Traditions are important and Advisor was able to keep my streak alive by scheduling me for the first session on the last day. As I have mentioned in this blog before, for some reason (guarantee that I will be sober) the organizers always pick me to present first in the morning. I talked about VFPX in my session “Learn How to Use VFPX Tools and Components for Visual FoxPro.” I felt this session went well and the feedback was very positive. Doug Hennig mentioned it might have been the most attended session of the conference. It is always nice to hear people are interested in your presentation, but more importantly, people are interested in VFPX and the future of Visual FoxPro.
The rest of the morning was consumed with email and following up on customer issues as I listened to Doug’s always good session on Integrating RSS and VFP. It was unfortunate, but I had to skip Tamar’s Solve Common Problems with VFP SQL. I will catch up by doing some homework and reading her white paper.
After lunch I attended Kevin’s session on the “COM Cookbook: Five Tasty Recipes for COM Automation with VFP.” Kevin went through five examples:
- Desktop Alerts
- Wrapper for VFP Encryption DLL by Craig Boyd
- Wrapper for VFP compression DLL by Craig Boyd
- VFP mail using Blat.DLL
- VFP Application Updater
Kevin showed the feared “Catastrophic failure” error message he had when he demoed the Desktop Alerts at the Detroit Area Fox User Group in the “Why not COM” section. He covered the fundamentals and some of the complicated things like debugging.
My last session (“Expand Your SQL Server Toolkit for the VFP Developer”) kicked off the VFP Track “overtime.” You see the rest of the conference was over after the desert reception, but the VFP track had two extra sessions for the attendees. Not bad since I was getting paid time and a half (1.5 * $0.00) {g}. This session covers a number of different categories of developer tools developers should consider to make their SQL Server experience better. I demo tools like SQL Compare, SQL Doc, MSDE Admin, and SQL Prompt. I have purchased and use these tools on a regular basis to increase my productivity and improve my profitability.
Doug Hennig wrapped up the conference with his really good session “Best Practices for Vertical Market Applications.” I have seen this session at GLGDW and OzFox in the last year, but I listened because Doug tweaks it and attendees participate with their own thoughts on the various topics. This time around I took a couple of notes for a project I am working on right now for another developer.
After the conference wrapped up we went out to dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Dinner was excellent, conversation was enjoyable and surprise-surprise we were the 1000th customer of the newly opened restaurant. What a hoot, dinner was on the manager! Later, Jeanine (who attended the VFP track) admitted she worked with the manager to set the whole thing up and bought us all dinner. After dinner we headed back to the hotel where we chatted some more.
I got to bed around 1:30 and was up at 3:30 for my early flight home. My flight from LA to Minneapolis was horrible as the guy next to me was sleeping and kept invading my personal space. From the airport I drove directly to the Detroit Area Fox User Group meeting where we held a meeting of open discussion and I ended up not having to present. It is good to be home.
