Jun
20

Listen to Andrew MacNeill’s FoxShow podcast (http://traffic.libsyn.com/akselsoft/FoxShow82.mp3…) featuring Doug, Tamar and I talking about Southwest Fox 2017.

Registration for Southwest Fox 2017 has been open for a few weeks and there’s less than two weeks until the Super-Saver Registration deadline. If you register (https://geekgatherings.com/Registration/) before the end of June, you save $125 and we’ll throw in a pre-conference session worth $99. Not only that, but you’ll be entered in the drawings for up to three scholarships (http://swfox.net/scholarship.aspx) that will reduce your costs some more. Check out the speakers (http://swfox.net/speakers.aspx) and topics (http://swfox.net/sessionsswfox.aspx) on the conference website.

Please beat the rush so we still have some fingernails left when July begins! No need to wait, we won’t charge your card or cash your check until August!

Only 128 days until we gather in Gilbert!

Jun
01

Registration for Southwest Fox 2017 () is now available. See our Speakers page for a list of speakers and Sessions page for a list of sessions. Super-Saver Registration, which saves you $125, is available only through June 30th, so don’t wait.

Putting on a conference is a risky endeavor. Conference centers require a guaranteed minimum income to block the dates of a conference; for a conference like Southwest Fox, that minimum is in the tens of thousands of dollars. We have to commit to the conference center by July 2nd and need your support by July 1st to make that commitment. We will not send out any “We need your help” appeals so please do not wait; register by June 30th! We know most of you like to wait until the last minute to avoid the credit card bill arriving too soon. We will not charge any attendee credit cards or cash any checks until we have committed to going forward (sometime after July 2), so this is not is a reason to wait.

Doug, Tamar, and I look forward to seeing you in October!

Only 168 days until we gather in Gilbert!

May
03

Speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2017 have been announced.

Only 176 days until we gather in Gilbert.

Registration will open before June 1st.

Apr
10
Dear Xbase++ and Fox Communities,
.
Geek Gatherings LLC, the organizers of Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++, have partnered with Alaska Software and the best speakers from the Xbase++ community to run Southwest Xbase++ for the past five years. Last November, Alaska Software informed us their core staff members would not be presenting at conferences in 2017, in order to focus on their other commitments including the LEAP program, which tests Visual FoxPro source code projects in Xbase++.
.
After hearing the news, we initially thought we would put the Xbase++ conference on hiatus for a single year as Alaska expects to have speakers available again in 2018. But after talking with others in the Xbase++ Community (including Alaska), we decided to try to run the conference without speakers from Alaska. We issued the Call for Speakers for both conferences. Unfortunately, we did not receive enough session proposals to put together an Xbase++ conference this year. We are naturally disappointed, but Alaska will continue to sponsor Southwest Fox and we are sure Southwest Fox will be a terrific conference on its own as it was for eight years before we incorporated the Xbase++ conference. In 2018, we hope to return to our usual dual conference format.
.
We look forward to announcing the session topics and speakers and to getting registration rolling for 2017 very soon. Thank you for your continued support of Southwest Fox.
.
Only 199 days until we gather in Gilbert.
.
Regards,
Tamar Granor, Rick Schummer, and Doug Hennig
Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ Organizers
Geek Gatherings, LLC
Mar
20

We’re still looking for a few more speaker submissions for Southwest Fox 2017. If you have something to share with our developer community, read the Call for Speakers and then use the Submission site to send us your ideas. Please let us hear from you by next Monday, March 27.

Only 220 days until we gather in Gilbert.

Feb
27

We’ve issued the Call for Speakers for Southwest Fox 2017 and Southwest Xbase++ 2017. If you are interested in presenting at either conference, please read the document and consider submitting sessions via the Geek Gatherings Submission Web site.

The conferences take place October 26-29, 2017. Session proposals are due by Monday, March 13 at 8 AM EST.

Having talked with a couple of potential speakers already about the topics they are considering proposing, I am definitely excited about this years conference which is only 241 days away. I look forward to hearing about your submissions.

Nov
05

This past week one of my customers who is a Visual FoxPro 9 developer emailed asking for help installing the Visual FoxPro 9 IDE on Windows Server 2016. His description of the process was that the Microsoft installer begins, shows the icon on the taskbar, and dies immediately. It does not even start to present the standard installer user interface. His normal application installers for a Visual FoxPro app install fine, but the Visual FoxPro 9 installer from Microsoft does not. He tried installing from the install CD, a USB stick, and an ISO with the same results.

I recommended trying to Run as Administrator, but that also did not work. Since it was not even giving him the user interface, it could not be a problem with permissions to the designated folder or something along those lines.

Knowing I have run Visual FoxPro 9 from a USB thumb drive, I figured we could copy over the development folder from one computer to another and get things working so I recommended the following steps to him.

  1. Copy an existing Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9 folder from a different machine to the Windows Server 2016 machine.
  2. Start the CMD.EXE in Administrator mode using the Run As Administrator option.
  3. From the Windows Command Window, change directory to the VFP folder on the server.
  4. To register the core VFP settings in the Windows registry, run the following command in the Windows Command Window:
    VFP9.EXE /regserver
  5. Run Visual FoxPro 9 to test the install.

It worked like a charm!

I also provided him a link to the MSXML 4.0 Core Services in case this was not installed on the server. One other thing I do when I am setting up a new computer (it has been 2 years since I have had to do this) is to export the VFP9 registry using RegEdit, and importing that by double clicking on the REG file that I exported. This moves over all my favorite Visual FoxPro settings and preferences.

In case you are not familiar with the parameters you can pass to the VFP9 executable, from the Windows Command Window:
VFP9.EXE /?

Hoping this helps out someone else along the way. I’ve never run a server operating system on my development machine and don’t foresee the need to do so anytime soon.

Sep
09
DBI is giving away a full license of Calendar COM (ctxCalendar; https://www.dbi-tech.com/ComponentPage_ctxCalendar.aspx) to each Southwest Fox/Southwest Xbase++ 2016 attendee (http://www.swfox.net).
Calendar COM is a really great Outlook style scheduling control with three fully extensible views baked into one control: a multi-column Day View (a multiple day appointment scheduler for one resource or multiple resource appointment scheduler for one day at a time), a Week View Appointment Scheduler, and a Month Calendar / date picker. It comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

DBI has been a long-time supporter of Southwest Fox and we thank them for their generous support once again this year!

Only 13 days until we gather in Gilbert!