Shedding Some Light

Catching up on the sponsors front… I want to announce two new sponsors recently signed up:

1) The Intellection Group, Inc. is a bronze sponsor. Dave Bernard is one of the leaders of this company and speaks at VFP conferences, and has been a friend of Southwest Fox at past conferences by writing up coverage on the UniversalThread. Dave’s company does some really cool stuff with Visual FoxPro on the Web, and is well know for his mantra: “There are no technical problems, only business problems.”

2) Servoy USA Inc is a gold sponsor. Servoy is making a serious push to FoxPro developers with their Java application development and deployment tools. I really do not know much about this company, but figure this is one of the reasons they are coming to Southwest Fox – to get their message out to the Fox Community.

More details about all the Southwest Fox Sponsors can be found here: http://swfox.net/sponsors.aspx

I am happy to announce I will be returning to Germany again this November to present at the 14th Microsoft Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2007. This is a fantastic conference put on by Rainer Becker and his team. Rainer has an excellent collection of presenters presenting 60 VFP sessions:

English speaking: Marcia Akins, Craig Berntson, Steven Black, Jim Booth, Alan Griver, Doug Hennig, Venelina Jordanova, Andy Kramek, and Rick Schummer.

German speaking: Marcus Alt, Rainer Becker, Joachim Durr, Sebastian Flucke, Uwe Habermann, Jochim Hilgers, Kirsten Hinrichs, Armin Neudert, Michael Niethammer, Patrick Scharer, Markus Winhard, Christof Wollenhaupt, and Jurgen “wOOdy” Wondzinski.

I will be presenting four sessions:

• SQL Server Toolkit for the VFP Developer
• Fishing with a ProjectHook
• VFPX Tools and Components – Live
• Creating Help – Made Easy!

The conference is held at a terrific conference center that serves the best food you could ask for. There are lots of opportunities to network and vendors to visit as well. If you want to learn more about this popular conference you can read some of my blog entries in November 2006 and 2005 (see the index on my blog). I really recommend this conference!

I am please to announce Mike Roof is the lucky winner of the White Light Computing $300 Scholarship for the Southwest Fox 2007 conference. Mike’s company is sending four people to the conference so they increased their odds of winning {g}. I talked to Mike yesterday and he is very psyched about not only attending Southwest Fox, but he is also attending the West Wind Technologies Double Impact training the two days before Southwest Fox. We laughed how much his head will hurt after listening to Rick Strahl for two days, followed by two and a half more days of intense conference sessions. A fantastic training opportunity for any developer. It sounds like a lot of developers are taking advantage of this year.

Sorry for the delay in the announcement, but I ran out of time before my vacation and forgot to hold the drawing. Mike’s name was drawn by the lead marketing advisor here at White Light Computing out of the 85 names registered by July 1, 2007.

Congratulations Mike! Only 76 days until we meet in Mesa!

I really thought the month of July would be really slow at the Southwest Fox registration headquarters because the deadline for early-bird registrations ended, but they keep on coming and today we registered our 100th person to attend the conference. Doug will be updating the Who’s Coming list soon, which now stands at 116 people including the presenters. Note: not all the people are on the list because each person has to opt-in.

Most of my expectations have been exceeded, and we are well on our way to breaking all records for Southwest Fox attendance. Only 78 days until Southwest Fox!

I am looking forward to seeing you in Mesa!