Shedding Some Light

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.

The Pistons just got beat by three zebras who are taking way to much control of the series with the Heat. How many offensive fouls got called against Rasheed? Doug Collins and Magic Johnson both questioned the calls so it is not just this biased fan. Terrible. Miami played good defense, but it is easier to play great defense and a more aggressive style when you have a zebra covering your back. Then Miami goes down the court and they shoot out the lights.

These are two great teams who could easily be playing for the championship instead of the Eastern Conference. They had a couple of great games in the first two of the series. Since then the refs have called horrible games. Let the players play the game. I hope Wade heals up so when the Pistons win on Saturday it is not because Wade is hurt. He is having a great series.

Ken Levy has posted the much anticipated VFP Roadmap today. This is the long anticipated future of VFP, and the future is bright. Go read it here along with this month’s VFP Newsletter and come back to read my assessment.

There is not a lot of specifics here, but let me start by saying my number one enhancement request has been honored, Longhorn compatibility. Out of the hundreds of ERs posted on the Fox Wiki, the UT wish list, and the beta forums, why is this my number one? Simple. It means my apps will run on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Longhorn. My customers don’t even have Longhorn on their radar scopes at this time, but eventually they will buy new computers and it will have the newest OS installed. I can now tell customers, and potential customers the apps I recommend using VFP 9 will run on all supported Windows well into the next decade. This is great news!

I also like the announcement of the VFP 9 Service Pack 1 later this year. I think some people will scream that it is too far away, but Microsoft can still release hot fixes for the critical problems. The Fox Team has posted that VFP 9 is the most stable version of VFP ever and fewer bugs have been reported in the released version than any prior version. I have seen some serious bugs reported and they need to be fixed for sure. I want to see the NT4 problem addressed officially. If the German User Group can address it, the Fox Team certainly can address it, even though it is not an officially supported operating system.

You need to work with VFP 9 and find the bugs. Six months is not that far away in development time, we have all been there.

I think the best thing to happen to Visual Studio .NET is the help from the Fox Team. There are a lot of smart people working at Microsoft, but it is my opinion the Fox Team will be the difference maker with respect to integrating data with .NET. I am not a .NET fan with respect to Windows client apps and have long said it will take Microsoft three versions to get it right. Whidbey is only v2.0. The Fox Team resources working on v3.0 cements my position. Does this mean I am ignoring .NET? No way. SQL Server 2005 has .NET built in, and ASP .NET is cool. .NET is not inheritently bad, and with members of the Fox Team working on it, it has a much better chance of being great.

I have heard Fox Developers who have added .NET to their arsenal of solutions complain about interop with VFP. The VFP Roadmap looks to address this issue. There will be developers who claim this is just another ploy to get VFP developers to make the jump to .NET. I see it differently. I see VFP being the primary development tool I use for the long term. I like the fact Microsoft is extending VFP to interop with the tools they see as their strategic direction. This means I can use both to provide the best solutions for my customers. I guess I see the glass as half full, or better yet, completely full and maybe even overflowing.

Kudos to Ken and Whil for posting Kevin McNeish’s .NET for Visual FoxPro Developers on the Microsoft Web site. This book is the first book you should look at to help you understand what .NET is all about so you can make informed decisions. Kevin knows both VFP and .NET extremely well. He uses this knowledge to help VFP developers climb the learning curve.

Sedna is the next version of VFP. Code names are a fun geek tradition so teams can refer to a product which does not have an official marketing name. For all the prior code names of VFP hit this Fox Wiki entry. So what is behind the code name? I did a Google search and found that it is the newest named object in our Solar System. It is also the coldest and most distant place in our Solar system. Should we be reading into this? {g}

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.

So does the lack of a VFP 10 announcement disappoint me? Sure. I think all serious VFP developers are disappointed we will not see a major upgrade. I personally look forward to the betas and working to understanding all the new stuff. On the other hand, Microsoft did not kill the product today, which is what many developers speculated over the last six months. VFP 9 does most of what I need today and I am extremely productive with this version. Microsoft added Property Editors, MenuHits, and the all new Report Designer so we can extend this product past what Microsoft provides.

Who knows, maybe the Roadmap will be enhanced the next time Randy or Calvin head out on vacation and come up with a cool feature they should include Sedna.

My guess as to why they are not calling it v10.0: the memory location inside the VFP executable only allows for single digit major version numbers (tongue firmly planted in cheek).

So the key here is to get VFP 9 if you don’t already have it. Don’t wait for Sedna because that is two years away. You will be losing out on the new productivity and cool functionality for your customers if you put off the upgrade until 2007. Using VFP 9 now also gives you a chance to contribute feedback for the upcoming Service Pack 1.

The future is very bright indeed.

It is Memorial Day weekend here so that means I get to take a break from the day-to-day development projects and catch up on some reading (and now listening). Last night I was going through some blogs and came across Andrew MacNeill’s The Fox Show and decided to listen to a couple I had did not have time for when they were first released.

What a resource for the Fox Community! Andrew is producing a podcast that summarizes some news in the Fox world, reviews products he is using (even before you can read the in depth review in his column in FoxPro Advisor), and provides some great insight with some tips and topics on VFP development. I have learned something in each of his podcasts and regularly add something to my to-do list to check out.

I want to thank Andrew for his plug on my recent three city segment of the Deployment Fox 2005 World Tour and the Hentzenwerke Publishing’s Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions written by myself, Rick Borup and Jacci Adams (a great book for graduating seniors and mid-year bonuses for your favorite developers {g}).

You can get his syndicated feed here and listen to it using your favorite media player on Windows, or an IPod or other portable music player. You can easily listen to a show during lunch. I have added The Fox Show to my must have list.

Off to do some yard work, have a great weekend.

Today I experienced something I have experienced before, and something that I find strange and more than a little frustrating. Outlook 2003 was not getting my email. I was heads down today supporting my client’s clients and did not notice that Outlook was not retrieving my email. Why was it not getting the email? I wish I knew why, but this happens once and a while and so today I have added a task in Outlook telling me to reboot it.

You might ask why I need to reboot Outlook? You see, I never really shutdown my computer. I hibernate it. I leave the apps running so when I start up I get back to what I was doing. I would hazard a guess that I have not rebooted my machine for more than two weeks and Outlook was open and running the entire time.

After I came up for air late this afternoon I noticed my inbox was empty, not even spam in the Junk Mail folder. I have been expecting some responses from my clients and thought it was unusual. I hit the Send/Received button and noticed that many of the email accounts were timing out. I shut down Outlook and restarted it and bingo, here come the emails by the truckload. To all those customers and friends who emailed me in the last 24 hours, please accept my apologies for not responding sooner.

Does this happen to anyone else? How the heck can I send reproducible steps to Microsoft for them to track this down?

Today I decided to take a short break after the battle with the fax machine to see if I could address a problem several of my Fox Friends have found with the site feed from this blog. The site feed provided by Blogger is called Atom.xml and is automatically generated/updated each time I post a blog entry. I had no idea how to fix it, and until my friends noted they had a problem I did not know it was even an issue. You see, I am a huge fan of FeedDemon and it read the Atom.xml feed and established the channel just fine.

Back in March Randy Jean told me he could not get his wiki to syndicate the feed. Craig Berntson and Andrew MacNeill soon followed with emails telling me how Newsgator was choking on the feed. Randy hinted I check out FeedValidator, which I did and sure enough it failed. It was not clear why it was failing. Periodic checks showed success, and later some failures, and then success again. The trouble with tracking down any bug is finding the reproducible steps.

Today I decided to take some advice Andrew provided and looked into FeedBurner. Direct from the FeedBurner Web site:

‘FeedBurner is an RSS/Atom post-processing service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By republishing their feeds through FeedBurner, publishers gain detailed feed statistics, maximum feed format compatibility, “shockproofing” to absorb bandwidth spikes, and more.’

When I entered in the Blogger site feed, FeedBurner choked. What it also did was tell me it was choking on a tag. So I downloaded the Atom.xml file from my site and searched for the tag. Sure enough it was in the HTML content of several blog entries. Well how the heck did that happen?

I typically use Microsoft Word to write my post so I can spell check and use the rudimentary grammar checks it provides. I then paste in the text to a blog entry using the Blogger Web interface. What I did not realize until today was that I get a bunch of HTML garbage for the ride. Blogger has two sides to the editor, Compose and HTML. I use the Compose mode, but the editor read the clipboard content Word provides and pasted in extra tags I was unaware of. It also grabbed some SmartTag tags as well any time I have the name of a city in the text. Fun.

So I have edited all the entries to remove the errant tags and posted clean enties along with the updated site feed. I also added the FeedBurner site feed which is in RSS format. Now you can subscribe to this blog no matter how your favorite aggregator perfers its feed. Both of the feeds are in the right side bar.

A big thanks to Randy, Craig and Andrew for making my blog better!

Always listen to the voices in your head, especially when they are screaming NO! Once again I didn’t listen to my initial reaction when the sale guy at the local office supply store asked: “Our self branded fax ribbons work just as well as Panasonics, would you like ours instead of waiting a week before we get theirs in stock?”

I hate fax machines with a passion. They never cooperate with me. In fact, I have threatened every fax machine I have ever worked with that it was going to face a drop out to the trash barrel. It is stupid medium in today’s technology world, but for some reason business still depend on faxes. But I digress…

So I decide to not listen to the voices and listen to the “expert” who swears his customers who have purchased these ribbons never bring them back. I agree to try them out. What a waste of time. Thirty minutes of time never to be recovered again. The stoooopid ribbon is never recognized by the fax machine. I tried doing several things including reading the instructions (is it Phillips who is advertising that technology should be simple??). I have changed this ribbon before and did not have a problem and the sales guy’s perfect streak is about to come to end. These generic ribbons are going back.

Fortunately, I remembered that I had a spare Panasonic ribbon in reserve. Thirty seconds later it was installed and working. The difference in cost between the store branded and Panasonic ribbon was three dollars. The difference in functionality and lost time, priceless. The fax machine lives another day and I can get back to crafting software.

I am amazed how frequently I see developers using a fake alias or handle on developer forums, especially on FoxPro forums where we pride ourselves as a friendly community. I am not talking about the chat rooms where you are trying to meet someone and do not want people to know who you are until you get to know them better. I am referring to technical forums where we share ideas, help each other out, collaborate, and as a byproduct of our interaction – develop friendships. I continue to meet most of my friends in the Fox Community online long before I see them at a conference, user group meeting, or work together on projects for clients.

I visit several developer forums including FoxForum, Tek-Tips, Foxite, and occasionally CompuServe, the Virtual FoxPro User Group, OpenTech, and the UniversalThread. Each of the forums has their pluses and minuses, and I know I will find solid answers to my questions on any one of them. Most of the forums encourage using your real name and others require it. I can tell you though I struggle with postings from MickeyMouse and Qwerty Qwerty.

Tek-Tips for instance has some genius contributors and a high volume of traffic with little noise (a restrictive, but effective forum policy). Unfortunately many of the members have handles and this drives me nuts. Same with Microsoft’s Channel 9. It is hard to develop a friendship with FoxDudette, CrazyDeveloper, DespiseCSharpMan, or ZMan999. More importantly, as a Microsoft MVP, part of my duty is to help Microsoft recognize contributions to the Fox Community and nominate others to be recognized as a MVP. It is pretty hard to tell Microsoft to consider FoxGeek879 as an MVP, even though this individual might have MVP caliber contributions.

It is not just on forums, the same is true with Amazon.com book reviews, especially negative reviews. I eliminate these reviews from the list I consider helpful because the person doing the review is hiding behind the alias.

So why does a developer feel compelled to hide behind a handle? My guess is they are afraid of people telling them they ask stupid questions. This is another thing we all should have learned in Kindergarten, there is no such thing as a stupid question. I know some forums are famous for their flaming posts and people do not want to be a part of negative dialog. I understand this, so go find a developer friendly forum where everyone knows your name. Some developers probably do not want to admit they are new to the development language or tool. Sorry, this is unacceptable as well. We all started somewhere, and quite frankly, none of us know everything there is to know about our jobs or the tools we use to craft software. We all have things to learn and need to start somewhere. Asking a question is the perfect way to start learning.

So if you are using a handle stop hiding. Use your real name and identify yourself. Jump out in the forums and ask questions. When you see a question and you know the answer, jump in and help by posting a solution.

(Disclaimer: all aliases and handles used in this blog post are fictional, and are not used here to call out anyone specific. No aliases or handles were harmed in the writing of this blog entry, some settling may occur during posting, your mileage and download speed might vary, use of the keyboard while reading this blog might cause stress injuries to your neck, arms, and wrists.)