Shedding Some Light

This is just a quick reminder that session proposals for Southwest Fox 2011 are due by this Monday, March 28. For details, read the Call for Speakers document.

Now off to get mine polished up and sent in.

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund brings a developer to the Southwest Fox conference in the United States 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. Please see the Ambassador Fund page to get more information on the nomination process or to learn how to contribute to it.

The Ambassador selection committee consists of Southwest Fox organizers Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and Doug Hennig, former Ambassadors Emerson Santon Reed, Cesar Chalom, and Bernard Bout, and VFP community members Christof Wollenhaupt, Rick Bean, and Alex Feldstein.

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2011 recipient. To nominate someone you think is deserving to be selected, please email their name and a brief list of their contributions to the VFP community to ambassadorfund AT swfox.net. Names must be submitted no later than April 15, 2011.

I have long been a user of the fine SQL Server developer tools produced by Red Gate. My all-time favorite is SQL Compare. Red Gate also has sponsored the Southwest Fox Conference which I am an organizer. I have attended the last two Business of Software conferences co-hosted by Neil Davidson who is the CEO of Red Gate. And I participate in the Friends of Red Gate program, which allows me to provide feedback to the product groups at Red Gate. So you might say I have a nice relationship with the company.

Red Gate made a recent announcement in an open letter to the .NET Community, which detailed some future changes to the product with respect to the licensing and most importantly that it was no longer going to be free. I watched the reaction in the .NET Community via Twitter and on some blogs, and was not surprised how many developers were reacting. Developers are notorious frugal and love free stuff, and complained loudly how Red Gate was cheating them and going back on their word/intention of always having a free version.

Any developer with few exceptions, who makes a living developing software and finds use for a tool like .NET Reflector core to their development experience certainly can afford $35 for the standard edition. Here in the USA we are talking a few pizzas or a week’s worth of Starbucks coffee. I have talked with numerous .NET developers over the last few years including people who work with me and they find this tool indispensable. The top of the line version which allows you to step through third-party assembly code is only $95. To me, as a business owner who likes when our company delivers solid software, $95 is a steal to gain functionality like this.

I emailed one of my contacts at Red Gate giving my view point. I am in the slightly unique position of having a line of commercial and some free tools that I make available to the developer community. I have experienced the developers who complain that I charge for tools that have some premium features and how I should make the pro versions free to everyone. I explained to Red Gate that they can expect some heated posts and tweets. But in the big picture, people should understand that the survival of a product for the cost of a few pizzas is minor in the big scheme of things.

As a thank you for my feedback Red Gate has given me some .NET Reflector VSPro licenses to give-away. This came to me as a total surprise.

I gave away 10 licenses to members of the Detroit Area Fox User Group last Thursday. I have 10 licenses to give-away at the Michigan Great Lakes .NET Group on Wednesday, and I have 10 more licenses to give-away here via my blog. This is close to $3000 of software. As you can see, Red Gate is a super generous company.

Rules/Disclaimer

[Edit 15-Mar-2011] All licenses have been given away.

So if you are doing any .NET development, or expect to be doing some .NET development and would like a FREE copy of .NET Reflector VSPro please send me an email: DotNetReflector AT WhiteLightComputing.com with the subject: “.NET Reflector Please”. The first 10 people who I get an email from will get instructions on how they can get their license returned to them via email. If you don’t get a response from me in 24 hours, consider yourself too late. I am fairly certain these licenses will not be around for long.

One license per individual. All tax considerations are the responsibility of the winner (consult your tax accountant for specific details). No employees of White Light Computing, or any family members of the employees of White Light Computing are eligible. Your mileage may vary, some settling may occur during shipping. Not valid outside of planet Earth. All decisions made by me are final.

Thanks

Thanks Red Gate for the great tools and the terrific support of the developer community, you guys rock.

Today we released the Call for Speakers for Southwest Fox 2011. Anyone interested in presenting should visit the Call for Speakers page on the Southwest Fox website, read the complete Call for Speakers document (linked from that page), and download the proposal submission application. Session proposals are due by March 28.

As in the past few years, we plan to offer a good selection of topics in core VFP development, extending VFP, using VFP with other technologies, and VFPX, as well as technology sessions to help VFP developers become better developers, not just more expert at VFP.

If you think you have something to say to the VFP community, please submit session proposals, even if you’ve never spoken at a conference before. Our community is strengthened when more people take an active role. Do be aware that speaking at a conference is a serious commitment. Even for experienced speakers, preparing a new session takes 40-80 hours. Doing it well at the conference calls for several rehearsals beforehand, too. So make sure you can commit the necessary time–the Call for Speakers lays out all the deadlines.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you all come up with. Reading through the proposals we receive each year is really exciting, and choosing among them is always a challenge.

Today I tracked down a strange error “File does not exist.” triggered when the users were testing the built in Stonefield Database Toolkit (SDT) Reindexing capability inside their application. We just updated this application from SDT 5.x to SDT 6.2 so we did risk breaking some of the functionality. At White Light Computing we have an external utility (EXE) that runs the Reindexing, Updates, and Repairs. This utility works fine with the current set of metadata, which made me think it was an environment issue inside the application. Sure enough the code failing is in the DBCXMgr class in the FindProperty method.

lcLongName = padr(upper(alltrim(tcProperty)), ;
             fsize('cLongName', .cPropCursorName))

The FSIZE() function is one of the functions affected by SET COMPATIBLE ON (it defaults OFF). When the setting is ON the function is returning the actual file size. When the setting is OFF, the function is returning the size of the field. This is one of those design decisions you got to wonder about. I know Microsoft made it to make the code work for dBase developers, but I think it is crazy-nuts to reuse functions in this manner. It leads to time tracking down problems like this one.

The application we are supporting has a SET COMPATIBLE ON in the start up code for reasons unknown to me. This is a global setting and it would take a considerable amount of time to track down all the possible code I would break by turning it OFF making it high risk. One workaround I could have implemented around this problem is inserting the SET COMPATIBLE OFF before the call to the SDT code and resetting it ON after the call (low risk, but only fixes this application). I decided to modify the FindProperty method to set and reset because it could be called by other application that use the DBCX Manager code. I also sent the findings to Stonefield support for their consideration.

[EDIT * 2-Feb-2011]  I have since realized that the changes are necessary throughout the DBCX Manager code. After further consideration, both Doug and I have come to the same conclusion, there are to many places to fix the code in the DBCXMgr, and no good reason why SET COMPATIBLE should be set ON. So I have changed the application to toggle the setting before calling the SDT Reindexing, Update, and Repair functions.

Glad to have that one off the bug list for our customer.

Mark your calendars! Southwest Fox 2011 will take place on October 26-29, 2011 with a post-conference event on the afternoon of October 29 and morning of October 30. Note a few changes this year:

• The shift not only from the second week in October to the last week (to avoid running into Jewish holy days).
• The shift from our usual Thursday to Sunday dates to Wednesday to Saturday this year (so you can get home in time for Halloween).
• The post-conference starts Saturday afternoon rather than the next day.

By the way, the post-conference event is guaranteed to blow your socks off, so you’ll definitely want to consider staying the extra day. Stay tuned for more details.

The conference was terrific. I learned a lot and it was great renewing some friendships and making a couple of new ones. The Germans are terrific guests and Rainer and Tina (who does most of the real work according to Rainer) do a terrific job putting on the event. Despite the jet lag, I look forward to the trip every year. This year was more fun because Cathy came to speak for the first time and it was nice having a friend along for the long flight to and from Germany. I have already been invited back for next year too, which is terrific.

The speaker dinner was themed oriental with some of my favorites including sushi and Thai food. More importantly the discussion was fun and often so funny I had tears in my eyes. It started at 8:00pm and ended around 3:00am for me, just a few short hours before we had to get in the taxi for the ride to the airport for the morning flights. Lots of discussion on how we can improve both German DevCon and Southwest Fox. We have a lot of synergy between the conferences and the organizers help each other out when ever possible. I think you will find many of the discussed topics making their way into the conferences next year as some of the ideas were downright cool and genius.

The last day of the conference is always the hardest since your brain is suffering from “VFP overflow” from all the knowledge you gained from the sessions. Combine that with the jetlag and you have a recipe for sleepiness. Fortunately there are only 5 sessions and the closing session on the last day.

Up first is Doug Hennig and his “Cool Controls for Your Applications” session. Doug’s theme this year was deep diving into various controls in both of his conference sessions. Doug is making the important point that your apps do not have to be mundane and boring. There are no more excuses. Doug covered his impressive SF Splitter control (for vertical and horizontal splitting, which I am planning to use soon for one project), the SFComboTree (found in the PEMEditor), the VFPX PopMenu project, Paul Mrozowski’s RCSCalendar control, and finally the VFPX Balloon tips by Carlos Allotti. Great session for anyone looking to spruce up your app.

I skipped the next session because my head was hurting a little bit and because it felt like I had gone non-stop for a few days.

Alaska Software was kind enough to show us where they are going with their “Polar Fox” project. They showed this off at Southwest Fox, but I did not have time to review it in Pheonix. Steffen Pirsig detailed the plans for the next major version of XBase++ and how it will transpile the current FoxPro source code into their format to run. Details include:

• Transpiler: will take existing Visual FoxPro code and transport it to XBase++ code.
• Source code control will be simplified with text based source code.
• Source compiles down to native platform executables.
• Decompilers will be a thing of the past.
• Designers will be written in XBase++, IDE can be automated (continuing the tradition of extensibility).
• Command prompt, roll your own commands (interactive just like Visual FoxPro).
• Concepts they are pushing: no limits, innovate without disruption, favor design, continue the language.

Code already is compiling and building EXEs, the initial designers are working, they are making the reporting engine 100% compatible, and have the Profiler and Debugger working.

The idea that gives me the most confidence that Alaska Software can pull this off is that they have done it before with Clipper and the Clipper Community. They also seem to have a terrific grasp on what Visual FoxPro does and how developers use Visual FoxPro, and the types of applications they write. I really appreciate the time Steffan put in on the presentation and how Alaska Software is working on a path for Visual FoxPro developers in the future.

After lunch was my “Mocking Your Customer” session. This session is the one I was most nervous about because it really counts on audience participation. Having other contribute to any session benefits everyone, and the participation I have had in rehearsals and at other conferences was terrific. So in an effort to coax people into asking questions I offered to draw names for one of two licenses of Balsamiq Mockups. It worked a little as two people asked questions. Each won a copy of Mockups. The business side of the session went faster than normal since there were no questions or observations to share. I enjoyed the session and got several nice compliments from attendees as they were leaving.

The last session of the conference for me was Servoy’s vendor session “Servoy for the Visual FoxPro Developers.” Several Fox developers have made some very public statements on how they are learning Servoy and how they like it. Ken Levy did not show up on time so I went out in the lobby to track him down and remind him he had a session to give in 5 minutes. I am not throwing stones here based on my tardiness to my first session. I normally don’t get to see vendor sessions so I decided to take the opportunity to check out Servoy. After all, they have sponsored SWFox for 4 years and I don’t really have in-depth knowledge of the specifics, and have not seen a demo of the product. It does look impressive, especially how you can literally change the source code while the code is running. Once you save the change it is immediately reflected in the running form. They offer a good deal to start with the development IDE for free. Unfortunately as cool as it looks, the one thing I did not get answered specifically is the licensing costs, which I have been told is per seat licensing. They slipped through the pricing slide extremely quick and ask that you contact them for specifics on the pricing.

The conference finished up with the closing session where lots of door prizes are given away.