Shedding Some Light

I am happy to announce I will be returning to Germany again this November to present at the 14th Microsoft Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2007. This is a fantastic conference put on by Rainer Becker and his team. Rainer has an excellent collection of presenters presenting 60 VFP sessions:

English speaking: Marcia Akins, Craig Berntson, Steven Black, Jim Booth, Alan Griver, Doug Hennig, Venelina Jordanova, Andy Kramek, and Rick Schummer.

German speaking: Marcus Alt, Rainer Becker, Joachim Durr, Sebastian Flucke, Uwe Habermann, Jochim Hilgers, Kirsten Hinrichs, Armin Neudert, Michael Niethammer, Patrick Scharer, Markus Winhard, Christof Wollenhaupt, and Jurgen “wOOdy” Wondzinski.

I will be presenting four sessions:

• SQL Server Toolkit for the VFP Developer
• Fishing with a ProjectHook
• VFPX Tools and Components – Live
• Creating Help – Made Easy!

The conference is held at a terrific conference center that serves the best food you could ask for. There are lots of opportunities to network and vendors to visit as well. If you want to learn more about this popular conference you can read some of my blog entries in November 2006 and 2005 (see the index on my blog). I really recommend this conference!

I am please to announce Mike Roof is the lucky winner of the White Light Computing $300 Scholarship for the Southwest Fox 2007 conference. Mike’s company is sending four people to the conference so they increased their odds of winning {g}. I talked to Mike yesterday and he is very psyched about not only attending Southwest Fox, but he is also attending the West Wind Technologies Double Impact training the two days before Southwest Fox. We laughed how much his head will hurt after listening to Rick Strahl for two days, followed by two and a half more days of intense conference sessions. A fantastic training opportunity for any developer. It sounds like a lot of developers are taking advantage of this year.

Sorry for the delay in the announcement, but I ran out of time before my vacation and forgot to hold the drawing. Mike’s name was drawn by the lead marketing advisor here at White Light Computing out of the 85 names registered by July 1, 2007.

Congratulations Mike! Only 76 days until we meet in Mesa!

I really thought the month of July would be really slow at the Southwest Fox registration headquarters because the deadline for early-bird registrations ended, but they keep on coming and today we registered our 100th person to attend the conference. Doug will be updating the Who’s Coming list soon, which now stands at 116 people including the presenters. Note: not all the people are on the list because each person has to opt-in.

Most of my expectations have been exceeded, and we are well on our way to breaking all records for Southwest Fox attendance. Only 78 days until Southwest Fox!

I am looking forward to seeing you in Mesa!

Today I received my June/July 2007 issue of the Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro (AGTMSVFP) and they implemented the Journal format (similar to fading FoxTalk 2.0). I like the change for a couple of reasons:

1) It will be more profitable to Advisor Publications since they are not printing in many colors on glossy paper. A profitable Advisor will produce this publication longer, which benefits the Fox Community.

2) No smearing. The glossy magazines seem to smear in my hands. I am not sure if this is something that only happens to me, but I hate ink smears on my fingers.

3) Same great authors and content.

Just in case you were wondering were I has been for the last couple of weeks: I have been to Alaska. Yep, 49 states down, 1 to go (Louisiana for those keeping track). We also hit the Yukon Territory and British Columbia, both Canadian Provinces I have not previously visited.

I hope to discuss my trip more and post some of the 1000 photos I took (along with a couple of hours of video) somewhere at a later date. I was really disconnected on this vacation with rare cell coverage and spotty Internet access. A real vacation. In fact, I rarely turned on the computer. It felt good to disconnect. Fortunately all emergencies and urgent problems got handled in a timely manner.

Thanks to all who were concerned when they heard a tour plane went down and killed four folks from a Princess cruise ship. Some folks did not get a response from me, or see me online for the two weeks and were a little worried at first. I never saw the report until the cruise line left a notice in our room. I actually took one of those plane rides around Mt. McKinley (different location from the one that did crash), and was on a Princess Cruise ship, but a different one. We actually ported with the ship suffering from the loss of passengers during their excursion. We feel sad for the families involved knowing how much we anticipated this trip and all the planning involved, just to have it end the way it did.

So more later after I catch up on the 27 items still remaining on my to-do list for the next couple of days.

I received a notification from Visionpace this evening about their next VFP bootcamp coming up in August. I get inquiries from VFP developers looking for training, and I have Visionpace on the short list of vendors I recommend. Here are the details from Visionpace:

The next VFP Boot Camp will be in Kansas City, Missouri, August 20-22, 2007

Registration ends on August 1, 2007 for the highly-acclaimed VFP Boot Camp. This event delivers three jam-packed days of solid, hands-on learning. From the fundamentals of VFP development through the very latest VFP 9.0 features, this boot camp is designed to quickly get your VFP skills up to speed. Attendees will receive a 500 page manual in both print and electronic format.

For more information visit http://visionpace.com/developereducation.html or email info AT visionpace.com. To register call 888-904-7900.

Two new sponsors to announce today:

1) Information Technology Associates (ITA) is a new bronze sponsor. ITA is a professional software development, computer services, and information systems consulting firm specializing in the design, development and support of custom software for business and office applications. ITA is owned and operated by VFP guru Rick Borup. Rick is presenting”Framework Fundamentals” and “So You Want to be an Independent Developer” at this year’s Southwest Fox, and presented at the last two Southwest Fox conferences.

2) Red Gate Software is a new bronze sponsor. Red Gate Software has been developing ingeniously simple tools that simplify the business of working with SQL Server and .NET. I personally use some of their tools when working and deploying Visual FoxPro applications in conjunction with SQL Server on the backend. Red Gate has provided us with some great door prizes for the conference.

If you are interested in being a sponsor, please send an email to sponsors AT swfox.net.

I can only start this post out by saying THANKS!

I am overwhelmed by the response to Southwest Fox 2007 and the number of registrations we have taken for the conference. When I talked to Bob about taking over the conference he cautioned me to not be concerned if the registrations were not hot and heavy until a month before the conference. He said I probably would be worried when less than half would register for the early bird. This puts a lot of pressure on the organizer when planning the budget and determining where money can be spent on things like food for attendees, travel for the speakers, and things like meeting the number of room nights we have committed to before hitting financial penalties. He told me to stock up on Tums (and I do have a Costco membership so I can purchase in bulk {g}).

Southwest Fox is in terrific shape for 2007. We have 88 paid registrations so far, which is more than were at the conference last year, and are on a pace to break all attendance records for this conference. I guess it is even possible to sell-out the conference (something we really did not think about when putting this together).

The Who’s Going page is going to be generated and posted in the next few days.

So thanks from the bottom of my heart for the great response and making the planning much easier. For those who still plan on registering, no need to wait until the last minute. Only 98 days before we meet in Mesa!