Shedding Some Light

Today is Saturday, the last day of the conference. Interesting, Rainer did not follow my tradition of speaking at the first session, but since my first session today is at 11:30, I will be presenting during my body clock time of 5:30AM. {g}

First this morning is Armin Neudert’s “Vorschau SQL Server 2008″, which is a German session revealing some of the new stuff in SQL Server 2008. I barely understood Armin’s discussion and could not read most of the slides, but I got the examples he showed and found the session very beneficial. One thing I noted is the addition of some new date/time formats. I was also working on reviewing my “Creating Help – Made Easy” material in preparation for my session after lunch.

I presented my “SQL Server Developer Toolkit for the VFP Developer” during the third slot of the day. I really enjoy this session because it shows developers tools to increase productivity. This session is designed to be interactive with the people who come to the session and this session did not disappoint. Lots of questions and experiences. I normally worry about a session like this at the German DevCon, but this year it seems developers are willing to contribute, which makes the session go better. It was exciting for me.

Lunch – more smoked salmon despite Marcia’s attempt to plate it all before I got to the buffet.

Next up was my “Creating Help – Made Easy” session. It is a session I developed for WhilFest 2003. I feel pretty passionate about creating Help for applications when it is required. I also know many developers who are nervous about Help because they think it is complicated. The reality is, when using the HTML Help Workshop it is hard. In fact, it is really painful. Miserable. This is why I step through the process in my session. I want to show the developers the pain and why you want to purchase a tool for a couple hundred dollars (Euros, etc.). I show you how to integrate the Help file into your application. Finally I show you a couple of HTML Help authoring tools (West Wind’s HTML Help Builder and Help and Manual) to show you how easy it really can be. I realized after the session I forgot to mention you need to ship a couple of VFP HTML Help DLLs with your app to get the integration to work in production. Fortunately all this information is in the session white paper, so if you attended the sessions or the conference you can read all about it.

Andy’s “Get the Most Out of Intellisense” session is in the official last slot of the conference. I have seen this session a couple of times before, but as usual I relearned several things. Couple of my favorites are:

1. Command Tip Window (replacement for the Quick Info tooltips) which allows you to copy the text.
2. Adding common variables you use in your code such as “loObj” and have it expand to “loObj = ” and then have it drop down a list of object references such as “this”, “thisform”, and “this.parent”.

Sweet refresher and packed with good examples, and literally a hundred items to use in our own Intellisense table. Not only do you get the code, but you get inspiration to create your own based on needs you have in development. Andy is one of, if not the authority on Intellisense. His knowledge on this topic is top-gun. I also appreciated his endorsement of using spaces instead of tabs in my code {bg}.

Based on some bugs discovered and some other quirks Andy has found over the years, I am hopeful the IntelliSense Manager becomes a project on CodePlex in VFPX once Microsoft releases the Sedna components and the XSource ZIP file. Alan Griver noted in the keynote that Sedna and XSource should be released in the next few weeks. Another session I can rate a six out of five stars.

Tonight is the speaker dinner which is something I always look forward to since Rainer brings out some of the most exotic food I have ever seen. In the past we have seen zebra, rattlesnake, fish I am sure is from another planet, and various other interesting food I cannot pronounce or spell. I am hopeful we will not see Monkey brains.

Tomorrow Doug Hennig and I head to Holland for the Software Developer Network conference on Monday. If I have time and a decent Internet connection I will make a report. I will be presenting three sessions and ignoring Doug’s (especially his Vertical Market session {g}).

Thanks for the great time Germany! Rainer: you run a terrific conference. Good news to the rest of the world as he has announced German DevCon dates through 2014. Check out the Fox Wiki for absolute details.

I am thankful that the sessions at German DevCon start at 8:30. I woke up with wake-up call and proceeded to fall back to sleep for 30 minutes. I still was able to get to Steven Black’s “Niche Marketing for VFP” session. I learned several important points during this session. Steven pointed out a new marketing term to me called SERP (Search Engine Results Page). What Steven talked about is owning your name property. Where does your web site come up in the results when you type in your company name or your name in Google? I am happy to say mine shows up at the very top via Google Germany. Steve provided several tips to include in the HTML and tweaks you can do using Google Analytics. This session also covered what a niche is and a number of niches available for VFP developers. I found this session to be very beneficial and glad I did not oversleep a minute more. Five of five stars.

Marcia Akins was up next with her “The 26 Hour Day” session. I saw this session earlier this year as she was starting to develop it. In this session Marcia shows a number of productivity tips and tricks and talks about how much time she thinks it will save you. I told her that her time estimates are conservative. This session covered a couple of my personal favorites: DeclareLocals.PRG (from MegaFox: 1002 Things You Want to Know About Extending VFP) and the new Edit Property/Method replacement dialog (soon to be added to VFPX). These two tools save me time. Marcia also showed her form and class hacking tool and pointed out how my HackCX Professional is like her tool on steroids. Her plug was very nice (and unnecessary), but she incorrectly pointed out that HackCX will even clean your kitchen. This is not true in the current version. Doug Hennig mentioned that I need to finish the MenuDesigner before I add the kitchen cleaning feature into HackCX {g}. Another five of five stars.

Craig Berntson followed Marcia’s session with “Continuous Integration.” This is a fairly new term (well new to me at least) that encompasses the automation of the build process and testing. This really is about development processes with respect to using source code control, building, and testing the build in tight iterative loops. Make small changes to the code, unit test, check it in, build, review the build results, use automated testing, and check the status of the tests. Better quality software based on a repeatable and proven process. Craig showed a number of free tools and talked about some very expensive tools to implement this process. He did this from the perspective of the .NET developer. .NET developers are evidentally ahead of the curve on automating the process. Craig did have one slide to show some of the tools that work with VFP like FoxUnit (automated testing), Code Analyst from VFPX to help with refactoring, and mentioned Rick Borup’s paper on FinalBuilder with VFP for “Automating the Build.” Four of five stars (would have been even better if this was presented from a VFP perspective).

Lunch – more good food, and of course more good smoked salmon.

I had ti get sine more work done in the afternoon along with some interesting discussions with Christof Wollenhaupt and Igor Vit (from Prague). I wanted to go to Michael Niethammer’s session “VFP – Tools und Assistenten.” I reviewed his materials a couple of days ago and figured I had a thing or two I could learn. Instead I ran through my demos for the VFPX session I was about to give.

I did give my session “VFPX Tools and Components – Live.” There was a big crowd in the room and you could feel the excitement as I revealed each of the tools and components. A quick poll at the beginning of the session revealed very few developers have heard of VFPX. It was consistent with the findings at Southwest Fox (15-20%). Looks like we need a “Tell a friend about VFPX” campaign. As I went through each section of the session I asked if anyone was using what I just showed and a few hands would go up. Then I followed up with the question asking how many developers might use it in the future and most of the room raised their hands. The session was definitely more interactive than any session I have given in Frankfurt the last three years. There definitely was a buzz in the room. I was very fun for me, I just hope everyone else was having a good time too.

One more day to go – conferences sure seem to fly by.

My day started out with Doug Hennig’s “Developing VFP Apps for Vista.” I first saw this at OzFox 2007 and have recommended every VFP developer should see this session. This session was very popular at Southwest Fox and Advisor DevCon too. I am also getting closer to purchasing my first Vista computer so the session has more relevance this time around. Doug has real world practical experience on the topic and is considered the authority. I think there are two key take-aways from this session. The first important ideas is security and not working around it, but rather work with it. The second is that even if you do not want to use Vista for development, note your customers eventual will be so you need to develop this expertise. Doug has lots of useful code to help make your applications compatible too. Still a six out of five stars.

Next up is the keynote. Alan Griver started the session by presenting Rainer with the VFP Lifetime Achievement Award as I posted yesterday. Alan also talked about “the announcement” from last March. Unfortunately Alan’s machine was suffering from a serious hard drive problem. He was able to boot in Vista safe mode, but none of his demos were working because they have registry dependencies. This was a bummer since I have seen his keynote material at the Advisor conference and it was very interesting, and showed some key technologies VFP developers will use for years to come. Doug Hennig stepped in with some Vista demos, and Steven Black made some compelling points on why VFP developers will be successful for many years to come. Stability is reliability. I have enjoyed Steven’s sessions over the years, but today I realized during this session that Steven could become a religious evangalist if his software career wanes. Steven basically whet the attendee appetite for his all evening session “FoxPro is dead! Now What? The Case for VFP.”

After lunch I had to work on some projects so I skipped the first two afternoon sessions. My “Fishing with a ProjectHook” session was the last afternoon session. It was not attended by a lot of developers because it was against Christof’s “Cross Platform with VFP and Guineu” and Andy Kramek’s “SQL Server for VFP Developers Part 2.” Personally I would have read the white paper for the ProjectHook session, and attended Christof’s session (which I heard was top gun). My session went okay, but definitely was not the best I have delivered it. It could be the fact I am still suffering a bit from jet lag, or it could be that I thrive off more energy from more attendees. I really appreciated the attendees who selected my session. Thanks for coming.

Dinner was very good. The only disappointment is they did not serve smoked salmon. This broke my streak of smoked salmon at every meal. Marcia Akins and I hunted for it for a while, but there was none to be had.

I also skipped the evening sessions to catch up with several clients. Skype is a lifesaver.

Alan Griver announced that Rainer Becker is awarded the Visual FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award during the keynote here at the German FoxPro DevCon.

Rainer is the organizer of the German FoxPro DevCon and is one of the leaders involved with everything FoxPro in Germany. This is well deserved based on his incredible contributions to theFox Community for many, many years.

More posted on the FoxPro Wiki by Steven Black already!

Congratulations Rainer!

I arrived in Germany Wednesday to attend the 14th German DevCon.

Wednesday is a transition and travel day. It is brutal getting use to the new timezone so this year I took a new approach and decided to take the 10-minute power nap approach. I have tried the stay up all day without success, and tried the long-nap approach. It worked. I actually slept through the night Wednesday and woke completely refreshed Thursday morning. Nice.

I had lunch with Steve Black, Alan Griver, Craig Berntson and Doug Hennig (both Craig and Doug will be blogging about the conference too). I spent the rest of the day working on some projects, power napping, and attending some speaker related meetings.

More to come…

Hot off the wire: Cathy Pountney is blogging which is great news.

http://cathypountney.blogspot.com/

Welcome to the blogosphere!

OK, normally I avoid stuff like this, but the local computer club I belong to has a newsletter with links to interesting sites. This site is interesting: 3-D Pong.

Halloween was about kids and candy back in the day. Not anymore. I am not sure when the tide turned, but in our neighborhood we now have adults coming to the door asking for candy. Seriously.

I was sitting in my office working on some cool report for a client not 10 feet from the front door. I hear Therese open the door and the “kid” barked out Trick or Treat. It was the deepest “Trick or Treat” I have heard in my life. I ask Therese how old the kid was thinking we got a super mature 12 year-old. She said it was someone who literally looked like he was on his way home from the office. Several other adults also came to our door last night. When did adults hijack Halloween?!?

I know the economy in Michigan is rough, so have some of the unemployed resorted to begging candy to make ends meet?

Ever since my kids were old enough to understand (three years old if I recall correctly) I implemented the Halloween “Dad Tax.” When the kids came home with their loot we would dump it on to the table and make sure we picked out the garbage (by parental definition, not kid definition). Once we waxed the garbage I implemented the “Dad Tax.” This is where Dad gets to take a certain percentage of their candy and hand it over to the greater good as Dad sees fit. I explained to the kids early on how this is implemented by our governments and how I am teaching them early on what taxation is like before they get a paying job. The kids naturally were against this from the start, especially when they saw how all their hard work took a hit from someone not doing any of the work. Lesson learned.

Last night my youngest came home from her travels and immediately started in on her tax evasion plan. She really showed me how well this life lesson has impacted her. She decided to implement a “Dad Donation” to her favorite Dad charity (me of course), in hope of reducing her tax burden. Sweet, giving to others through a charity of your choice before the greedy politicians decide how to spend your hard earned money. This life lesson went even better than I could have hoped for in my wildest dreams.

By the way, I was the hit with my own life lesson last night while I was thinking of this. My two oldest have moved off to college so the revenue sharing of Halloween is getting thin these days. This means I have to hunt down other forms of candy revenue, or increase the Dad Tax. I began to plot the Uncle Tax and started real long term planning with the Grandpa tax. {g}

{rant}

This is mirroring what we are seeing in Michigan. We are watching people move away to the greener pastures of Texas and Arizona, and the tax base is eroding very fast. So to boost the state revenues the Michigan legislature decided to increase the taxes on those who remain in Michigan. People are losing their homes at alarming rates and personal budgets are squeezed tighter than ever so the politicians decide to make the hurting hurt more. They also decided to tax consultants for the services they provide to the clients. This little law change was implemented by a part-time legislature making full-time salaries and was done without much thought to the impact on small business and the administrative headache they dumped in our laps. Maybe they should have hired a couple of economists to consult on the package before they put it together. Today they extended the deadline of December 1 to December 20th so they have time to rethink this crazy strategy. Ya think there is a better way to balance a budget?

{/rant}

Life lessons, you are never too old to learn them.