Shedding Some Light

Today is one of those big days here at Geek Gatherings because we officially announce the speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2013 and Southwest Xbase++ 2013. All the details can be found on the Speakers page.

Combined with the two conferences is 45 sessions (white papers for all), 6 pre-conference sessions, a keynote and lots of the usual networking opportunities with tons of fun thrown in too.

Registration opens later this month

White Light Computing is a platinum sponsor again this year.

You can stay up to date on announcements via Twitter too: @swfox and @swxbase

I hope to see everyone in October. Only 169 days until we gather in Gilbert!

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund brings a developer to the Southwest Fox conference as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient’s country. The trip is paid for by the VFP community’s donations to the Fund.

Nominations

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2013 recipient. The Ambassador selection committee consists of Southwest Fox organizers Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and Doug Hennig, former Ambassadors Emerson Santon Reed, Cesar Chalom, Bernard Bout, Borislav Borissov, and Jun Tangunan, and VFP community members Christof Wollenhaupt and Rick Bean. To nominate someone you think deserves to be selected, please email their name and a brief list of their contributions to the VFP community to ambassadorfund@swfox.net. Names must be submitted no later than May 31, 2013.

Donations

In addition, we are looking for donations to allow us to pay for the travel costs for the ambassador. We urge you to consider donating any amount you see fit, small or large, to this fund. See the Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund page for details. 100% of donated money goes to the travel costs for the ambassador. Not a single penny is used to cover administrative costs. All time managing the fund and working through the selection process is donated. No one is paid for their time.

Thank you for any donation you make.

Note: if you want to send in a donation via PayPal, please mark it as a “gift” so we do not incur transaction fees.

Just a reminder that session proposals for Southwest Fox 2013 and Southwest Xbase++ 2013 are due by 8 AM EDT this Friday, March 22. If you’re interested in speaking, please download the Call for Speakers and submit your proposals using our new online application at www.geekgatherings.com/submission. We look forward to hearing from you.

Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2013 announcement!

Save the dates of October 17-20, 2013.

We’ve issued the Call for Speakers for both conferences. If you are interested in presenting at either conference, please check out our Call for Speakers Doc and consider submitting sessions via our new Web-based submission application developed by the White Light Computing team.

White Light Computing is a Platinum sponsor for the seventh consecutive year, and a conference sponsor all ten years!

Here are a few last-minute things about this year’s conferences:

• Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Kokopelli scheduling application will not be available this year.
• We are streaming the keynote presentation again this year, Thursday at 7:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time (Arizona does not observe Daylight Savings Time): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/swfoxtv
• The conference guide (http://www.swfox.net/ConferenceGuide.pdf) is now available for download. Please download and read it because there are important details about the conference you need to know. This is the only copy of the guide you are getting; in our continuing efforts to make our conference greener, we are not printing them this year.

And yes, there is still some time to register.

Yet another reason to attend Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2012! All registered attendees at Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ are eligible to win one of two one-year subscriptions for Visual Studio Professional with MSDN. Register today: http://www.swfox.net/register.aspx

Over on the Southwest Fox blog someone asked the following question in the comments for our post announcing the Windows 8 keynote:

Why have MS promote their products when they don’t care about developers? MS discontinued VFP.

Comments often get lost, and sometimes people read the posts without looking at the comments, so I am going to post my answer here.

It is a good question. This is not about promoting Windows 8, this is about educating Visual FoxPro and Xbase++ developers on a new operating system their customers are eventually going to consider and use in their businesses. You need knowledge to help guide your customers and users. This session is going to help you learn the advantages and pitfalls of Windows 8 and how it is going to affect your customers’ business.

Jennifer is not a marketing person, she is a developer and has lots of good information to share with other developers. This keynote is about helping developers get past the pundits and press, and down to the nuts and bolts of the next OS developers have to consider when deploying applications. Plain and simple.

What is one of the most common concerns about the future for VFP developers? Answer: will my applications continue to run on the next Windows?  Xbase++ developers want to know new features their applications can work with too.

We have more reasons for you to attend Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2012:

This year’s keynote address will be given by Jennifer Marsman of Microsoft Corporation. She’ll talk about “Industry Trends in Windows 8”. See http://www.swfox.net/sessionsswfox.aspx#Industry_Trends_in_Windows_8 for a description of this session.

All Southwest Fox attendees receive a free PDF version of the latest VFP book, “VFPX: Open Source Treasure for the VFP Developer,” by Rick Schummer, Tamar E. Granor, Doug Hennig, Jim Nelson, and Eric Selje, courtesy of the German FoxPro User Group, dFPUG.

All attendees receive a free one-year subscription to CoDe magazine, courtesy of EPS Publishing.

Add these to more than 40 different regular conference sessions (http://www.swfox.net/sessionsswfox.aspx and http://www.swfox.net/sessionsswxbase.aspx)  and these concurrent conferences provide an opportunity you shouldn’t miss.

Register today.