Shedding Some Light

Finally, after 10 months of organizing the conference we get to the opening day. I am still on Eastern time so I wake up at 5:00am. I took the opportunity to get some work done that I have neglected over the last couple of days. Caught up on email and then headed over to the conference center to open registration at 7:15am.

The conference center is quiet at 7:00, but things get rolling quickly. I made sure the projectors were up and running and connected two of them in the combined Fairway 3/4. We combined the room because there were 40 people signed up for Andy and Menachem’s pre-conference sessions. All the equipment worked fine.

Back at the registration booth, Doug, Tamar, Therese and Marshal were busy delivering the materials for those registered for the pre-cons. Just before Andy was about to get going he noticed his machine was not cooperating with the projectors and the splitter. So they called in the guy who HATES hardware. Fortunately we got it working by having Andy reboot his machine and getting the output on one screen. Once we got it working on one we were able to get the second projector to work.

Back to the registration area where I had to process a couple of last minute registrations. I have to do this because I run the accounting software, have the merchant account to process the credit cards, and process all the registrations in our database. This is a single-threaded process, and is the only time it really is a pain in the neck.

Thursday is also vendor setup day. More boxes get delivered, and the vendors start to set up their booths. Bo Durban had the best innovation this year with his signs next to his booth. These signs were done up at the UPS Store for under $50 each. Much cheaper than the $1500 to $2000 it costs for one of the standard booths by the more experienced vendors. For those of us who have smaller operations, but still want a professional presence I think Bo found the perfect solution.

Mid-day we found Menachem’s older laptop did not want to cooperate with the projectors and splitter. See the trend starting? No luck this time, we could only get it running with one projector. Yes, this is better than zero, but not as good as two. No complaints from the people in the seats though, which I was thankful for. I appreciate the understanding that bad things just happen. Maybe the majority of the people sitting in the room are members of my “I HATE Hardware Club”?

The rest of the day was spent handing out materials and scrambling to order a last minute monitor for one of the vendors. There always seem to be some sort of glitch that needs to be solved. Later in the afternoon Steve Bodnar arrived so we could test out the technology to broadcast the keynote on the Internet – live. At first we ran into problems getting the camera to talk to the computer. I asked Frank “Mr. I don’t hate hardware” Perez to see if he could work with Steve to get this solved. Fortunately Frank had a different cable to make the connection and everything was up and running.

Keynote time was 7:00pm. Steve had us live as we set up so people could see what was happening. I was testing the equipment and ensuring my FoxCharts demo was working and looked good on the screen. Bo Durban was also testing his computer because he was going to demo VFP Studio with Craig Boyd. Up popped Cesar Chalom (creator of FoxCharts) asking why I was running an older release of FoxCharts (less than a week old {g}). He told me to download the latest version which fixed a couple of bugs. Not going to happen minutes before we go live with the keynote {bg}. Sorry Cesar, but people were still wowed by the older one.

They keynote can be watched here: http://ustream.com/channel/swfoxtv

You will see the whole thing as it happened. Overall I think the keynote went well. The core presentations was known as the VFPX Showcase. We wanted to show people some of the components and tools the VFPX team is working so hard on each day, and how they can be leveraged in the Fox IDE or as part of an application.

We also announced something we initially call the “Worthy Developer Fund.” We know we need a better name for this, but the creative juices are not flowing fast enough. The concept is to bring one or more developers to the conference who normally would not be able to attend for what ever reason. The developer(s) needs to be contributing to the Fox Community in a very significant way such as leading and contributing to one or more projects on VFPX or something else of that magnitude (exact criteria to be determined). What will happen is the three organizers of Southwest Fox will donate the conference registration and the fund will be used to pay for travel costs for the individual(s) selected. We are working out the selection process guidelines in the next month or two. We wanted to get the idea out to the community so they could start funding the fund. If you have suggestions for the selection process you can email those to me and I will forward it to those involved in the process of defining the process. Initial ideas include a nomination step, and then some sort of selection process from those nominated. More details later.

[Edit] Based on some discussions after the conference we have changed the name to “Bring a FoxPro Ambassador to Southwest Fox Fund”. This is brilliant as it really expresses the ideas behind the concept we have for this fund. Thanks to Christof Wollenhaupt for making the suggestion. [/Edit]

Next up was the VFPX Administrators Award for Outstanding Service. This is something new this year and was given to one person who really has given a lot to the Fox Community via the VFPX open source project. While there are many deserving candidates for this award, the administrators felt there was no person more deserving than Bo Durban who leads the GDIPlusX project. GDIPlusX allows you to work with the GDI+ DLL via some well built Visual FoxPro classes. GDIPlusX turns out to be one of the foundation classes as it is used in several VFPX projects and numerous other projects put together by the Fox Community.

Bo and Craig then literally performed some magic. Well maybe not good magic as the team put on a Penn and Teller skit with a sledge hammer, a watch, and a saw (I was a little nervous before the keynote when I heard explosives might be involved in the presentation). My recommendation to the two of them is to stick with better tools like Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio {g}. This magic lead to the real magic which was a demo of VFP Studio. I know many in the Fox Community have been wondering what is going on with VFP Studio and I was glad the two gave us a little peek at the future. From my perspective the future looks quite bright with these two geniuses working on VFP Studio.

The last part of the keynote is the birthday surprise for the Class of ’58. If you don’t know, the Fox Community seems to have a unusual number of people born in 1958 and they turn 50 this year. Two of the organizers turned 50 last month (yes, I’m the youngster in the group {bg}). Toni Feltman did a surprise demo with some stats on aging people, and then brought in birthday cake for all to share. I called Whil Hentzen on the phone so he could listen in as he is one of the Class of 58, as is Barbara Peisch who is speaking at the conference, and Dan Freeman who was visiting us. It was fun to surprise them. Thanks to F1 Technologies (Mike and Toni Feltman) for organizing this and sponsoring the whole thing.

The rest of the evening was the Tradeshow Reception, which I heard went well for the vendors. I did not get a chance to man the White Light Computing booth, but did mingle with the other folks and watched the vendors deliver numerous demos of their products. If I let anyone down by not demoing our developer tools please let me know and I will be happy to do something after the conference to show you what we offer and what they do.

Wednesday (Day -1) is prep day. I woke early at 5:00am (8:00am Eastern) and it was like Christmas morning. I went out into the family room of our suite and started opening some of the boxes. I couldn’t help myself since there were a few things I did not see before shipping. One was the Techsmith boxes. Once again Techsmith really came through for use with Camtasia and SnagIt as give-aways and tons of pens and marketing materials. The other thing I was looking for was the VFPX Administrators Award we had made up (more on that later).

Bright and early was the delivery of the AV equipment for Rick Strahl’s training session. I worked with the conference people and the AV-dude to ensure the equipment was set up in time for Rick’s sessions.

Off to breakfast with the organizers followed by our “pre-con” with the facility staff. The people at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center are top notch. Special thanks to Sharon, Liz, Mark, Bennie, and Nancy for making this a pleasure. We found out last year how well these people work together and worked with us to ensure comfort for those attending the conference. Nothing goes perfect, but these folks work hard to get as close to perfect as possible.

After our “pre-con” meeting we had the warehouse in our room moved to the assembly area in the board room. We assembled the binders by inserting all the materials printed for us by Smooth-On this year. Next up were the badges. The schedules you got in your badge had to be cut and folded. Once they were done we laid out all the materials around the table we want in the conference bag. This is when we noticed we were missing the CDs from DBI. I made a call to Rod Miller who gave me the tracking number to find out where they were. Unfortunately they were delivered, but no one was available to take delivery. That meant they had to be delivered on Thursday. Minor crisis, adrenaline rush, but not a disaster. We had established the backup plan early by delivering the goods to everyone via an FTP site earlier in the week. Frank Perez arrived in town and made an emergency run to his dad’s place to see what other goodies were delivered at the last minute and tried to track down the CDs in case we could get them before Thursday.

Marshal (Tamar’s husband) and Therese (my wife) made a couple of trips to the airport to pick up speakers. Therese also picked up the remaining shirts from our vendor.

Over in the main building the rooms were getting fitted for the screens. We upgraded the screens to the 12 foot kind purposely because they look better and are more functional than the 10 foot ones. I kind of think of it as getting the 24 inch LCD instead of the 19 inch. Both are functional, but the bigger one is way better than the standard size. The rest of the AV equipment is delivered in the afternoon. I take the opportunity to make sure it all works. We had to make a couple of minor tweaks to the room setup to fit in the projectors for optimal viewing.

During the afternoon I processed a last minute registration and provided details needed by another person to get their registration authorized and a check cut.

Back to the assembly room where things were not slowing down I found the crew going in circles. This is a good thing! All the materials are laid out around the table. Each person goes in circles to pick up the materials and place them in the conference bag. Putting together 160 bags went quite fast.

Special thanks to Rob and Chris who work at Stonefield, Therese, Marshal, and Cathy Pountney who helped the three organizers get everything put together. Once assembled we moved it over to Fairway 1 (the staging area) in preparation for the registration opening Thursday morning.

Last thing was the battle to get the wireless working with the conference Internet connection. Frank and I battled the hardware until it finally worked. Fortunately Frank likes hardware (unlike his boss who hates it) and was persistent until we got it working (more on this later too for those who claim it never worked).

We decided to head out to dinner at Chili’s so Tamar and Marshal could see their Phillies win the National League Championship. Go Phillies!

Day minus 2 is the arrival day. Therese and I got up early because I was trying to finish up a beta for one of my customers (didn’t happen, which was a big disappointment) the night before. The night before I could not focus on the monitor and noticed I was just staring at it getting nothing done. Unfortunately I collapsed from pure exhaustion. The nightmares were not as intense as last year though, which must be a sign we are more prepared this year than last.

I did not sleep well because there was still so much to do. I packed things up the day before, but there is always the nagging worry about forgetting something. Two full carry-ons with the critical stuff: badges, extra materials for more badges for on-site registrations, lanyards, names for drawings, some of the MSDN Subscriptions we are giving away, all the marketing materials for White Light Computing we put in the bags, sign tripods, cameras, camera tripod, and some of the special WLC “ninja” mousepads. Some of the less critical stuff put in checked luggage included the wireless hubs.

Our flight was uneventful, which is always good. Normal wait time for luggage at PHX is usually around 30-45 minutes, but ours came quickly. Direct route to the rental car place where we picked up our Chevy Uplander. We need a mini-van to pick up all the stuff manufactured locally, as well as picking up speakers from the airport and getting them to the hotel.

Next up was picking up all the outstanding conference materials. The shirts (speaker polos, t-shirts, and the white polos ordered by anyone who wanted one) and the conference bags were produced in Tempe near the airport. How about those bags? We decided we wanted to do something green this year, something to help the environment so we ordered reusable grocery bags for everyone. I think they turned out really nice. I was expecting a smaller logo, but it really stands out on the neutral background. Speaker shirts and conference bags were the only thing ready.

Off to FedEx Office (it will always be Kinko’s to me) to pick up the session boards so people know what is going on in the different rooms for the different time slots. The gentleman who helped me asked what I used to print the signs as he thought they looked really nice. I told him it was a custom software package created with Visual FoxPro. His eyes lit up and he told me how he once was a FoxPro developer back around the turn of the century for a local hospital. So I can tell you the signs were printed by a Fox developer. I print the signs based on tables maintained by Doug and Tamar for the speakers and their session. The report is output to a PDF and emailed to Kinkos.

Last stop before the conference hotel was Staples to pick up some late printed materials for WLC. We arrived at the conference center a little later than I thought. Therese reminded me we took an earlier flight last year. We unloaded our stuff and picked up Doug for the trip to Costco to buy binders, paper, and water.

When we got back to the conference center we headed to dinner. After dinner we took delivery on a full pickup truck of stuff delivered to us in the weeks leading up to the conference. Thanks to Mr. Perez (dad of Frank who works at WLC) for warehousing all the materials sent in advance.

We went to bed early Tuesday night because we were tired and knew we needed our rest for the conference.

Southwest Fox 2008 is fully materialized.

Today started out with breakfast at the hotel. The food was really good both last night at dinner and this morning. We kicked off the event with a meeting with the staff to review the entire conference, make sure the daily room configurations and food are in order. The staff here at the Arizona Golf Resort are superb and well organized, and most important very flexible to our needs. Next up was the emptying the warehouse of boxes from our room to the board room, also know as conference factory. The organizers and some volunteers assembled all the binders, badges, and the goodie bags for the folks coming to the conference tomorrow. The screens are up, the projectors are in place and the kiosk computer is running. We even have the wireless all set up so everyone can keep in touch with the office over the next couple of days if necessary. Thanks to all the volunteers who helped us out. Your efforts are really appreciated.

Everything came together.

I believe today is the most energy zapping day of the conference. It is all downhill from here. If this year is anything like last year, the conference will almost run as if it is on auto-pilot. Mostly because we have terrific speakers, fantastic staff here at our hotel, and the staff made up by the three organizers, my wife and daughter, and Tamar’s husband.

I need to take a moment and publicly thank Doug and Tamar. This year, even more than last year, their efforts on this conference made it entirely possible. Without them the conference would not have happened. I know we share the workload over the 10 months we work to put this together, and I am so thankful I have two good friends to partner with to make this conference happen. This conference did not happen without significant sacrifices to our day jobs. I also want to thank Peggy, Marshal and Therese, our spouses. Without their support to the three of us, this conference does not happen. Especially to Therese who thought I was a little nuts to take this on. Therese, you were right as usual, but thanks for making sure I did not get committed to the crazy house this year. I know, it was close.

Oh, and to my color printer, I know you are listening. Despite our battle and the threats made on your future existence, the badges look fantastic this year.

BTW, the weather is perfect as predicted. I hear the pool is very refreshing too.

Less than 1 day until the conference. Safe travels to Mesa if you have not already arrived (I have seen several people already soaking up some AZ sun). Let the the fun begin.

Yesterday I received some great news from Microsoft that I have been named a Visual FoxPro MVP for the 2008-2009 season (renewed on October 1st each year). This is the eighth consecutive time I have been honored with this award.

The MVP award is the way Microsoft recognizes some individuals for their contribution in supporting Visual FoxPro developers (and other Microsoft technologies) by answering questions on forums, presenting sessions at conferences, and writing articles, blogs, books, and several other activities. More information about the MVP program can be found at the MVP site.

This is absolutely an honor.

(Sorry for the late announcement and to the few individuals who were concerned that I did not make an announcement I hope there was not too much anxiety {g}. I have been buried for the last couple of days with several deadlines, a small conference crunching decisions, and fighting a migraine.)

Just in case you are like me and missed this, last week Microsoft released security updates for Visual FoxPro 8 SP1, Visual FoxPro 9 SP1 & SP2. The patches affect a lot of other Microsoft products too since it is one of the core DLLs used many Microsoft and other third-party software packages.

All the details are here.

I am a little confused on why there might be three separate patches since there is only one GDIPlus.DLL file, and it is currently shared between the three versions on my machine. It might be set up this way for those running only one of the three versions. I think you only need one of the patches since there is only one GDIPlus.DLL file, but I am not 100% sure.

I have an email off to Milind and yag for clarification.

UPDATE From Milind:

Yes, the same GDIPlus.DLL is used. However the patches are for all mainline supported versions for VFP.

The dll gets installed to common files, as well as the VFP install location (C:\Program Files\Visual FoxPro 8.0, for instance).

So if you have VFP8 sp1 and vfp9 sp2, you will only need those two patches. Since sp2 is cumulative of sp1, one can’t really have ‘all 3′. {g}

So it sounds like you need to install each of them if you want the update installed. Milind obviously did not read my white paper on installing all three versions of VFP 9 (I sent him the link {g}). My recommendation at this time is to install the GDIPlus patch for VFP 9 and copy the installed version to each of the other two folders if you have them installed.

Today Cathy Pountney drove across the state of Michigan and presented/rehearsed her Southwest Fox session called “Customizing Your Vertical Market Application” to the Detroit Area Fox User Group. I have been looking forward to this session from the moment I saw it proposed to the organizers of the conference. Tonight I was not disappointed.

What Cathy showed is one approach, one architecture to developing and extending vertical market applications (those built with several potentially diverse customers who work in common businesses). Her approach uses a data driven, hook infested, dynamic approach. The ideas presented are not just something she is thinking of doing, but are a simplified version of the real world approach she and her teammates are using in the app they support.

The session starts out with a demonstration I won’t spoil for those coming to the conference. Trust me though when I tell you there is some humor and some fun poking at herself and the three Southwest Fox organizers. Cathy then demonstrates how she makes the core app work completely different in the other three implementations.

Her architecture works for forms, reports (naturally), menus, processes, and controls. It is built into the base classes and is extremely extensible. While her session focuses on the vertical market application implementation, it could be applied to any software that needs ultimate flexibility to adapt to a dynamic business environment. Here examples are fun, the code is all there for the taking, and the ideas there to use and be expanded upon.

Cathy’s approach might not be exactly what we implement in the first vertical market application White Light Computing develops, but the ideas and approaches were inspiring and could easily be the basis for something we design and integrate with the commercial framework we use.

Definitely a five out of five stars. While I have been to many sessions where I can say this session paid for the entire conference, I can say this session paid for the entire conference and the conference has not even started yet. Very well done.

Just in case you have not seen it, today we posted the tentative schedule for the conference. This is subject to change since we are still more than a month away from the opening keynote. I am personally happy we got this published because several people have asked when it would be out. Putting the schedule together is not an easy task, but I think there have been only two versions so far. No matter what, with 32 fantastic sessions, finding the right mix for everyone is very challenging.

Doug posted a screencast on his Advantage Database Server for Visual FoxPro Developers session. Interesting revelations demonstrated in this video. Check it out on the Southwest Fox Video page.

I recorded a screencast on my Using VFPX Components in Production Apps session this evening. Hopefully this will get posted tomorrow. Short 6 minute video took an hour to record. I actually hit it on the first take, but for some reason Camtasia did not record the balloon tip in the open of the video. So I had to figure out a “fake” way to demo it in. Hope the teaser gets you to consider coming to this session in Mesa.

Registrations continue to flow in. We have 105 people registered (not including speakers and vendors). No better time to register than right now. Make sure to get your hotel reservation in too. Wednesday night is sold out at the conference hotel.