Shedding Some Light

http://blueballfixed.ytmnd.com

Mindboggling.

The publishing industry in general has faced some troubling times in the last couple of years. This can be witnessed in spades in the Fox Community as we have all watched both FoxTalk and The Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro literally go away. FoxTalk is still published, but is continuing printing the “best of” articles. Advisor collapsed the majority of their technical magazines into Databased Advisor and nearly tripled the price. Both of these situations are sad. I still have active subscriptions to both publications, but I do not intend to renew either of them.

So this leaves a huge gap in the community. There are authors who are getting jittery with extra time on their hands each month and no outlet to get articles published. They could resort to blogging, but long blog entries are not fun to read (at least to me), and often hard to take with you to the reading room, or on a plane or train. More importantly they are not necessarily permanent. Bloggers change services, RSS feeds only hold so many posts, and the authors have the right to pull their posts. Magazines (paper or electronic) are delivered to me and I can keep them as long as they are useful.

It would be nice if there was a publication that would focus on FoxPro. A great magazine the entire Fox Community could subscribe to for state-of-the-art and timely information, and techniques for our favorite development tool and language. I would subscribe in a heartbeat.

Rainer Becker, the newest Lifetime Achievement awardee is stepping up and creating a new magazine called FoxRockX (pronounced Fox Rocks). He has convinced some of the regulars you have come to enjoy reading to produce some new content for this magazine. He has lined up some excellent regular topics on the Sedna extensions, VFP 9 SP2, VFPX, business topics, deep dives into development, Vista, extending with .NET, new tools, tips and tricks, Guineu, and is resurrecting the KitBox column. I am sure there are going to be many more topics as time goes on.

I am very excited by this development in the Fox Community and am glad I am able to help out with getting this magazine started. I have already sent in one article on VFPX and plan on doing more articles that deep dive into the various VFPX projects and tools being developed by developers in our community.

I am glad Rainer has been working on this because I was starting to plan again how to start my own venture in publishing I knew I did not have the amount of time and energy it was going to take and still keep White Light Computing running properly.

FoxRockX will have subscriptions in electronic and print (print is naturally more). All the details will be posted soon and the magazine will start in early 2008. Thanks to Rainer for heading this up and to all the individuals who are pouring their creative and administrative energies into this new venture. I hope everyone in the Fox Community can support this magazine. It will only be successful if people back it by subscribing to it as soon as they can. I hope Rainer can count on your support.

Sorry for the long absence from the blogosphere.

I am digging out of a huge backlog of customer work, recovering from a neck full of unaligned vertebrates (literally a pain in the neck) from a slip on the ice, working on some long avoided home improvements because of neglect, assorted hardware problems, wrapping up some to-do items for Southwest Fox 2007, working with conference center for next year, tiding up the office, and the inevitable onslaught of the holidays.

Heck, I have not even had time to setup the new Vista laptop that arrived a few weeks back. I did however connect my new Dell 24 inch LCD monitor (yes it is very sweet and highly recommended if you need extra light in the office {bg})!

I am also working on some cool new things for the Fox Community (more coming in the next blog post).

Happy New Year to all. I wish each of you a very healthy, extraordinary, and extremely prosperous 2008 with your favorite developer tools and environment, what ever platform you have chosen. Fox Rocks!

It is not bad enough that most Dilbert strips represent some past life experience I have had (or maybe something for my future), but now the guy is looking into my closet and blogging about it.

Read: Free T-Shirts

Today I am wearing a TechSmith SnagIt T-Shirt under my Southwest Fox Speaker sweatshirt. I am pretty confident that every t-shirt in my closet has some geek company or conference logo, and everyone of them were free.

As you may know, Advisor has consolidated all their technical magazines into Databased Advisor. Life in the business world goes in circles and Advisor has come full circle if you recall the history of Advisor and their FoxPro offerings. It all started with Databased Advisor covering several database languages including FoxBase/FoxPro. The split the FoxPro content off into FoxPro Advisor, changed the name to Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro, and have now consolidated it back to Databased Advisor.

While I see some value in having access to all the content, to me at least it just gets in the way of finding the excellent FoxPro content written by the usual suspects (Christof Wollenhaupt, Tamar Granor, Pamela Thalacker, Andrew MacNeill, Ceil Silver (now Mike Lewis), Rick Borup, Rick Strahl, Doug Hennig, Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins) and the cast of others who contribute less frequently.

So I emailed Advisor and asked how I can see just the FoxPro content and they quickly responded with the following link:

http://my.advisor.com/wpubs.nsf/p/MSVisualFoxProAdvisor

(Updated 6-Mar-2008)
http://my.advisor.com/whome.nsf/w/MSVisualFoxProAdvisor

Much better.

While in Germany someone made a comment to me how they are looking forward to my blog returning to a FoxPro theme, instead of it being hijacked by Southwest Fox announcements. This is a really good point. So yesterday I created a Southwest Fox Blog so the three organizers can blog about our experiences organizing the conference, and things we are considering doing for the next Southwest Fox to open up a discussion on some new ideas. I hope you take time to subscribe.

Hopefully I will be blogging soon about the whole Southwest Fox Conference 2007 experience. I have so many great memories even though the conference was truly a blur.

Only 332 days until we all return to Mesa! {g}

On Sunday Doug Hennig and I took a train to Holland so we could present sessions at the Software Developer Network FoxPro (SDN) Software Developer Event. The train is one of the high speed trains that travels at 300kph/188mph. Fast and smooth. Once we arrived we were picked up by Gerben Kessen at the train station and taken to the hotel. At the hotel we met up with the Visual Objects and Vulcan speakers for dinner. The other track at the conference had session on these two technologies. It was interesting to hear about the world of Visual Objects and Vulcan (a XBase language on the .NET framework currently in development). Naturally we had some fun in the VFP is better vs. your tool of choice discussion {g}. I went back to my room and battled the wireless Internet connection before falling asleep.

The next morning I woke up late! I requested a wake-up call for 7:00 so I could get breakfast and make sure my computer works with the beamer. I woke up at 8:00, which still gave me enough time to get to the conference room to test out the beamer, but not enough time to eat breakfast. I was happy to do the first session on the last (and only) day. Traditions are important. I also had the first session after lunch and the last session of the day. All three slots are the least preferred by most speakers, but I don’t mind presenting during any of the slots.

I presented three sessions:

1. VFPX Tools and Components – Live
2. Creating Help – Made Easy!
3. SQL Server Toolkit for the VFP Developer

The first session did worry me as there were only 3 or 4 developers in the room when the session was suppose to start. I expected a few more since there were 25 people signed up for the conference. A couple minutes into the session the rest of the crowd filed in. I asked how many people had heard of VFPX and not a single hand was raised. By the end of the session people were real excited by this project. We are already working to come up with some plans to get the word out about VFPX, but we are going to need your help in doing so. Make sure to spread the word about this important project, and a significant part of the future of Visual FoxPro.

My other sessions went well. During Doug’s sessions I caught up on some work I needed to have done before I returned to the states. After the conference we had dinner with the organizers and then headed to Amsterdam. Tuesday Doug and I toured Amsterdam. I felt like I was a zombie. Amsterdam is definitely everything I have heard about it. It is different than any place I have visited on the planet.

I think SDN has a really good idea with the one day event. This is something I have been considering doing in North America for a couple of years. I have attended a number of “mini-conferences” over the years put on by Microsoft, and other organizations and individuals. What do you think? Would you attend a one or two-day “mini-conference” with five or six sessions in a day? If so, how much would you be willing to pay for this? Please let me know either on this blog, or even send me a private email.

It is well documented that my struggles with Outlook 2007 are not fun (maybe humorous to the readers, but not fun to me). Today I wasted four hours struggling with Outlook to have room in the PST file to move mail items between folders, and send mail. I have hit the 2GB limit.

What I have learned:
1) Outlook PST files in the 97-2002 format have similar limits to the VFP DBF.
2) Outlook Archiving works when it is schedule, and can be run manually via the File menu.
3) Compacting the PST file only works when it can compact 16KB of material from the file (at least this is what is documented).
4) Outloook 2003 PST format will store more than 2GBs.

I looked up the conversion process to learn it is manual, very manual. As in create a new PST file and then manually run the import process via the Import/Export process.

So before I go off and waste more time, I am asking you if you have run through this and got the same content out on the other side of the import. I have heard from others who were migrating from Outlook Express to Outlook 2007 that they did not have much success and needed to export first, then import.

My goal here is to get all my data across without losing anything. I have dozens of mail folders and more than a thousand contacts, lots of calendar items, and tons of tasks and notes. I rely heavily on this information.

I am not interested in hearing:

1. Move to Thunderbird (it does not do everything Outlook does, least of all synching contacts to my Windows Mobile phone).
2. Move to Web mail (get real, I am not always connected to the Internet, and I use Outlook for more than just email).

I also have lots of backups, but what I don’t have is a lot of time to deal with this. I need something to go smoothly. Your experience is really appreciated. Thanks in advance.