Shedding Some Light

It certainly is shaping up to be a busy second half of the year with respects to presentations.

You may have read the White Light Computing news release a couple weeks back announcing my selection to speak at the 12th VFP DevCon Germany 2005 held November 10-12, 2005. I am very excited as this will be my first trip to Europe. I have heard from other VFP developers the German DevCon is a fantastic conference with premium sessions and a super facility. It is a priviledge to be select to present at this conference.

I can also announce I will be speaking at the 9th F1 Technologies DevCon, September 26-28, 2005 in Toledo. Mike and Toni have asked me to do a presentation on Debugging VFE Style, a session on XCase, and another session on integrating developer tools into your VFE development. F1 put on a great conference in 2002 in Vegas, so I have extremely high expectations for this year’s trip to Toledo.

Looks like the rest of July and all of August will be packed with session preparations, which should be fun. It has been more than seven months since we wrapped up the writing for What’s New in Nine. The break has been nice, but it will be good to get back to do some more formal writing. I have also promised David Stevenson a series of articles for FoxTalk. Looks like Microsoft Word will be getting a workout.

Noooooooooooo, not again. Space.com and CNN are reporting the fleet is officially grounded until further notice because foam was spotted flying off the external tank during yesterday’s launch. This was being heralded as one of the smoothest shuttle launches to date and in less than 24 hours the fleet is back in mothballs.

The irony of this decision is the crew of Atlantis is prepare to fly and rescue the Discovery astronauts if there is a major problem with the orbiter and cannot be repaired. So what happens if the orbital boom survey or the pictures from tomorrow’s space station fly-by show more than a chipped tile and it cannot be fixed? God help the decision makers if this ever comes to pass. What happens if the same thing happens to Atlantis on the way to rescue Discovery? We could have two-thirds of the orbiters crippled and hanging in space. Not a good thought.

Is Russia ready to rescue the US Space program again?

I can now admit I have not used the report chaining capability Microsoft added to Visual FoxPro in VFP 8, at least until two days ago. It is the typical case of finally hitting the need for the feature.

One of my clients called me into a project where they are struggling to make a report break to a new page based on the data. I played around with the report for an hour and was able to break to a new page where they wanted it to break, but the side-effects were forcing a page break later that was not desired. I tried a couple more things by adding extra groupings, but it was not working as desired.

Since the developer was using VFP 8, I thought of chaining reports. I split the one report into two reports and called them with the appropriate commands:

SCAN REPORT FORM Itinerary01 NEXT 1 NOCONSOLE NOPAGEEJECT TO PRINTER REPORT FORM Itinerary02 NEXT 1 NOCONSOLE TO PRINTERENDSCAN

The NOPAGEEJECT clause tells VFP to not close the print job. This worked like a charm when printing to the printer. I then moved to the preview logic and whammy, I was getting two previews for each of the records. Crud! When I tested running the reports to Acrobat I was getting prompted for two file names. Double crud! Another great idea crashing and burning. Even though this report is not previewed as often as it is printed, I suspected the users were not going to be happy with this, especially since they like to print the reports to Acrobat.

So I fire up VFP 9 and run the exact same code. I was not expecting different results, but I wanted to see how the reports looked in the new Report Preview window. I was going to investigate how the new ReportListener might help. To my surprise, the preview window was only opened once per record. The VFP 9 report chaining is way smarter! A hidden gem (at least to me).

As a bonus, the graphic images not printing to the Acrobat 6 PDF driver in VFP 8 are printing just fine from the VFP 9 reports. Double bonus. So once again, Richard Stanton (Fox Team Report Designer guy extraordinaire): you da man!

So if you are struggling with reports in any version of VFP prior to 9, head out and upgrade and see if your struggles are reduced or even eliminated. This simple little behavior change just sold two copies of VFP 9 to the two developers I am working with on this project.

The launch of Discovery this morning was spectacular as expected taking 7 new heroes back to space. This is the second time Discovery has healed the space program as it followed Challenger into space back in 1988.

Thanks to CNN (excellent coverage of the updated features on the shuttle system) and NBC (very cool animation) for the excellent coverage this morning. I really liked the new camera views and look forward to seeing a launch in person one day.

Earlier this morning I posted about the different Web pages where developers can see what is new in the various versions of VFP. After posting I headed out to a client and on the way I recall some pages in the Fox Wiki where this information is detailed.

No sooner do I get to the client that BOb Archer hits me with an email about the Visual FoxPro Version Feature Concordance and just a little bit ago Steve Black was kind enough to let me know the same. Steve provided an extra hint as well:

“There, by version of Fox, are all the NEW functions, events, commands, files, pieces, etc and below that, what’s ENHANCED (fly the mouse over a few and note the popup that explains what’s new).”

This is a superb resource and a way cool feature!! Kudos again to Steve Black!

(Thanks to both BOb and Steve for nudging me, and my client for providing the 10 minute break during a very busy day to post this entry {g})

I work with other developers at my clients and mentor several developers on a regular basis. It is not unusual for developers to ask me the question “When was that added to VFP?” I am finding it harder and harder to recall the details off the top of my head with so many versions of VFP.

This morning over on FoxForum a developer who is getting back into VFP development wanted to find out how he could go through a history of VFP to see what new features were added since VFP 6. Naturally I wanted to answer this information is in the VFP Help file in the What’s New section, but he last developed in VFP 6 and now owns a copy of VFP 9, so access to the 7 and 8 Help files is not on his machine.

Then I recalled the VFP Help files are online on the Microsoft MSDN site. Each version has a separate page:

What’s New in VFP 9
What’s New in VFP 8
What’s New in VFP 7
What’s New in VFP 6 (not found)
What’s New in VFP 5

This is a great way for developers who skipped upgrading to each version to find out all the features which are new to them. Unfortunately I could not find what’s new in 6, but I am guessing it is out there.

The definitive guide for me is the Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 6 and Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro 7, but unfortunately there is no 8 or 9 in this series. I am also a fan of the What’s New in VFP 7, 8, and 9 as well. I use these books along with the Help files to understand which versions of VFP I can support for the developers tools I have published. I find it easier to look up a command in the various resources than to find it breaks when I perform system testing for the developer tool in each version of VFP I plan to support.

This is a headline in this morning’s Great Lakes IT Report: “Bill Gates is puzzled by computer science apathy.” I also read a couple of news items with the same story yesterday. If he wants to understand it, all he has to do is sit down with some high school students and he will get his answer. I have and can tell you there are several reasons.

The top reason is counselors are telling these young adults that computer science is a dead end career. Two years ago my son was talking to the Dean of the Math, Science and Technology school in our district. He asked my son what field he was interested in going into and what colleges he was interested in attending. I was in the room to witness the look of horror on the dean’s face when my son noted Computer Science. Then I listened to ten minutes of blah, blah, blah about how all computer jobs were headed to India. Apparently the dean did not realize the field I was in and was not prepared for my ten minutes of counterpointing. The field of Computer Science is not dead in America! So Bill, tell the teachers and counselors in our schools to get a clue before they go off molding the next generations of minds and fill their heads with incorrect information.

Here is a quote from the same article: “Gates said that even if young people don’t know that salaries and job openings in computer science are on the rise, they’re hooked on so much technology – cell phones, digital music players, instant messaging, Internet browsing – that it’s puzzling why more don’t want to grow up to be programmers.” This brings up three interesting points.

1. The salary issue. At least here in the Midwest, salaries are not on the rise, They are stable, but more important, they are lower than five years ago (simple supply and demand). Even though more people are returning to work, flat out and simple, there are fewer people interested in returning to a job doing programming.
2. Bill seems to have a different view than I do on this concept. Just because young people are consumers of this technology, does not mean they want to be the one to make it work different in the future. They want it faster and cheaper but in general they want some one else to do all the hard work. Most of my children’s friends could care less about working today. The fact is most of them do not have jobs, nor have their parents provided incentive for them to get to work. What we need are passionate developers, and from my perspective, young people are not passionate about much.
3. The third point about his quote: programming alone is boring. Bill needs to stress all aspects of Computer Science including interacting with people, understanding their needs, translating needs to design, programming, testing, installation, and production support. So many people miss the mark and think Computer Science is only programming.

The last point I want to make is the career path of Computer Science is not for everyone. I am sure Bill Gates understands this. I believe it requires a special type of person. I can not think of many careers requiring a complete revamp every two years. Sure there are developers still writing COBOL code and are working on the same project for the last 10 years or more, but this is rare. Most developers learn new technologies to better the software they create, to provide better value to their boss and company, to stay ahead of the competition, and even just because they like change. Change is the part of my career I have enjoyed the most. Sure I could have been one of the COBOL programmers working on the same project my entire career, but my personality does not tolerate boredom well. What I am witnessing today is more developers hitting burnout than ever before. So many developers are looking at .NET and questioning if it is worth climbing one more technology learning curve. I believe the next generation entering into college is recognizing this and questioning if it is worth it or not. Do they want to enter into a career where the financial business model for success requires built in obsolescence every 24 months?

So my humble message to Bill Gates is this: you want to understand why this the next generation is apathetic, ask and you will get hours of discussion. This is my personal experience.

This week one of my readers posted on Tek-Tips how much he enjoyed my post on Doing whatever it takes post, but he had a problem reading the blog in Internet Explorer 5.0. In particular he was getting what appears to be carriage returns after each single word. Unfortunately I do not have any old machines hanging out with IE 5.0 (or even 5.5 for that matter) so I am not able to test it out. I have tested it with all the current versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, and Mozilla and they all work fine.

So out of curiosity I fired up an old copy of Netscape 4.7 to see if it works and sure enough it makes a mess out of the HTML. I tested this out on a number of Blogger blogs and other blogs posted on different sites to see how they fared. Most of the Blogger sites get messy to various degrees. Some of the other sites on Foxite and ASP.NET work okay, but are not exact.

So I investigated the Browser states on my sites. Netscape is not even at 1%, Mozilla shows up at 4%, FoxFire is 20%, and IE at 50% for the last couple of months. The other 25% is spread across several bots and browsers like Opera, Safari and Konqueror.

Drilling down into IE, just a little more than 1% are using 5.0.

So the question begs, how much time should I spend trying to fix this issue? I hate ticking off readers because of accessibility, but we are talking two percent of all hits on my Web site, not just the blog. I understand not all developers have access to the latest machinesand operating systems, but there are other resources like libraries, cyber cafes, and even family computers. For what it is worth, I have posted a question to Blogger support on this issue. They only maintain a list of browser compatibility for the posting functionality. Fingers crossed.