Shedding Some Light

When the Pistons have their backs to the wall, count on a win. No team has won a game six on the road in the finals when down 3-2 to force a game seven, Pistons win. They say no team can win two games on the road to finish a series. No team has won a game seven on the road in the Eastern Conference Finals, and they beat Shaq and Wade on their home floor. Keep giving this team the impossible because it only fuels the fire.

They have the same resilience as the Fox Community. {g}

Oh, Bill Walton, time to find a different line of work. You have not called it right once this entire playoffs. If I was head of ABC Sports I would not even let you finish out the season. You would definitely be fired. You are the worst basketball analyst on the planet. Pull Charles Barkley off his vacation.

Two great teams, one fantastic series. I cannot wait until Thursday night. We are going to try to get to the Palace and watch the game with 20,000 other fans to cheer the Pistons to one more impossible win. Last time we went to see the Pistons in the Finals on PalaceVision was the back-to-back championship when Vinnie Johnson sunk the winning shot with 00.7 seconds left against Portland in 1990. It would be cool to repeat history one more time.

Go Pistons!!!

Just in case you did not see this one: Drew Speedie posts his thoughts about the VFP Roadmap on the Visionpace Blog. This is a relatively new blog in the VFP and .NET community.

Well said Drew.

OK, early this week I posted why I was not able to attend Advisor DevCon, but now I am declaring I have returned from Microsoft DevCon? What’s up with this? Well apparently Microsoft thinks the DevDays is better called DevCon. Yesterday I attended the one day Microsoft DevCon which highlighted Visual Studio 2005 (web and smart clients), Team System, and provide a 50,000 foot view of the Visual Studio and Longhorn RoadMap.

I had three goals for the day. One was to meet local Microsoft reps here is Detroit, find out who is replacing the local Microsoft Developer Evangelist (an official job at Microsoft), and make some connections with other Microsofties. The second goal was to get a jump on ASP.NET 2.0 and the third goal was to learn as much about SQL Server 2005 as possible.

The first goal was accomplished in short order. Drew Robbins was very kind and even knows of Visual FoxPro MVPs in Canton, Ohio (actually Andy and Marcia are in Akron). Drew noted he worked on one VFP project, but asked me not to quiz him on VFP syntax. I mentioned that Michigan has three VFP MVPs and he was surpised how many VFP MVPs were concentrated in the Midwest. We talked about the user groups in Michigan as well. It was nice to get a positive reaction to the groups and VFP in particular. I also talked to several .NET MVPs and user group leaders.

The sessions started out early in the morning and I had to drive across town in rush hour traffic, which I normally avoid. The keynote speaker obviously did not rehearse because he went over by 50% for a 60 minute session with few questions asked during his time. I cannot imagine how frustrating it is to work every day in VS 2003. The crowd got excited at things I have taken for granted for the last 15+ years like a window to evaluate expressions (Command Window) and Visualizers (the BROWSE).

The morning sessions I attended covered the new features in ASP.NET 2.0. The sessions were okay, but the presenters were not prepared. They did not cover all their material, the demos crashed, and that morning they found out their 75 minute sessions needed to fit into sixty minutes. A tough task for experienced speakers. The product looks promising despite the sessions not going well. I felt bad for the presenters. One thing is obvious though, you need a serious machine to run Visual Studio 2005. The presenters all used Virtual PC to present the material and it looked very sluggish. I am not sure if it was VPC or if it was the Beta 2 version of the product, but every presenter said you need a serious machine to run this product.

At lunch I talked to a couple if “kids”. One is starting college in the fall, the other is a developer at a company, but is definitely in the early years of his career. It was interesting listening to their perspective as they are in the midst of being brainwashed by academia with respect to the “Evil Microsoft”. The college freshman definitely loves LAMP and was only at the conference to connect up with some Microsoft people and see what it takes to become a Microsoft Ambassador for his college (Michigan Tech). The other developer is working on financial web apps. I think it would be good to wear the rosy-colored glasses once again.

The afternoon sessions were great. The ASP.NET session covered the separation of presentation from the business objects and data. It looks like the data binding is a lot easier in ASP.NET 2.0. One of the design goals with ASP.NET is to reduce the coding by 66% and the speakers demonstrated several ways this is true. It was pretty impressive. The binding initially looks a lot like the VFP CursorAdaptor object. The other session I attended was on the Compact Framework, SQL Server 2005 Mobile, and deploying apps on PocketPCs and SmartPhones. Despite the struggles with VirtualPC, the speaker did a great job to getting the message across and showed how to deploy an app and do merge replication with SQL Server.

The day wrapped up with a peek into the Microsoft future and the promised delivery of VS.NET 2005 on November 7th (the announced release date). Lots of information in a 75 minute session about Longhorn, WinFS, Indigo, Avalon, WinFX, SQL Server 2005. Interesting, there was nothing about Orca (the version of VS.NET after 2005). Looks like the developers in Redmond are going to be very, very busy over the summer. I get the impression from the speakers and Microsofties that the schedule is very aggressive and announcing the release date this early is nuts.

I really enjoyed the day, learned a lot, and walked out with three books, two t-shirts, and several VS.NET press on tattoos (giving a whole new meaning of product branding {g}).

You might be wondering what has happened to the Pistons in the first two games of the NBA Finals. Simple explanation: they have been schooled and beaten by their own game. Fortunately the Pistons play best with the backs against the wall. Spotting San Antonio two games should provide them the pressure situation they thrive in.

I am impress how global the finals have become. More than 150 countries have sent reporters to cover the games and I have already forgot how many languages the games are broadcast in, but it is staggering.

The one thing the NBA needs to discard is the goofy trophy poses the players have to make when their name is announced before the start of the game. Dumb idea. You can see the players are embarrassed when they are standing there.

Hopefully the real defending champs will show up tonight and we will see a real game between two great teams. Go Pistons!

David is performing a fantastic service to the community with his DevCon coverage on his blog: Talking Fox. Thanks for the information David and I look forward to many more posts! Looks like the Universal Thread does not have any official coverage, so I guess it is up to the bloggers to help us out.

Normally I like to attend DevCon in a year when the Fox Team makes a release (in this case, VFP 9). This year I cannot because my oldest son graduated from High School and we are doing some work on the house to get ready for his party (120 people are coming for dinner in a couple of weeks). So instead of getting together with Fox friends, I spent the weekend cleaning out the garage and mudding the walls so we can paint. I can only say, I wish I was at DevCon {g}.

What does the word “FoxPro” mean to your customers? In the last year I have contracted to two different IT departments to assist the developers in supporting and enhancing their applications. These two clients have provided me an interesting perspective to what FoxPro means in the business community.

Customer one has a staff of five developers and several contractors working on supporting a FoxPro DOS application, which has been around since the late 1980’s. They have several applications making up the core mission critical system supporting a company of more than 500 employees and revenues which would blow your socks off. At the same time the developers are trying to migrate the application to the latest version of VFP and SQL Server. This process has been started several times and now the company has part of their application in FoxPro DOS and the other part in Visual FoxPro (sharing a common set of DBF tables).

Soon after starting at this client, I was sitting in the conference room working on a module for the VFP application. One of the employees poked his head in and asked me, “Are you the guy who has FoxPro as his license plate?” I gave him an affirmative answer and he proceeded to warn me that I should park my car somewhere else, and not in the company lot unless I wanted it damaged. I was shocked! I asked why and was told that many of the employees hated FoxPro! This was not one of the developers; this was one of the users. The users referred to the custom application as “FoxPro”, not as the application. Since there are parts of the app that are suffering from lack of attention there are users who are not 100% satisfied. In fact, some of the users wanted to take out their frustration on the FoxPro car! The users throughout the company refer to the system as FoxPro 2.6 and FoxPro 6.0, not by a custom application name or acronym.

In February this year I started working as a consultant at a multi-billion dollar, publicly traded company. The director of systems development introduced me as a “FoxPro Expert” to several people as we walked around the office. When a support call comes in and the Help Desk determines it has something to do with one of the many FoxPro applications, I get assigned to a ticket to investigate and recommend a solution. I have been assigned numerous tickets to solve. At the same time several people have popped their head into my cube or called me. The typical conversation goes something like this: “I hear you are an expert on FoxPro. I have a question to ask if you have a couple of minutes.” Now talking about FoxPro is something I really enjoy and of course was ready to help out. The users then proceeded to ask me a detailed question about some process in one of the applications. When I shrug my shoulders and tell them I will look into it, they are appalled that I did not have expertise I was allegedly hired to have and show. They too associate the name FoxPro with the company’s mission critical applications.

I have clients who know nothing about Fox or the fact they have a FoxPro application running on their computers. I have other clients who know Visual FoxPro is the tool I use to create their application, but still refer to the app by the name or acronym. Until recently my dad thought I owned “FoxPro” since it was on my license plate.

So how do your customers see the name FoxPro? Do they see it as the application they use all day, or is it just the world’s best database application development tool their developers use?

This weekend I took a couple of minutes to update the White Light Computing DBCX Metadata Compare Utility based on a developer’s request that it account for deleted records in the metadata. The developer also mentioned that he automatically runs the DBCX Metadata Compare Utility executable as part of his deployment process so he knows exactly what has changed. This is why I wrote the tool in the first place, but it is always encouraging to hear how other developers use the tools you create, and how they depend on it for their development.

I decided to take the opportunity to include SET REPORTBEHAVIOR 90 when you run the tool inside VFP 9. This allows you to preview the report with the crisper zoom magnification, and display multiple pages in the preview window. The good news with this little tweak: I did not have to modify the report to be compatible with the new Report Designer.

DBCX Metadata Compare still runs in VFP 7 and 8 as well as VFP 9 IDE. If you run it in standalone mode the executable now requires the VFP 9 run-times.

In case you were wondering, this tool is a freebie. All the details on how to download it, and some basic documentation can be found on the White Light Computing Web site here. Enjoy.

I have watched with curiosity how the Fox Community is reacting to the announced code name for the next version of VFP. Sure it is fun listening to the various reactions from the community about the Roadmap, but lets have a little fun with “Sedna”.

In my post VFP Roadmap provides direction I note:

“Sedna is not yet classified as a planet, but speculation is it is orbiting the sun in an elliptical orbit, which takes 10,500 earth years to orbit the sun. If you are a space geek like me, you might find this Sedna page quite interesting.”

There were four things that came to mind when I read about the celestial object and the code name of VFP.Next…

1. Pluto is the ninth planet and Sedna is past the ninth planet. Sedna in the VFP world is past the ninth version (this is the obvious one that Ken confirmed yesterday is the base of the code name).
2. If you look at the Sedna page you will see 2003 VB12 was the official temporary designation of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Minor Planet Center. So we could make a correlation that the add-on to VFP 9 is equivalent to VB v12.0 (this one was just too much fun).
3. The other fun conspiracy theory is Sedna is a red object and VFP is the red-headed stepchild in the Microsoft Developer Tool Division.
4. Finally, Sedona was the code name for VFP 7, take the “Oh” out of 7 and you get Sedna.

According to a post on the UniversalThread, Ken Levy says only the first observation is correct and later John Koziol (lead tester on the Fox Team) admits to being the originator of the code name:

“With Ken’s approval, the “Sedna” idea was mine At first, the name was attractive as the first planetary body beyond the 9th (Pluto)…and then I read the legend of Sedna, the Artic goddess and about fell off my chair laughing at the loose parallels to VFP.”

In a later post John hints there are many other reasons Sedna is a great name and they will become apparent as time goes on. Well, geeks just gotta have fun. OK, back to work.