Shedding Some Light

Sorry Craig, your excuses are weak {g}.

I host my own Blogger blog on RickSchummer.com, and all the comments posted by readers are on *my site*, not Blogger’s. I can download the HTML files for each post and they contain the comments too. This is how it works when you host your own blog. I can leave Blogger any day I want and I have all the content and all the comments. I understand you concern for sure, but I think your concerns in this case are unwarranted. Use the tools and save yourself some time not building your own solution. Life is too short and there is too much to do. Think of all the positive blog entries you have time to post now. {bg}

I recently turned on Comment Moderation for the same reason you turned comments off. Sploggers are stupid. I figured my blog would be off the radar of these idiots, but I got a couple and decided to go the moderation route. Unfortunately there is a short delay between the post and my acceptance, but this is a small price to pay. I get notified right away and normally publish them within minutes of the post. I only will block spam and foul language, not comments that disagree with my thinking. That is a promise.

By the way, I was not saying Doug should not expose his feed link. I think we both know Doug was going to do this. I was only suggesting this should not be a reason not to subscribe to his blog. Missing the good blog posts is silly when most good tools will find the feed link by themselves. Heck, I would drive to the local library to read Doug’s blog on a public computer if all 5 of my computers went down simultaneously.

Maybe we should just debate this at WhilFest over a couple of lemonades. My treat! Look forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

When I started White Light Computing two years ago I wrote down several things I knew I needed to do to make the company successful. Competitive advantages and things I have learned from mistakes in the past. One of those competitive advantages is taking regular company field trips. A company field trip is all about learning something to make me a better business person. It can be networking, it can be educational, or it can be technical. Most of the time it has nothing to do with technical growth. A couple of weeks ago I mixed it up a bit (both technical, business, and networking) and took a trip to visit the fine folks at TechSmith in Okemos, Michigan.

In case you are not familiar with TechSmith, they are a software company here in Michigan and the creators of SnagIt (leading screen capturing program), Camtasia (leading screencasting program), and Morae (usability testing). I use both SnagIt and Camtasia on a regular basis. They are best of class tools and I can say “must haves” in my professional toolkit.

SnagIt is something I have become dependent upon to author specifications, documentation, articles, session whitepapers, Help files, and has been a part of all four books I have written. There are plenty of competitors in the screen capturing utilities category, and I have tried a bunch of them. SnagIt beats them all hands down. I use Camtasia to record training material, screencasts for marketing the WLC line of developer tools, and to show customers prototypes of features I am working on. Recently my clients have started using Camtasia to show me reproducible steps for bugs and even ehancements. I have only been using Camtasia for a little more than a year, and I quickly found it to be one of those products I wonder how I lived without.

Betsy Weber is the Chief Evangelist at TechSmith and writes the TechSmith Blog. Back in October she placed an open invitation for a VIP tour at the company’s world headquarters. I am not a VIP by any stretch of the imagination, but I was in the Lansing area to speak with the Mid-Michigan Fox User and Developer group so I sent Betsy an email to see if she was serious.

The tour was great. I was introduced to the program managers, product managers, developers, tech support people, the president, and the guy who ships their products all around the world from the middle of Michigan. Everyone was asking me how I used their products and what I would like improved. I provided some feedback and got to ask some questions. Nothing like getting a personal demonstration of the next version in the hallway from the SnagIt product manager on his TabletPC.

The facilities are nice and very conducive to development and collaboration. I heard stories how one company used three Camtasia licenses to save their company twenty million dollars. Yes, twenty million. I would love if my revenues hit five percent of their savings.

Betsy was very interested in my business, maybe even more than I was in hers. She wanted to understand how I used the TechSmith products to be successful and profitable. She was quite curious about Visual FoxPro and the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program.

I told Betsy a story on how one of my clients tried the Camtasia trial on his own time, and built a screencast that trains the field on how to use a module in their app. I told her how it addressed one of their big support concerns. My client is a staff developer and got lots of kudos from the field, but his management would not spring for Camtasia because it would deter him from focusing on his priorities. In fact he finally convinced them to buy it after six months of pleading, and then they refused to give it to him when it arrived. Betsy set me up with some swag and door prizes for the MMFUDG meeting, and provided me some big help in getting a copy of Camtasia and SnagIt for my friend. Totally cool.

I have been invited to be on the TechSmith Advisory Board. I will be providing feedback to the development teams, taking more trips to TechSmith in the future, participating in their beta program, and having more geek fun than one person probably should.

It was a great field trip. I learned a lot during the tour about how larger software companies operate, which will be a key as White Light Computing grows. I also made some new friends in our industry, and some excellent contacts, which will help out my clients in the future.

Craig Berntson – Blogger has comment moderation, so open up the comments on your blog. Ya can’t ask a question on the post and not have comments so we can set you straight. FYI – Doug had the RSS feed early today.

Comments are just as big a deal as having an RSS feed exposed on a blog. Comments are probably more important. Both FireFox and FeedDemon recognized Doug’s feed even without the link. All good tools do.

Doug Hennig is absolutely one of my favorite authors and speakers in our community, and I for one am very happy he has decided to start a blog. This was an instant subscription when I found out yesterday. Welcome to the blogosphere Doug!

Wow, Jim Booth is speaking at Southwest Fox! Talk about an instant bonus to help you make your decision to attend this fantastic fall conference a no-brainer.

This is part of the super list of speakers Bob has on tap for – FoxPro Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Other speakers include Marcia Akins, Bill Anderson, Jim Booth, Craig Boyd, Mike Feltman, Toni Feltman, Tamar Granor, Doug Hennig, Claudio Lassala, Ken Levy, Andy Kramek, Cathy Pountney, an undisclosed guest speaker, and yours truly.

I will be presenting a new session I am developing called the Professional Developer’s Toolkit, and by popular request on last year’s evaluations – a revamped Fishing with a ProjectHook. Doug Hennig, Craig Boyd, and I are cooking up the conference keynote address, which should be both fun and revealing.

This was by far the best and highest rated North American conference last year and I believe this year is going to top last year. I hope you can join us in Tempe October 19th to 22nd, 2006. Registration is already open with Southwest Fox Alumni and user group discounts available.

I know I am geeked!

If you author any kind of whitepaper or article with Visual FoxPro example code you quickly understand the need to suppress the rich text formatting included in VFP 9 when you copy code to the clipboard. At first I really liked this feature for my own technical documentation, but when I work with conference session templates, magazine templates, and Hentzenwerke Publishing templates I am frustrated because it breaks the style guides from the various publishers. During the VFP 9 beta the feature was part of the product and not configurable, but the voices of the beta testers were heard loud and clear. We want a way to shut this off.

I have helped many developers turn off this feature, and today while working on my error handling session for GLGDW 2006 I realized I turned this on (nice when sharing code in email or posting on a forum) and need it off while writing the whitepaper. I have a program to toggle the setting. Here is the code:

* Toggle rich text formatting to clipboard
IF ‘X’ $ _vfp.EditorOptions
* Turn it off
_vfp.EditorOptions = STRTRAN(_vfp.EditorOptions,”X”, SPACE(0))
ELSE
* Turn it on
_vfp.EditorOptions = _vfp.EditorOptions + ‘X’
ENDIF

You can hook this up to a developer menu item, or toolbar, or just run it from the Command Window.

Bonus Tip
While reviewing the code I remembered another tip to share. IntelliSense has a feature called C++ Operator Expansion. I use this all the time. If you have a variable like lcErrorString and you want to concatenate some text to the existing string you can enter the following in the program editor:

lcErrorString+=

Then hit the space bar and you will see:

lcErrorString = lcErrorString +

You are ready to type in the rest of the logic to perform the concatenation. There are several C++ operators to work with in VFP’s IntelliSense.

lnCounter++
lnCounter–
lnCounter+=
lnCounter-=
lnCounter*=
lnCounter/=

The reason I was inspired to write the bonus tip is the situation where you have a object.Property and want to concatenate or increment, like _vfp.EditorOptions. If you have code like this in the program editor:

_vfp.EditorOptions+=

And hit the space bar, nothing happens. I reported this as a bug during one of the betas. The workaround is simple, but you have to remember it when writing code. Include a space between the property name and the operator, then hit the space bar after the operator.

_vfp.EditorOptions +=

Enjoy the weekend!

I am looking for a blog entry, or more likely a white paper or book on Microsoft’s VirtualPC, and the setup of a Virtual Machine for a client (read – I am not interested in writing something already written on the subject).

I am not looking for a How To Install VirtualPC on Your Computer – although this could be part of the white paper. I want to point to a resource stepping the user through the process of building their first Virtual Machine, installing the OS, and helping them with the choices and some optimizations.

Any pointers?

The Toolbox is a very powerful tool added to VFP 8 and improved in VFP 9 by the simple fact it can be docked. Several developers refer to the Toolbox as the Forms Control toolbar on steroids (which might not be as politically correct as it once was {g}). I like the Toolbox for several reasons, but the one I really like is working with ActiveX controls.

You can drag and drop ActiveX controls from the Toolbox to the Form or Class Designer. Handy in itself, but not where I think the real power is. I like dropping the ActiveX control in a program or method window. Dragging the ActiveX controls to an editor provides the needed NEWOBJECT() code. The following code was created when I dropped the DynaZip Zip ActiveX control in the editor:

Olecontrol = NEWOBJECT(“dzactxctrl.dzactxctrl.1″, “dzactx.dll”)

Now you do not have to look up the registration information for the control in the Windows Registry or the documentation distributed with the control. You can change the line of code to:

LOCAL loZip AS “dzactxctrl.dzactxctrl.1″

Now as soon as you type loZip. in the editor you get IntelliSense for the ActiveX control. This works well and really increases productivity when you do some Automation code with a control of this type.