Shedding Some Light

One might be thinking of “feast” and the food served at German DevCon. While breakfast was delicious (I had eggs and smoked salmon, with grapefruit juice), I am referring to the nine session slots during the day. Lots of choices and lots to learn. Official sessions on Friday start at 8:30am and run until 10:00pm. It is a day developers feast on a lot of great material presented by some great speakers.

Up first is Christof Wollenhaupt with his first of five sessions for the conference. This session is called “Psychologie und Softwareentwicklung” and was presented in German. All the sessions in this slot were in German so I picked the one in the same room as my next session. I listened as much as I could, but mostly I caught up on some email and other work. Christof’s sessions in German are fast, as in speaking fast and packing in the information for the attendees. I like the fact that people laugh at is jokes and he has interactive sessions.

I followed Christof’s session with my “How Craig Boyd Makes Me a Hero!” session. I enjoyed it and hope the attendees did as well. The session was more interactive than most sessions I have given in Frankfurt. I love interaction and contributions from the audience when I talk so this helped me. I got through all but one demo so the timing on this session is still not perfected (something I worked on last weekend and on the plane ride to Frankfurt). The demo gods made sure I was in check with a VFP 9 SP2 C5 crash and the same for Skype (which definitely should not have been running in the first place). Rainer, the conference organizer, stopped by the room before the session and noted how much he really liked the session title. I have plenty of material for part two next year if Rainer wants to invite me back.

Up next was Cathy Pountney’s “Making the Most of VFP 9 SP2 Reports.” Cathy reminded me about some issues with respect to installing VFP 9 SP2. Since I have seen this session numerous times at user groups and conferences I took the time to update my document “Install and Run Different VFP 9 Versions on One Computer” with her discussion about Virtual Storage in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. The introduction to the new Report Dynamics is delivered from one of the few experts in the community. The tips she shows in this session are outstanding. One of her tips in particular deals with the wrapping of details to the next page of reports when you have more than one object with different sizes bumping up the height of the band. This one hit home because on of my mentoring customers has a very similar problem (which Cathy helped me work through for a solution during lunch). This reminds me of an important benefits of conferences: getting help from other developers to solve problems that have you stumped. I know I try to help out other developers when ever I have a chance, but to do it face-to-face is really beneficial. This session actually was a perfect warm up to her fxReports session later in the afternoon.

Lunch followed Cathy’s session. At this point I was not hungry because breakfast was so good, but I had some salad and naturally the smoked salmon.

“Windows Presentation Foundation 4″ by Kevin McNeish followed lunch. This was the perfect follow up to the Entity Framework 4 session on Thursday. Kevin compared and contrasted the differences between Windows Forms and WPF-based interfaces. I really know nothing about either, so it was great getting background from one of the experts on the subject.

“fxReports – Sharing Custom Report Features” by Cathy Pountney is another session I saw in rehearsal at the Grand Rapids Fox User Group. Cathy added some stuff based on the fact that the VFPxRepository.com site is established. We are working on getting a place set up so the community can share add-ons and plug-ins for the various VFPX tools that have them. We decided that we needed a place separate from the VFPX Codeplex pages because VFPX hosts core projects and is not great with respect to multiple downloads. The rest of the session showed various dynamics and special effects Cathy has produced via a new reporting framework called fxReports. She showed the code and how they work, and how they are implemented in the ReportListener class hierarchy. The framework is designed to share components with other developers. Cathy has devised a VFPX project that helps developers not only design special effect classes for reports, but to load other ones by other developers, and share the ones they create. This is a really cool project and has tremendous potential for developers to create special effects on report and simple to implement ones developed by others. Really cool and a great session.

Christof (note, I only have to use his first name {g}) presented “Automatisierung des Entwicklungsprozesses” also in German. I was catching up on more work as I listened to him and tried to understand the various processes he has tried to automate in his work life. So many things to try and so little time to do so.

I skipped the two after dinner sessions since they were in German and got some more real work done. I needed to work on a proposal that was due for a customer by 5:00 EST so the fact that I was six hours ahead really helped me beat the space-time continuum limitations.

Once the proposal was completed and emailed I headed downstairs to participate in some discussions in the bar and later headed to bed because I was really tired after the long day. Unfortunately, jetlag was kicking my behind once again.

As you can read in my previous post, things did not start out well on day one for me. It was not until after lunch some time that the adrenaline finally leveled off and my hands stopped shaking.

For the record, I had smoked salmon at every meal during the conference including lunch on day 1. This is a personal goal I am happy to meet each year at German DevCon.

Doug’s “A Deep Dive into the VFPX ThemedControls” session was up first after lunch and as is normal for one of the world’s best speakers, Doug did a great job. He stepped us through a deep dive into Emerson Santon Reed’s class library of fantastic controls that really helps in the quest to make Visual FoxPro applications look modern. Doug talked about the fundamental classes: ThemesManager (allows you and your customers to pick from one of six predefined themes), the ThemedContainer, the ThemedTitlePageFrame, and the ThemedButton (including the builder). After the fundamentals Doug described in great detail the classes and code needed to implement the ThemedExplorerBar, the ThemedOutlookNavBar, ThemedToolbox, ThemedZoomNavBar, and the newer Ribbon. I agree 100% with Doug’s summary that there are no more excuses for Visual FoxPro developers to create applications that do not look good. Doug’s 26 page white paper on this topic is a gold mine of information as well.

Cathy Pountney’s session “PEM Editor: An Absolute MUST HAVE in your development toolkit” followed Doug’s session. I saw this session in Grand Rapids when she rehearsed it for Southwest Fox. Cathy’s session in Grand Rapids was good, but it was obvious she refined timings and material since I saw it. I was wondering if I would learn anything new since I saw it once before, and should not have forgotten that there is so much to this tool and I was destined to learn or relearn something new. PEMEditor is always changing and being improved by Jim Nelson so any minute we can count on a new release with new features. Cathy gave a brief overview to show people in the room who did not know what the PEMEditor is. After this she showed the crowd a dozen or more different features that are new in the current version. One of my favorites was the “Go To Definition” which literally opens up the method in the method editor, the property in the PEMEditor, or an object in the PEMEditor Document Treeview. The “Extract to method” does exactly that, BeautifyX is a beefed up beautifier, and the built in Enhanced Cut, Copy and Paste are fantastic advancements in the PEMEditor becoming a serious refactoring tool.

Kevin McNeish’s “The Microsoft Entity Framework 4″ (also known as EF4) made my list of sessions because I have read and heard from others that it is Microsoft’s data access soup of the day for .NET development. Seriously, Microsoft has put a lot of resources together to improve the Entity Framework. White Light Computing purposely used EF4 in our conference session eval Web site that we created earlier this year for Southwest Fox so we could learn more about it. Kevin introduced EF4 with his normal wit and humor. The one thing I took away from the session is that Microsoft made some significant improvements from EF1 to EF4. EF4 is really the second release of the Entity Framework and in true Microsoft fashion, needs three releases to really get this product at a mature state. One thing is for sure though from what I have learned at German DevCon, Microsoft needs to listen to database developers more closely as there are some fundamentals missing in EF4, which I find disturbing, but not surprising.

I skipped the first session after dinner since I needed a bit of a break. I also needed to finalize the three tips I planned to present during the bonus session.

The second bonus session was the delivery of two “FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Awards” and Tips & Tricks from the conference speakers. Rainer started out the session with an overview of an app he is working on. Most of his discussion was in German with an occasional break in English to help out the non-German people in the audience. It looked like an interesting application.

The two “FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Awards” were given to Jürgen “wOOdy” Wondzinski, and Christof Wollenhaupt. Both wOOdy and Christof are developers people recognize with a single name, like Cher, and have made so many contributions over the years to the world-wide Fox Community. Their contributions are going to be posted soon on the Fox Wiki. I was honored to be one of the presenters along with fellow award winners Doug Hennig and Rainer Becker.

Up next was the Tips and Tricks session. Several speakers presented tips they have learned over the years. I presented an ActiveX/IntelliSense tip, ability to sort Watch Expressions in Debugger, and a DataExplorer Query tip.

Other tips presented by the other developers included:

• Doug Hennig demoed “Go To Definition” feature of PEM Editor and a instrumenting/logging tool.
• Ken Levy demoed _SetAllX FFC class he included in VFP, _EvalText found in _HTML.vcx, and advanced Component Gallery tips.
• Cathy Pountney demos Report Designer trick for “;” as CHR(13) in reports, and is showed off SlickRun.
• wOOdy is showed a field type tip, a BROWSE NAME trick, and EVAL() tip.
• Christof showed integer in Command Window does Goto, “-” concatenates and ALLTRIM(), using SET VOLUME, and killing/restarting VFP. Christof also mixed tips and tricks with humor and had the audience in stitches.

The tips might be printed in a future issue of FoxRockX. That was the end of the conference day. I hung out with folks in the bar for a while, and then headed back to my room around midnight to get some customer work completed. Day 2 would come too quickly.

The most common nightmare I have as a speaker is showing up for a conference unprepared. So far I have been able to avoid this. The second most common nightmare is completely losing my voice. The third most common nightmare I have is oversleeping. You know, waking up to a phone call from the organizer wondering why I am not starting my session. I have heard stories over the years for a couple people that this happened too, mostly due to some heavy partying the night before. I take pride in the fact that I am always on time for my sessions and prepared, and organizers often count on me to do the early morning sessions because I don’t party.

Today I overslept despite setting up a wake-up call, the television alarm, and my phone as a backup. I did not wake up until Doug Hennig called me almost four hours after the alarms.

I heard the phone ring. I answered it expecting it to be someone from the hotel telling me to wake up. Strange though was the voice sounded a lot like Doug. I think I asked him what time it was. “11:20″, Doug replied. Mental check, my session starts at 11:30. Holy $%#, 10 minutes.

Need computer working so I figured I could log in and get things set up and ready so I can start immediately upon getting in the room. Blue Screen! Seriously?!? Really?!? At this point I thought I might want to wake up from this nightmare. This is not a joke. These are real thoughts. Pinch, nope I am awake, phone says it is 11:21. Reboot the machine and hit shower, dress, login, and run for session room.

I arrived and started my session at 11:35.

The first 5 minutes were the hardest 5 minutes of my presenting life. The adrenaline level was as high as I have experienced in all my years of speaking. I could feel my heart jumping out of my chest as I introduced the session. At the same time I was introducing the session I was trying to figure out where I could cut time, and slow down my racing heart.

Jet lag is obviously killing me this trip. I returned to my room exhausted last night, but could not fall asleep since my body thinks it is dinner time back home. I tried several techniques to sleep and all failed. I got up and called my family and went through my session (which turns out to be a key to delivery this morning), tweeted about the problem of not sleeping, and handled some email for customers. All tasks were done hoping to make me more tired. I ended up falling asleep at 4:30 local time.

All-in-all I was able to convey the information I wanted to share with the people in the room. One of the attendees told me at lunch after the session, after learning I woke up 15 minutes before starting the session, that I did remarkably well considering the experience. In my mind it was definitely not my best work, but appreciate the kind review. I am also hoping the adrenaline levels off some time this afternoon. Wish I could bottle it up for use later.

Thanks to Doug for recognizing my absence and waking me up. Thanks to those who stayed and attended the session. And apologies to Rainer for letting you down this morning. It will not happen again. As a fellow organizer I know how important it is to count on the speakers to show up on time and deliver a good session.

Putting on a conference like Southwest Fox takes an enormous effort. Each year I put in over 200 hours doing organizer tasks. Each year each of the organizers automate a little more of the effort to help reduce the number of hours we put in. For instance, the registration process the first year took close to 25 minutes per registration, and this year I am averaging close to 5 minutes for someone returning to the conference, and 7 minutes for someone new. Most of this savings comes from the electronic registration app I developed and delivered in 2009.

This year I am hoping to reduce the effort of recording the evaluations you give us. It is one of the most important tasks we take care of after the conference.  Naturally we are interested in what you have to say about the conference, and the sessions the speakers prepare and deliver.

During the conference post-mortem meeting the organizers divide up the evals in thirds and use a couple very efficient Visual FoxPro forms developed by Tamar to enter in everything you put on the paper forms. We do this mostly because we want to get this information to the speakers. We deliver the details and summaries to them in early November (at least this is the goal). It normally takes me a couple of evenings to enter in my portion of the evals.

The biggest drawback other than the time it takes to enter in the evals is the latency to get the feedback to the speakers. Understanding what you did right and wrong in your sessions would be way more useful if you got it before you give it a second time at the same conference. The paper approach we use does not allow for this type of feedback.

So in an effort to get feedback to the speakers quicker, to save the organizers a little time after the conference, and as a terrific learning experience for the development team at White Light Computing, I designed an online Evaluation site for Southwest Fox.

To make things really interesting we decided to use a lot of new technology so everyone on the team would learn something new. In fact, some of the technology is beta itself. Oh, and I did not cut the development team any slack at all by giving them the specs and mockups just a few short weeks ago. Heh, if we cannot make it interesting, why do it at all?

The core part of the site is already developed. I opened up a private beta testing cycle late last night and already this morning we are getting feedback. If you are interested in beta testing it, we might have a few invites to share with you in the next week or so. So please email me at info AT swfox.net.

If you are interested in how I designed the site please come to my Mocking the Customer session at Southwest Fox 2010 and German DevCon.

Please keep your fingers crossed that White Light Computing can pull this off with the help from the test team, and if you like it don’t be shy about letting us know how we did at Southwest Fox. If you don’t like it, let us know in a constructive way too. We really appreciate your feedback.

Only 18 days until we gather in Glibert!

There is still time before September 1st to get in on the Early-Bird Registration for Southwest Fox 2010! The Early-Bird discount saves you $50 over our regular conference registration.

This year’s conference, held October 14-17, includes 15 speakers, 26 different sessions in the main conference, 4 pre-conference topics, and a free one-day VFP to Silverlight post-conference workshop. Plus, if you’re a member of a registered VFP user group, when you attend Southwest Fox, your user group receives $25.

In case you haven’t heard, we made a change in venue back in late July. The conference moved to a new location: SanTan Elegante Conference & Reception Center/Legado Hotel. Room rates are “run of the house” at $119 a night. You can find all the details at http://swfox.net/hotel.aspx. The room block for the conference is held through September 13th; after that room availability and pricing is determined by the hotel.

We are planning to add a “Show Us Your App” bonus session based on the success of the session the last couple of years.

Got suggestions? info@swfox.net Got questions? info@swfox.net Got registrations? register@swfox.net, or you can call the Geek Gatherings’ World Headquarters at 586.254.2530.

Read about the registration process and get the registration application here: http://www.swfox.net/register.aspx

Follow the news about the conference on our blog: http://swfox.net/blog/index.htm

Use our brochure to convince your boss (or spouse or SO) to let you go: http://www.swfox.net/brochure.pdf

Only 48 days until we meet in Gilbert. Hope to see you there.

Scholarships

For the last four years White Light Computing has supported the efforts of Southwest Fox and the Fox Community with a scholarship to one person who registers for the conference. You can read all about the scholarships for the 2010 conference on the Southwest Fox Scholarships page.

The first year I did it to help Bob Kocher as an incentive to get some people to register for the conference. It is hard to measure what marketing gimmicks work and which ones are less successful, but Bob noticed an uptick in the registrations after I made the offer. During that experience I realized that it was more than getting people to register for the conference, it was about giving back to the community. I fully understand the importance of education in one’s career and good conferences are an excellent approach in the grand scheme of advancing and pushing the technology learning curve. The conversations with the winners is enjoyable because the winners are first surprised and second, appreciative that someone would help with the costs of going to the conference.

This year I mixed it up and decided to offer two US$150 scholarships, which turns out to be double the fun. The Director of Marketing at White Light Computing (my oldest daughter, and yes the title is not real because she will expect some sort of salary) picks the winners each year. This year she first picked the top 10, and then picked the final two. The winners this year are:

1. Prentiss Berry of Pensacola, Florida: last year was Prentiss’ first Southwest Fox.
2. Allan Gordon of Littleton, Colorado: this is Allan’s third year coming to Southwest Fox.

Both gentlemen are looking forward to this year’s conference and are excited by the sessions and presenters we have on the schedule.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN

White Light Computing also contributed a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN which retails at US$11,899. Now I see myself as a generous person, but even a company as successful as White Light Computing is not going to plop down close to twelve thousand dollars to give away to someone in the Fox Community. Not this year.  The Microsoft Developer Division provided each MVP with three licenses to share with other developers. I decided to offer one of these to give away to one person who registered for the Southwest Fox Super-Saver discount.

The winner of the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN is: (drum roll please….)

1. Mary Pilon of Farmington, Michigan: this is Mary’s fourth year coming to Southwest Fox and she is a fellow officer of the Detroit Area Fox User Group!

Congratulation to everyone who won!

Thanks to Microsoft and in particular S. Somasegar, who is the Senior Vice-President from the Microsoft Developer Division and provided the license for me to give away.

And thanks to all who have registered for Southwest Fox 2010. Your support for our conference is truly appreciated and critical to making the conference a success each year.

Conferences are an important part of my training as a developer and as a person who runs a business. I normally attend 4 or 5 conference/events a year. In addition to the three I am presenting at later this year, I will be attending the Business of Software conference in Boston in October, and I am one of the organizers of Southwest Fox (in case you are new to this blog {g}).

I have been invited to present at the following conferences in the second half of the year:

DevLink

DevLink is a conference held in Nashville, Tennessee from August 5th to 7th, 2010. The technical content is for software developers, database administrators, project managers, system administrators, and business analysts. So the sessions cover a wide spectrum of topics. I have not been to one of the previous DevLink conferences, but I planned to attend this year whether I was invited to speak or not based on a conversation I had with the DevLink organizers at last year’s CodeStock conference. I was impressed with their approach and how they offer sessions on multiple development languages and how they cover business topics for people in the industry who are not developers.

Looks like there will be 10 sessions going on during the time slots so picking what session to attend in each slot is going to be a bit challenging to say the least. Also, sessions are offered once so if you miss it and you hear how great it was a lunch or during a break you, well, missed it. There are a lot of topics that interest me for sure and some really good speakers who will be presenting. I am looking forward to sessions on SQL Server, the Entity Framework 4, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, lessons  learned while being an independent, social networking, project management, and more.

If you are going to DevLink and want to see a good session called Code Reviews: Why real developers do not fear them!, my session is at 2:30 on the opening day (August 5) in the Swang-S110 room. It is the only time I am rehearsing it before Southwest Fox. {g}

Southwest Fox

Doug and Tamar asked me to return to Southwest Fox again this year (I swear I am not making this up as I don’t actually pick me as a speaker, nor do I have final say on what sessions of mine are selected). As one of the organizers I really hope you will attend the premier Visual FoxPro event in North America. This is the seventh year for Southwest Fox and it seems to get better each time we put it on. The presenters are terrific, the networking opportunities are off the charts important, and no where else will you find that white papers are required from our speakers. So even if you miss a session you can read about it as soon as we make them available (which normally is days before the conference starts).

The conference runs from October 14th to the 17th, 2010 with currently three simultaneous conference sessions for each slot (we are hoping to add a fourth if attendance dictates this is financially feasible). There are four different pre-conference sessions to pick from too. On Monday the 18th dFPUG (publishers of FoxRockX, some new VFP books, and Visual Extend) are putting on a post-conference session on Visual FoxPro and Silverlight.  There will be some bonus sessions offered on Friday night as well. We also should have lots of vendors so you will be able to check out all kinds of third-party products to help you develop better database applications.

The golf resort is phenomenal, the weather is perfect in October, and we believe we have the perfect situation for developers to relax and learn not only about the latest and greatest Visual FoxPro techniques, but other development platforms and tools. If you need more reasons on why you should attend the conference then check out the page: Why Attend Southwest Fox!

I will be presenting the following sessions and participating in the keynote:

• Code Reviews: Why Real Developers do not Fear Them!
• Mocking Your Customer

There is a lot of work that goes into putting the conference on each year, but I am probably looking forward to Southwest Fox 2010 more than I have any other Southwest Fox. Last year was off the hook fun for everyone, including the organizers.

And just in case you have not heard, the super-saver registration deadline is coming up this week. Make sure to save a few bucks, get a free pre-conference session, and get in on the more than $18,000 in drawing prizes and scholarships available to people who register before July 1st.

I hope to see you in Mesa.

German DevCon

This is going to be the seventeenth time Rainer has put on German DevCon and I am really happy he has asked me back for my fifth time. The conference runs from November 11th to 13th, 2010 in Frankfurt Germany. This conference has presentations in German and in English so if you understand either of these languages please consider going. I have sat in on some German sessions and still get a lot from them. The language of technology is the same.

Rainer has not posted the details for 2010 yet, but you can stay tuned to the conference Web site to see all the particulars. I am presenting the same sessions in Germany as I am at Southwest Fox with the addition of a session I am calling: How Craig Boyd Makes Me a Hero!

Andrew Ross MacNeill’s “The Fox Show” #65 includes the annual interview of the Southwest Fox Conference organizers (Doug Hennig, Tamar Granor and myself) and our thoughts about Southwest Fox 2010. It is always fun to participate in Andrew’s interview. Listen to his hard hitting interview and see if he can pry some secrets planned for the conference.

More details on the conference at the Southwest Fox Conference Web site.

Thanks Andrew!