Shedding Some Light

Just in case you have not seen this yet, Bob Kocher has more surprises for you at Southwest Fox 2006. I just read that he has added Rick Borup, Milind Lele, Rod Paddock, and Christof Wollenhaupt. Wow!

I think this will be Christof’s first speaking engagement in the USA, but he has been a big time speaker at the German DevCon for years and someone I really respect. His knowledge of VFP and software development are tops in our community. I am really looking forward to his session ‘The Security Cookbook.”

Rick Borup is one of my personal favorite speakers at VFP conferences and is the co-author on Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions. His session on “Automating the Build” is something I plan on attending.

Rod Paddock has hosted the often overlooked FoxForum.com site, which is where I hang out daily. Rod is an accomplished developer in both VFP and .NET so his session on “Understand the .NET Framework” should be a good one.

What a great set of additions to a power packed line up!

I also see Bob has announced each attendee will receive $150 in DBi Dollars. What a fantastic offer from the folks at DBi Tech. DBi Tech has been involved with the Fox Community for years, but have really stepped it up in the last 12 months with the Sedna components they are planning to release as part of the product and now this generous offer. Way to go DBi Tech and Bob!

Looks like Southwest Fox is heating up even more to be the best valued conference of the year here in the USA. I am sure there is not better bang for the buck in conferences around. You still have a couple of weeks to get the lowest price available. And knowing Bob, he probably still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

(updated 06/20/2006 to remove Milind’s speaking as Bob has removed him from the list in latest post)

I have a situation here that has me perplexed. I build an APP file, the VFP Builder Manager (Builder.APP) to be specific. I do a Recompile All, and have checked on Debug Info and unchecked Encrypted in the Project Info dialog when I build.

I have added a SET STEP ON in the code to figure out a problem I have with a new builder I am writing. When the Trace Window opens there is no code displayed. None. It is as if the Debug Info was checked off.

I have checked the code for SYS(2030) and there are no instances of this called in the project. There is no SET DEBUG OFF anywhere in the project. The FXPs are not readonly and not getting replaced because the code stops on my SET STEP ON. I have checked this with PROGRAM() and LINENO() in the Watch window and they match my additions to the Builder.PRG. No projecthook to reset the Debug Info setting. I even added a SYS(2030,1) to make sure VFP was not stopping the debugging internally.

I know I am running the correct version of the APP file by checking _BUILDER and doing a ?FDATE(_BUILDER) to see if the file is the correct build date.

As you probably know, I don’t have much more hair to pull out.

Has anyone seen this before? Can anyone point me to the corrective action? There could be prizes!

Finally coming up for some air today after a marathon of activity here at White Light World Headquarters. I added about 10 blog entry ideas to my Wiki over the last couple of weeks and have not had time to address any of them.

VFP 9 has many enhancements to the Property Sheet, but one I was using a lot this last week include a shortcut to the Edit Property/Method dialog. I was refactoring some classes for a builder framework I am extending (which will be detailed in a future article in Advisors Guide to Visual FoxPro). I was adding properties and methods, renaming them, changing descriptions, and moving them to different classes. Fun work.

One of the frustrating things to make these changes is to to pull the Edit Property/Methods dialog off the Form or Class menu. Once displayed you have to scroll down the list to find the property/method you want to change. What I rediscovered this week is you can call the dialog from the Property Sheet shortcut menu and it will actually position you on the PEM (property/event/method) in the dialog. What a time saver.

Unfortunately this is only available for custom property and methods you add to the form or class. Right-clicking on intrinsic PEM does not display the menu option. Bummer.

Now the dialog should become a MenuHit project on SednaX (hint, hint, hint {g}). The dialog should be modeless like Doug Hennig’s New Property/Method dialog. It should be resizable, remember its last size and position, and be dockable. It should be MemberData smart (making a change to the PEM in this dialog wipes out the MemberData details), the New Property and New Method buttons should call Doug’s dialog. I am sure there are other ideas. What are your’s?

There was a brief thread on this topic a long time ago on FoxForum.com (“Semi-hacking .SCX/.VCX PEMs for speed” thread in June of 2005). I offered to help, but unfortunately the thread and the discussion went no where. Hopefully someone will take the charge and come up with a replacement dialog.

Back in March I blogged looking for instructions to set up a Virtual Machine. I even asked this question to the attendees of GLGDW 2006. I flat out have not had a single pointer to some decent resources. This surprises me.

Since this time I have run across two good resources I want to share with you. The first is a book called The Rational Guide To: Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (Amazon link here). It is a short book and has some decent pointers on configuration and setup of VirtualPC. While this book has some simple topics and states some obvious points, you will definitely get your US$10 worth from the read.

The second resource is a new whitepaper from Ronald Beekelaar and John Paul Cook titled Developing and Debugging Software Inside of Virtual Machines. You can get this whitepaper free of charge of on Microsoft’s VirtualPC site. Besides the testing and debugging topic, this whitepaper helps you with copying a virtual machine (VM) to save you time setting up different configurations of the same OS, making new VM, and configuring advanced networking scenarios.

Neither of these resources resolved all the things I was looking for initially, but between the two I have been able to answer most of the questions. Hopefully if you are in the market for some answers to similar questions you will find these resources helpful.

So we headed out to the pizza place to continue the meeting for some beverages. It is not unusual for our group to do this and quite often the meeting after the meeting is as good or better than the original presentation.

There certainly was some fun discussion, several problems solved, and much Fox education being shared. We did not solve world hunger, but we figured out how vendors can reduce SPAM, discussed numerous gotchas with SQL Selects in VFP 9 (and how Craig needed to use SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 70 to work around a UNION problem with character fields and memo fields), and probably a dozen or more detailed discussions.

I got home just about an hour ago and several people joined SednaX and specifically noted how Craig’s session inspired the decision to join.

I have not had a chance to review the video recording. We decided to try a digital video camera because of the last minute decision to record the event. I am going to send it to Craig for review and possible editing and then decide if we should make it available to the rest of the VFP Community. We are not video professionals, but it has a lot of value if it worked.

Indeed, the VFP World Domination Tour stop in Detroit was a big hit.