Shedding Some Light

It is almost spring here in our wonderful state so that must mean it is safe enough to travel out of the suburbs of Detroit and visit my other favorite Michigan FUGs. {g}

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Grand Rapids Area Fox User Group
Saturday, April 14th

“Learn How To Use VFPX Tools and Components for Microsoft Visual FoxPro“
Or as I like to call it: “VFPX Tools and Components – Live”
This is a dress rehearsal for a session I am giving at the Advisor Summit next month.

10:00am – 12:00 noon or so
At the offices of Optimal Solutions, Inc.
http://grafug.com/

This session will introduce VFP developers to VFPX on CodePlex, and will demonstrate and show real world implementations of the various components and tools developed and under construction in VFPX.
At the end of the session you can learn how you can get involved in the future of Visual FoxPro and why it is important to you as a VFP developer.

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Mid-Michigan Fox Users and Developers Group
Tuesday, April 17th
“What is new in the Sedna Data Explorer”

Not a dress rehearsal for anything.

6:30pm to 8:30pm
At the offices of Melange Computer Services, Inc.
http://mmfudg.org/indexframes.htm

This session will cover all the new things in the Data Explorer expected to ship this summer with the release of Sedna. There are a number of bug fixes and lots if enhancements to the Data Explorer first released with VFP 9. Rick will also be asking you to download the Sedna CTP release from February so you can help test out the new changes you will see during the session.

Based on some feedback from some folks who want to promote Southwest Fox on their Web sites we had some new banners created that are narrower than the original one.

Original:

New slightly narrower:

New portrait format:

Thanks again to Dave Aring for his excellent effort and rapid turnaround.

If you are interested in helping us promote Southwest Fox, head over to the SWFox conference Web site and click on the Promote Conference link on the left side menu. And thanks to everyone who is helping spread the word!

I shipped an alpha release this morning after working like a dog yesterday to solve a half dozen deployment issues and a huge crasher bug I found when testing yesterday. Yes, I was working like a dog. Or so I thought…

Then this afternoon I was reminded by my dog that I was working like a nutty human. The moment I realized I was not working like a dog is the moment I heard her snoring at my feet in the middle of the afternoon while I was coding like a crazy man.

I reserve the right to rethink this, but maybe in my next life I can come back as a dog who gets to sleep all the time between the moment I scare the ducks and squirrels out of the backyard, and when I take time to train the humans to throw me a rubber toy. What a life she has going these days.

I think most of you know that sticking images in VFP General fields is considered a bad practice. I also know many VFP developers were lulled into the cool idea of storing images and other files into General fields, myself included back in the mid-90′s. Then you quickly realize you cannot get the images out of the memo files without some great pain.

I have been lucky over the years because I have not run into any requirements or projects needing to work with General fields. That is until recently. A new project I am working on has some BMPs stored in VFP DBFs and the developer I am working with knows he made a mistake and is ready to correct it as we rewrite his vertical market application in a short 5-6 week period. I have outsourced the conversion part of the app to one of my subcontractors. I know I had read somewhere how you can extract the image data, but could not recall where. Since I did not have time to look it up I delegated it to the person doing the conversion and the answer came quickly.

How to export pictures from General fields by using the ReportListener base class in Visual FoxPro 9

In this Microsoft KnowledgeBase (KB) article Trevor Hancock (a wizard in support for VFP) details and provides code to extract the images using the HTML Report Listener. Pure “Freaking Magic”!

This one KB article saved our project days of development. Thanks Trevor. I know you work in a role on the Fox Team that is probably one of the more difficult (always being handed something allegedly broken) and probably one of the more thankless roles. I have observed Trevor in action and he is one of the best problem solvers I have had the pleasure of working with in my years of beta testing. Thanks to the architects of the powerful ReportListener that makes mince meat of the long time problem of extracting images from the General fields. Very nice piece of work!

Kevin reminded me that there are only two weeks until the deadline of April 15th to turn in your topic(s) for FoxForward 2007 presentations. So don’t procrastinate and pile the session topics Kevin’s way.

In particular he is looking for a two session overview on “Learning VFP“. I doubt you will even scratch the surface in the 3.5 hours, but you will be doing the community a service by guiding a path for those who are looking to get into VFP.

I gotta get back to evaluating all the Southwest Fox sessions submitted. I was telling Doug and Tamar that we have a near impossible task of narrowing down the sessions we can accept for the conference. All part of the fun of putting on a conference. I hope Kevin has as much fun as we are.