Technologies is doing for the Fox Community by giving us seven commercially sold controls for free in the Sedna release. This is not part of the Community Technology Previews released to date, but is something coming in the production release. More details can be found on the Web site. A very generous company and one that has supported the Fox Community for years with some great products.

Craig then kicked into his high energy presentation of the Vista Toolkit. Most of the demonstration was done on Windows XP. This is really key to note. Much of the functionality he exposed in the toolkit was back ported to Windows XP by Microsoft. The MS Feeds (RSS) an
d Desktop Search were demonstrated. Craig showed a feed reader he wrote entirely in VFP 9 to access the feeds stored by the OS. Impressive functionality for sure. I think the Desktop Search was even more impressive. Most desktop searches today will look for strings in files. Craig demonstrated queries into the file system and email, but there are many more sources that are searchable. He also pointed out the queries executed actually have a SQL Select behind the scenes. The performance is very fox-like, extremely fast.

Craig rebooted his machine into Vista for the rest of his presentation so we took the opportunity to show some of Kevin Ragsdale’s VFP and VFPX promotional videos. Kevin did a great job with these.

Craig continued and showed VFP under Vista. He showed some of the minor user interface problems he knows the Fox Team is working on. More importantly he showed how VFP forms already work with the new Areo user interface techniques. Craig was not even running SP2 to demo this. This is a good sign of how well VFP will play in the Vista sandbox. Craig then showed how a VFP form can run XAML (Windows Presentation Foundation / Avalon) code to extend the form user interface. I personally was impressed by this and see how this opens up the possibilities for the future user interfaces for our VFP applications.

Craig finished up the Sedna portion of the keynote by demonstrating the XPS listener he is working on. This works with reports and outputs to the new XPS format. The XPS format is Microsoft’s new portable document format. It works and smells like a PDF, but is all XML. Craig discussed some of the possibilities for VFP developers to use this format and how powerful the viewer is for end users. The more I hear about this the more I am interested in this technology.

The future is in the Fox Community’s hands as Craig talked about VFPX and VFPY and how the members are working real hard in these two open source projects to create add-ons for VFP developers everywhere. I am impressed with the outpouring of support and the ongoing development of these projects. We did not get a chance to demo some of the projects going on because we already were going over the scheduled time.

Ken Levy drew the ticket for the winner of the MSDN Premium Subscription Sweet Potato Software donated as a prize for the keynote. Cathy Pountney was initially drawn as the winner, but she was ineligible because she is an MVP and MVPs already have a subscription. The winner (and I forgot his name unfortunately) was obviously very happy to have won this very valuable prize.

The last thing of the keynote was really a surprise for Doug Hennig as he was named as the third recipient of the VFP Lifetime Achievement Award (previously given to Whil Hentzen and Rick Strahl). Ken Levy hosted the announcement from Microsoft and the Fox Community. Doug was very surprise as we arranged this behind his back {g}. This was well deserved. Congratulations Doug!

Several people have told me they really enjoyed this year’s keynote. It is apparent from the feedback that we hit a home run and more importantly, got the message across that the future is indeed very bright. More to come…

We are minutes away from the pre-conference sessions…

Registration opened a couple of hours ago…

The weather is hot if you are from Michigan, cold if you are a native of Arizona…

I have already seen a few friends…

So many sessions, not enough time, but this is always the case at a FoxPro conference…

Craig Boyd is hiding some where in the hotel and is avoiding me {g}…

The hotel rooms are way better than the Twin Palms…

Let the conference begin!!!

I am hoping to blog each day, but I have a busy schedule this time around.

I can hardly believe the team I referred to as our minor league baseball team is taking this town to the championship of baseball. Seriously. I would never have imagined it, and definitely would not have bet money on it. Every 22 years or so we get enjoy this baseball fever (1968, 1984, 2006).

Detroit is Championship City! Again!

This means all our professional teams have played in the playoffs this year (yes, our men’s football team is not professional by anyone’s stretch of imagination). The Pistons won the NBA championship in 2004, The Shock won the WNBA title this year, the Red Wings are always good and last brought the Stanley Cup to our fair town in 2002, and the Detroit Demolition of the Independent Women’s Football League won 4 championships in a row from 2002 to 2005 based on a 52 game winning streak. Now the Tigers are getting close again.

And to all my friends in Chicago who were kind enough to rub my nose in their good fortune last year at Southwest Fox, the tables have sure turned. {g}

This morning I received some great news from Microsoft that I have been named an MVP for the 2006-2007 season (renewed on October 1st each year). This is the sixth consecutive time I have been honored with this award.

The MVP award is the way Microsoft recognizes individuals for their contribution in supporting Visual FoxPro developers by answering questions on forums, presenting sessions at conferences, and writing articles, blogs and books. More information about the MVP program can be found at the MVP site.

This is an absolutely an honor. It is my intention to continue helping other VFP developers on FoxForum.com, the MSDN forum, other forums, at conferences, through this blog, and via some articles I am putting together.