Shedding Some Light

The fax line is taking a beating (compared to the usual one or two a month I get) and the emails are coming in quite often with the registrations for Southwest Fox 2007, the best Visual FoxPro conference being held in October this year! You can sense the early-bird deadline is approaching when we took in 5 registrations one day last week.

Just in case you have not heard, the early-bird discount is scheduled to expire on July 1st (this coming Sunday). Now is the time to save yourself US$75, get that freebie pre-conference session (US$99 savings and way more value considering the sessions available), AND possibly get a US$300 tuition scholarship for the conference from White Light Computing. Definitely a great deal. There are more surprises on the way too!

Your humble registration taker (me) appreciates all the attendees who already registered and did not wait until the last week because I really need to get *some* development done for my clients. Still, I am willing to work at all hours of the day to process the registrations as they arrive, so keep on sending them!

Doug, Tamar, and I are happy with the registrations so far, but we are expecting this to be a busy week with those who like to wait until the deadline to push the credit card process out as far as possible. We understand, but the clock is ticking and we hope you get in on the great deal we have on the table at the moment. We know VFP developers are familiar with deadlines and how to manage them. Mark your calendar, post the reminder in your calendar software, stick a note on the monitor, or even write on your hand if necessary, but get the registration form filled out and sent in.

While you are at it, invite a friend to come along. The more the merrier.

Don’t forget, if you need me to help you with the boss and getting her/him to send you to Southwest Fox, or any of the other VFP conferences – give me a call or send me an email. I will be happy to help you out.

I hope to see you in Mesa in 115 days!

For those who like to follow along with my current desktop image, I was able to update today to the latest configuration of the International Space Station (my summer place as I like to joke about).

I borrowed this beautiful picture on the NASA multimedia page.

As a side note: Atlantis is not landing today as planned because of bad weather. The plan is to try again tomorrow at Kennedy Space Center, and Edwards Airforce Base in California as a backup. They are doing a orbital burn to slow the shuttle orbiter down a bit to bring the landing in earlier when the weather is expected to be better.

It is interesting to listen to the interaction between the astronauts and Mission Control in Houston. Checklists after checklists with step-by-step processes ensuring a successful flight. The thing I really notice is the number of “thanks” being passed around. I think the “thanks” part is really missing in business interaction these days, and something I have to remember to do more.

So thanks for reading my blog today {bg}.

After reading an email from Microsoft today about the two Window Vista logos I decided to ask Milind Lele if VFP 9 SP2 was going to be logoed with “Works with Windows Vista” or “Certified for Windows Vista.”

Milind said VFP 9 SP2 will get the “Works with Windows Vista” logo.

If you want more details on the logo you can head over to the Microsoft Vista Logo site.

Tonight I climbed up on the roof of my house with the intention of seeing the space shuttle Atlantis and International Space Station (ISS) fly over southeastern Michigan just before 11:00pm EDT. I missed them last night so I was bummed when I saw the horizon was cloud covered and the kids on the street behind us were blowing off some fireworks in the line of sight, but I was not disappointed!

The orbit took the two satellites from the northwest horizon to the southeast. They were only in the clear sky for a short time, maybe 10 seconds. It was an impressive site and well worth the effort. I probably could have seen the shuttle orbiter and space station from the ground, but the homes behind us are colonials and the orbit was 30 degrees off the horizon. I thought for sure the homes would block my view.

I am not sure which one was leading the other, but they are definitely on the same orbit and one was chasing the other. Atlantis is currently 10 nautical miles lower than ISS. It was definitely cool to see them. If you are interested in finding out when ISS is flying over your geographic location go to http://heavens-above.com/ and put in your location.

If you want the new Sedna DataExplorer to be the DataExplorer showing up in the Task Pane Manager you need to copy it from the Sedna Beta folder location to the VFP 9 root folder. You might want to rename the existing one before doing this in case you want the old one for some reason. For some reason I expected Microsoft to include the new DataExplorer in place of the old one, but the Sedna beta installs itself below the VFP root folder.

If you are tired of typing in a long path to run the DataExplorer in standalone mode you can do a couple of things to save you time:

1) Once you copy the DataExplorer.APP to the VFP 9 root folder you can type DX in the command window to run it in standalone mode.

2) You can edit the DX entry in FoxCode to run the DataExplorer.APP in the Sedna beta folder. To edit the script you need to bring up the IntelliSense Manager, go to the Custom page, find the DX entry and click on the Script button.

3) Type in the Command Window one of the two:
DO HOME() + “DataExplorer.app”
DO HOME() + “Sedna Beta\DataExplorer\DataExplorer.app”

Hopefully you are all testing the new Sedna extensions and VFP 9 SP2.

A friend of mine just passed along this link to an editorial about the sad state of America’s Education System written by Lou Dobbs called “Dobbs: A legacy in search of a president.” This editorial really points out something I have been harping on for the last 15 years about the education of our kids with respect to mathematics and science (and other subjects too). How do we expect to fill technical jobs in research and development, design, and programming in medical, engineering fields, and computer science?

I am shocked to hear how few kids graduate in the Detroit Public Schools (which my kids thankfully do not attend). A quarter of the kids graduate?!? In comparison I would guess less than 5% of the students in my daughter’s class did not graduate. I am fortunate to live in one of the best school districts in the state. Detroit Public Schools appear to be real bad, but this is a nationwide problem in big cities according to the numbers presented by Mr. Dobbs.

I have intentionally left politics out of this blog, but I absolutely agree with Mr. Dobbs’ request for President Bush to build his legacy by using the last months of his term to starting a course of correction on this issue.

I know several people have been blogging about this today, but the long awaited beta is released and you can get it here. I wanted to comment on one thing on the fix list I did not think was going to make the cut:

VFP9: Debugger: ToolTip for character variable in the TRACE window no longer has quotes around the value. Did in previous VFP versions.

I know this might feel like one of the small things in the life of a developer, but it still throws me each time I see the quote-less string. Thanks Fox Team! This one has “bugged” me for a long time! The entire list is extensive and impressive. Looks like we are going to have some fun over the next couple months.

I am a big fan of XFRX and today I got notification from Martin Haluza that the newest version was released. There are a number of speed improvements in the PDF generation and a few bug fixes which should directly benefit my customers, but the big news is the release of a new output type of XPS.

XPS is the new XML Paper Specification by Microsoft. This has been touted as a “PDF-killer” by some people, but I really don’t think PDFs are going anywhere at the moment. I just like my VFP solutions to offer integration with new technologies and Martin has done all the work that will make me look like a hero to my clients. I downloaded the Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack since I don’t have the .NET 3.0 framework loaded on my development machine yet. The process was surprisingly painless. It installed the Microsoft XPS Document Writer (printer) so I can print from any application to a XPS file (not required by XFRX), and the XPS Viewer to look at and print XPS files (just like Acrobat Reader for PDFs). Slick.

Thanks Martin, and keep up the good work with XFRX!