Shedding Some Light

The conference started out with Alan Griver’s keynote. Alan did a great job. He started out by restating the no VFP 10 announcement (Alan is a brave man {g}) in case there were people who had not heard about it. I was surprised by the number of people who did not know about the announcement. There was no loud screaming or angry mob mentality. More importantly, Alan also showed all new material from SP2 and some of the issues fixed for Vista that the Fox Team is working on. One of the cool things he showed is the new toolkit Microsoft released last week to allow developers to build controls in VB.NET that can be used in VFP forms. This really has a lot of potential for VFP developers who want to leverage new controls not available in VFP. Alan demonstrated the VB menu control and coded it to display a .NET messagebox. Nothing fancy, but something very important moving forward. I enjoyed the keynote.

I attended a couple of Sharepoint sessions that were not so good. Mostly because the presenter got into “presentation hell” when their virtual machine was not booting successfully. I felt bad for him and headed to the speaker room where I got some client work done.

The next big session of the day was the session I really anticipated since I heard Doug was working on it: “Develop Microsoft Visual FoxPro Applications for Windows Vista.” It was the session that paid for the conference, okay, it paid for the non-billable time I am spending here. Doug detailed the good and the bad things, and showed us workarounds for many of the issues as we wait for SP2 to ship. For the most part you can read Calvin’s blog and see how Calvin is attacking the Vista issues presented so far. Calvin is directly working on community reported problems. Doug’s session addresses security issues, the User Access Control, Virtualization (advantages and disadvantages), installing applications and where to put the files, user interface problems, how to simply address fonts, customizing the Vista Task dialogs, and other issues he has faced. It was a fantastic session and one I think everyone should see at some point in the near future (hint, hint, it will be at Southwest Fox).

The last session of the day was Kevin Ragsdale’s session “Using InfoPath with Visual FoxPro.” Kevin did a good job and showed how you can use InfoPath as a front end to FoxPro data. He showed a VFP form and an InfoPath form that accessed a Web Service he developed using the express edition of Visual Web Developer. We are talking about a Web service developed by the creation of a ASMX file you could edit in NotePad. Interesting session. I just wish Kevin had the white paper done so I could read it when I return home (one of my pet peeves, in case you were wondering). He promises it will be done soon.

The evening was filled with a long walk and dinner at Buca di Beppo. I also watched part of the Jazz-Warriors game and learned the Pistons kicked the Bulls behinds again. With the Red Wings winning the series against the Sharks it looks like my spring is going to be packed with playoff games to watch. {bg}

Tuesday evening (tonight) we are headed to the LA Fox meeting to listen to the speaker (I hear the topic is going to be interesting). Doug, Tamar, and I might do 20 minute mini-sessions back-to-back after he is done. A VFP smorgasbord.

I do want to clarify something I have read about on ProFox where it was discussed that there are 35 attendees here. Actually there are 35 VFP attendees, but there is not a 1-to-1 ratio of speaker to attendee. The VFP track has 5 speakers so the ratio is 7:1. It should be noted on a slightly positive note the VFP track has the most registrations of all the tracks according to what I have heard through someone who talked to Advisor.

So far it has been a great conference.