Shedding Some Light

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.

Marketing, marketing, marketing.

The organizers of Southwest Fox are gradually cranking up the marketing machine and are asking for your help to spread the word. We are looking for past attendee testimonials to post on the Southwest Fox site, and for those with a Fox related Web site to link to our site. Help spread the word!

Check out our banner developed for us by fellow Fox’er Dave Aring…

More details on how you can help, along with directions to create a link using our new banner graphic are available on the Southwest Conference Promote Conference page.

Speaker submissions look great and registration starts May 1st.

Thanks in advance for helping us out!

I stepped out of the office to get the mail this afternoon and realize it is hot outside. In fact it is officially 79F outside and less than 70F in my office. I was sitting in the office wearing a sweat shirt. So I opened up the windows and let in the noise of the birds chirping, the buses braking, the children playing, and the cars racing down the street.

I have declared it is too nice to work. Unfortunately I have a pile of work to get done today and cannot take the afternoon off. The boss here at White Light is a slave driver.

Spring has officially arrived in Michigan, but winter will be back as I am sure we should get one good snow storm before May 1st.

Over the last few weeks a few people have commented to me privately how the North American VFP conferences threaten each other in the September and October time frame. I can tell you this is not the case. Sure, in the big picture we are competitors because we are trying to convince the same customer to attend our conference. But the fact is, the conferences are very different in the type of developer we expect to attract to our venues.

Yesterday I got an email from Kevin Cully asking me a question about how we are approaching credit card processing for Southwest Fox. This is a big deal expense to a conference organizer or any business accepting credit card payments. The costs can easily determine if a conference like ours is profitable or generating a loss. I just got off the phone with the second credit card processing vendor I talked to that afternoon when his email arrived. I called Kevin and talked to him for an hour. We covered a number of common issues FoxForward and Southwest Fox face. It was a great conversation and I learned a lot from the discussion. Thanks Kevin.

When I was first contemplating taking over Southwest Fox I called Kevin and the other VFP conference organizers looking for their wisdom and to understand the battle scars. I wanted to avoid making as many mistakes as possible. Kevin, Whil Hentzen, Rainer Becker, Igor Vit, Mike and Toni Feltman, and Craig Bailey have been very supportive and are very open to my inquiries. Each and every one of them spent time advising me on the dos and don’ts. Even Advisor wants to talk to us. Hopefully it will help Southwest Fox to be a great conference, and maybe I can return the favor at some point in the future.

The key here is Kevin and I want each other’s conference to be very successful this fall. It is in the best interest of the Fox Community. So if you are worried we are out to cut each other’s throats, fear not.

Back a couple weeks ago I mentioned several Outlook 2007 frustrations on my blog. I am making some progress on a couple of issues I noted.

1) “The last frustration is the themed appearance of the title bar.’

I found buried in the Outlook Options the ability to select Blue, Silver, or Black as my “Outlook Theme.” You can find this under the Tools | Options dialog box, pick the Mail Format page, Editor Options button (near the bottom of this page). On the Editor Options dialog box you will see the Color scheme option on the “Popular” tab.

While I wish they would let me turn this off and just use the regular Windows Theme I have selected, at least the black theme is closer to the theme I have in Windows and is easier for me to see the Windows inside of Outlook. Unfortunately this is the only one I have resolution on and it is the least of the problems I have with Outlook 2007.

2) “The first is the appearance of Outlook locking up during a Send/Receive pass.”

I learned at the MVP Summit that this is a common problem and one that has solutions. Some folks have mentioned the size of PST files over 2GB are an issue. Mine is still floating around 1.5GB and has been at this size for the last couple of years. All the solutions I have been pointed to and read about give solutions that appear to work only on Vista. I can tell you Vista is not in my near future for my primary development machine so I have to find a solution for Windows XP. I have posted this problem on a couple of message boards I have access to and hope the community will jump in and make this easy.

3) I half jokingly mentioned: “I am not sure Outlook and my Treo are ever going to synchronize. {g}”

So far so good. Once I corrected some of the inadvertent time changes all is working on both Outlook and my Treo. No missed appointments so far.

Thanks to those who have offered help and condolences.

Only one week left to save $200 on the $2195 Gold Passport, or $1695 Regular Main Event fees to the Advisor Summit being held in Anaheim, CA May 6-10, 2007.

Deadline is March 30,2007 so head over to the online registration to save a couple of C-Notes before time runs out.

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for speaker proposals is fast approaching for Southwest Fox 2007. The deadline for proposals is 8:00am Eastern Daylight Time on Monday March 26, 2007. To be considered, send your bio, between three and six session proposals, and a digital photo for publicity purposes to: speakers AT swfox DOT net (correcting all the intentionally spelled out parts for the email address).

All the details, expectations, instructions to make a proposal, and the selection process can be found on the Southwest Fox Speakers page. Just click on the link for “Call for Speakers.”

Proposals from great speakers have already arrived (as good as getting early birthday gifts) and we are anticipating the selection process to be quite difficult, but this is part of the fun in assembling the best Southwest Fox yet!