Posts Tagged ‘Conferences’
I see Igor Vit has the session schedule posted for the Prague DevCon. This conference is the most attended conference year after year and there is no doubt why, great sessions and inexpensive registration fees. If you are in Europe (or anywhere else for that matter) and you have room in your schedule next week (June 19th to 21st), head on over and get registered for this great conference.
The biggest questions I got about the Southwest Fox speaker list was:
(OK, I made up the last one, but heck, there is not enough turmoil and friction in the Fox Community at the moment {g})
I was considering creating a FAQ page on the site just so I could point people to it. If I had a dime for every time I had to say: we would have loved to pick Craig Boyd, but he did not submit sessions, I think I could be closing in on fully funding two kids in college.
So now that Craig has officially let the cat out of the bag on the real reason he was not on the initial list of speakers (and why his blog has been quiet – leading to a huge drop of VFP on the Tiobe index), it is my great pleasure to announce he is speaking at Southwest Fox 2007! Even if you don’t want to read the details of the real reason, you have to check out the cute picture of Scarlett Elizabeth Boyd.
I will keep you in suspense a little longer about the sessions (Doug will get the Web site updated with the new sessions when he gets a moment on Monday or Tuesday) to help get some traffic to the SWF Web site, but I can guarantee you will find them very Boyd-esk.
I cannot wait until October!
I am very excited to announce SweetPotato Software Inc. (owned by VFP MVP and Fox Guru Craig Boyd), and Cully Technologies, LLC (owned by Kevin Cully who runs the FoxForward conference) are Bronze sponsors added today for Southwest Fox 2007!
Craig has been helping the organizers by hosting the Southwest Fox Web site and handing administrative details concerning the email accounts we have. This has been a huge help behind the scenes here at SWF, and is one of those things we flat out have not had to worry about.
Both of these gentlemen are huge supporters of the Fox Community and we are very excited to have them aboard as sponsors. You can check out the complete list of sponsors on the Southwest Fox 2007 sponsors page. Please help us show appreciation for their support of the conference and Fox Community by visiting their pages, and checking out their offerings.
Thanks again guys.
There is no time like the present to get signed up for FoxForward, with the early bird deadline approaching in a few hours. You can register with a simple four step process so head over to the FoxForward.net and get going. Clocks are ticking…
A day of .NET for Rick? I can here the rumors already – Rick has completely moved his operations to .NET. Nope, but I took the opportunity to get a day of free seminars on some topics I was interested in in Grand Rapids last Saturday. You will see by the sessions I picked that they are Web related and something I think .NET is very strong and well suited for in today’s projects. All the sessions were scheduled for 60 minutes, most ran over, and some of the sessions did not have any break time between them. It was almost as if the original schedule had less sessions for 75 minutes each and they had to be crammed in to fit the one day conference.
The day was organized by the West Michigan .NET User Group, sponsored by several local companies and one very large national company with a vested interest in spreading the word about .NET. I also got a chance to take my son with me so he could get a little taste of the Microsoft vision. He is a Web developer and he gets the LAMP vision at school. He sees how .NET could be in his future, but has not seen it much at the University of Michigan. He also understands how school is way different from the real world.
The keynote was very interesting. It was about the Future of Development. The speaker talked about how data will be accessible on all platforms (server, desktops, laptops, PDA, phones, toasters (okay, I added the last one)). It was not a discussion of the paperless office promised by so many years ago. Rather it was a discussion on how our users will want to get their data in non-traditional ways. The speaker sort of reminded me of Tom Rettig. This made me wonder what Tom might be blogging about today if he were alive.
Next up was the “Building a .NET Startup.” I think this session would have been better titled “How to Design and Build an ASP.NET Application.” What Brian Anderson showed is how he designed, architected, and developed a Web site that allows someone to invoice people for money and allow the people to pay via cash or through a PayPal account. This is designed for people who run a soccer team and need to collect money from the parents to run the team, or a scout leader who needs to collect dues for the child’s participation (or similar scenario). The Web site charges a little fee for each transaction. It gives you the ability to manage the people and what each owes. Nice little site. Brian built the site using the Microsoft AJAX Toolkit, .NET Tiers and Codesmith frameworks/code generators, and the PayPal Payment Pro Web service integration to process the PayPal transactions. His basic premise with respect to the frameworks and code generation tools is to never write CRUD code. I talked to him after the session about the lack of optimization code generators are famous for. He said I might be surprised on how far tools like this have come. Lots of links and lots ideas on how one can rapidly put together a .NET site. Very good session.
Daniel Woolston presented the “AJAX Controls” session. This session went through some of the 32 controls in the Microsoft AJAX Toolkit. Dan started out the session with a comment that I will paraphrase as “I really have no idea how this session is going to go because I have not rehearsed it.” With this in mind, I was pleasantly surprised how smooth the presentation went. Some of the controls in this toolkit are extremely cool. The AJAX Control Toolkit is from Microsoft and is open source, and is free. The project is hosted on CodePlex like VFPX is and is community driven. The controls also play nice with other frameworks and look easy to implement. I am most interested in the Accordion, the Calendar, the Always Visible, and Resizable controls for a project I have coming up. He also gave away Nerf toy guns at the end of his session (not technically important, but I think as a bribe to get better evals {g}). Excellent session.
The next session was called Command Patterns by Martin Shoemaker. I have seen Martin present before and his session was on the Command design pattern, While I was interested in what he had to say, I have seen some great design pattern sessions by VFP speakers who cover several design patterns in one session. So I bailed early and visited with the different vendors. I actually learned a lot from the vendors with respect to the Michigan economy and how .NET developers are seeing a growing market again here in Michigan. One of the companies described how they lived through a down turn in the software industry after Y2K, but how in the last year it really is rebounding. This is exactly what I have experienced, only my rebound has been going for the last three years. They did mention how their consulting practice and head hunting is seeing a real drive for C# developers as opposed to VB.NET developers. It is only one company’s perspective, but interesting nonetheless. They are also seeing a lot more VB6 to VB.NET conversions than they have in the last few years.
Jim Holmes kicked off my afternoon with his “Real World MOSS” session. Jim shared his real world experience working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and the tools he uses to make development and deployment easier. This really is my kind of session as Jim detailed shortcomings and workarounds to increase productivity. One of the cooler tools he showed is Watir Recorder. This tool records clicks and keystrokes in Internet Explorer so you can rerun unit and system tests for a Web application. In this particular case Jim uses this tool to deploy SharePoint features. There are a number of steps you need to process to unregister (for lack of the exact term) and re-register the SharePoint feature. He automated all of it using the Watir Recorder. Very cool session. I learned more about SharePoint in this one hour than I did at the entire Advisor Summit.
Dan Hibbitts presented the “Mobile Software Factory” which covered the .NET Compact framework and SQL Server CE. I am sure I cannot deploy an application on my Treo anytime soon, but this informative session did get me geeked to try something on this platform down the road. So much to learn, so little time to do it all. This is one of the things that has me interested in Christof’s Guineu project. As a VFP developer I have little to no capabilities to develop for this platform. I have one customer who is thinking this platform might be the next big thing for him so I am trying to expand my skill to possibly meet his needs. Another good session.
The last session of the day was “Vista Gadgets” by Microsoft Developer Evangelist Drew Robbins. I have seen Drew present a few times before and there is no mistaken that he loves his job and feels like he is one of the luckiest guys in the world. Drew showed us some of the available Vista Gadgets and then built a practical one. Now I will admit when I first saw these gadgets a couple if years ago I was not impressed by them. I found them more than a little distracting. I like a clean desktop for the most part and these gadgets are anti-organizing from my perspective. My view on this has been changing more and more as I see some real and practical implementations. I really don’t need a fancy clock or the weather in my face. Drew put together a fairly simple gadget that read your tasks in Outlook and presented them on the desktop outside of Outlook. Even better, you could complete them and create detailed fly outs with very simple and easy to understand javascript code with a little HTML. I see some advantages to some dashboard type of applications where this might have some practical implementations for business. Thanks Drew.
One other general observation: most of laptops at the seminar were running Vista. This is completely different from the laptops I have seen at Fox events. Interesting. I talked to several attendees about this and they are “struggling” to adopt Vista, but overall they are liking it.
Overall it was a day well spent. Sure it was a Saturday and I had to cross the state to attend, but I would have traveled much further for this kind of value. I wanted to attend the one in Ann Arbor put on by the AA .NET group because it was closer to home, but it was held during the Advisor Summit. Sounds like the two groups are helping each other and are planning several of these a year. Looks like I might be scheduling a couple more Saturdays a year to career development.
Traditions are important and Advisor was able to keep my streak alive by scheduling me for the first session on the last day. As I have mentioned in this blog before, for some reason (guarantee that I will be sober) the organizers always pick me to present first in the morning. I talked about VFPX in my session “Learn How to Use VFPX Tools and Components for Visual FoxPro.” I felt this session went well and the feedback was very positive. Doug Hennig mentioned it might have been the most attended session of the conference. It is always nice to hear people are interested in your presentation, but more importantly, people are interested in VFPX and the future of Visual FoxPro.
The rest of the morning was consumed with email and following up on customer issues as I listened to Doug’s always good session on Integrating RSS and VFP. It was unfortunate, but I had to skip Tamar’s Solve Common Problems with VFP SQL. I will catch up by doing some homework and reading her white paper.
After lunch I attended Kevin’s session on the “COM Cookbook: Five Tasty Recipes for COM Automation with VFP.” Kevin went through five examples:
Kevin showed the feared “Catastrophic failure” error message he had when he demoed the Desktop Alerts at the Detroit Area Fox User Group in the “Why not COM” section. He covered the fundamentals and some of the complicated things like debugging.
My last session (“Expand Your SQL Server Toolkit for the VFP Developer”) kicked off the VFP Track “overtime.” You see the rest of the conference was over after the desert reception, but the VFP track had two extra sessions for the attendees. Not bad since I was getting paid time and a half (1.5 * $0.00) {g}. This session covers a number of different categories of developer tools developers should consider to make their SQL Server experience better. I demo tools like SQL Compare, SQL Doc, MSDE Admin, and SQL Prompt. I have purchased and use these tools on a regular basis to increase my productivity and improve my profitability.
Doug Hennig wrapped up the conference with his really good session “Best Practices for Vertical Market Applications.” I have seen this session at GLGDW and OzFox in the last year, but I listened because Doug tweaks it and attendees participate with their own thoughts on the various topics. This time around I took a couple of notes for a project I am working on right now for another developer.
After the conference wrapped up we went out to dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Dinner was excellent, conversation was enjoyable and surprise-surprise we were the 1000th customer of the newly opened restaurant. What a hoot, dinner was on the manager! Later, Jeanine (who attended the VFP track) admitted she worked with the manager to set the whole thing up and bought us all dinner. After dinner we headed back to the hotel where we chatted some more.
I got to bed around 1:30 and was up at 3:30 for my early flight home. My flight from LA to Minneapolis was horrible as the guy next to me was sleeping and kept invading my personal space. From the airport I drove directly to the Detroit Area Fox User Group meeting where we held a meeting of open discussion and I ended up not having to present. It is good to be home.
Tuesday is a busy and very long day here in Anaheim. Lots of news from LA area with the fires, but it is northwest from where we are.
The first session of the day is Kevin Ragsdale’s “Best Practices for Deploying Visual FoxPro Applications.” You should be aware of my passion for the topic since I helped write the book Kevin used as part of his research on the topic. He formally recognized the work Rick Borup and I did on the Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions book he considers essential reading (I agree {g}). He also recognized the work Rick Borup did at GLGDW 2006 on the same topic. Kevin then went through several best practices and shared his deployment successes and failures. One of the things I like to do is learn from other people’s mistakes so I can avoid them, especially with deployment. Kevin made several excellent points during the session and I thought he did a good job. Several people talked to me about our book after the session. It is nice to get the word out about it.
The next session I attended was suppose to be “Simple SharePoint Solutions”, but it was replaced with “Customized SharePoint Sites with ‘Features’.” The two presenters got together a decided the timing should be switched. I was curious more about the solutions, so I bailed out after a short time and went to get some work done. I have already seen Tamar’s session called “Practical Tips for Working with Existing Visual FoxPro Code” before, but I am going to read her white paper because I am living this with a new customer and their FoxPro DOS code. I hope they will move to VFP and SQL Server some day.
After lunch (which several people did not like, but I enjoyed because there were lots of veggies) I skipped Doug’s session on Inno Setup because I have seen it a couple of times already. It is a great session. You can read some of the material in the last couple issues of Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro. It is a fantastic session. The first time I attended I was making changes to my scripts in the session.
Up next was my session “Microsoft VFP Debugging Essentials.” I was not happy with the delivery of this session at all and it was reflected in a couple of the evals. I did not have the energy I normally like to deliver because I had a headache that made me feel dizzy while I was presenting. I was able to communicate, but as one eval correctly stated: “This was not one of Rick’s best sessions.”
The last session of the regular day was Tamar’s “The Why and How of Test Data.” This was another session I was really looking forward to before the conference and is one we selected for Southwest Fox 2007. Tamar shows you why and how to auto generate test data using third-party tools, and her own framework. I have a real need to generate some test data for a couple of projects I am working on so I can use this session as soon as I return home. Highly recommended session.
Right after Tamar’s session we were picked up and attended the LA Fox meeting out by LAX. This was fun. We listened to an interesting presentation by a couple of guys from GeneXus. GeneXus is a suite of development tools that generate applications from it own IDE into source code in VFP, .NET, Java, and several other platforms I cannot recall. At the same time it generates the application it generates the database in VFP, SQL Server, MySQL, and many other popular database backends. It definitely looks like an interesting product. The thing I like about it is the one source (they call the source code a KnowledgeBase) and many different “buzzword compliant platforms.” I was curious what target platform has the best performance, but they did not have any metrics. I have always been skeptical about code generators, but this one definitely looks like it is mature. The product has been around since 1988 and is very current. I am still skeptical, and the cost is a little steep (US$5000), but looks very powerful at the same time.
We had a good view of the fires in LA from the office where the LA Fox meeting takes place and watched it while we ate pizza during the break.
Following the presentation from GeneXus, Tamar, Doug and I did our 20-minute mini-sessions. Tamar demonstrated an app she is working on and how she is using GDIPlusX from VFPX to capture screens shots and print them on a VFP report. I covered Southwest Fox and the user group offer we are doing, and rapidly went through some of the VFPX projects in a quick overview. Doug followed me with part of his VFP and Vista session. It was a fun night. We got back to the hotel around 11:30 and I rehearsed my morning session before hitting the pillow.
More to come…
The conference started out with Alan Griver’s keynote. Alan did a great job. He started out by restating the no VFP 10 announcement (Alan is a brave man {g}) in case there were people who had not heard about it. I was surprised by the number of people who did not know about the announcement. There was no loud screaming or angry mob mentality. More importantly, Alan also showed all new material from SP2 and some of the issues fixed for Vista that the Fox Team is working on. One of the cool things he showed is the new toolkit Microsoft released last week to allow developers to build controls in VB.NET that can be used in VFP forms. This really has a lot of potential for VFP developers who want to leverage new controls not available in VFP. Alan demonstrated the VB menu control and coded it to display a .NET messagebox. Nothing fancy, but something very important moving forward. I enjoyed the keynote.
I attended a couple of Sharepoint sessions that were not so good. Mostly because the presenter got into “presentation hell” when their virtual machine was not booting successfully. I felt bad for him and headed to the speaker room where I got some client work done.
The next big session of the day was the session I really anticipated since I heard Doug was working on it: “Develop Microsoft Visual FoxPro Applications for Windows Vista.” It was the session that paid for the conference, okay, it paid for the non-billable time I am spending here. Doug detailed the good and the bad things, and showed us workarounds for many of the issues as we wait for SP2 to ship. For the most part you can read Calvin’s blog and see how Calvin is attacking the Vista issues presented so far. Calvin is directly working on community reported problems. Doug’s session addresses security issues, the User Access Control, Virtualization (advantages and disadvantages), installing applications and where to put the files, user interface problems, how to simply address fonts, customizing the Vista Task dialogs, and other issues he has faced. It was a fantastic session and one I think everyone should see at some point in the near future (hint, hint, it will be at Southwest Fox).
The last session of the day was Kevin Ragsdale’s session “Using InfoPath with Visual FoxPro.” Kevin did a good job and showed how you can use InfoPath as a front end to FoxPro data. He showed a VFP form and an InfoPath form that accessed a Web Service he developed using the express edition of Visual Web Developer. We are talking about a Web service developed by the creation of a ASMX file you could edit in NotePad. Interesting session. I just wish Kevin had the white paper done so I could read it when I return home (one of my pet peeves, in case you were wondering). He promises it will be done soon.
The evening was filled with a long walk and dinner at Buca di Beppo. I also watched part of the Jazz-Warriors game and learned the Pistons kicked the Bulls behinds again. With the Red Wings winning the series against the Sharks it looks like my spring is going to be packed with playoff games to watch. {bg}
Tuesday evening (tonight) we are headed to the LA Fox meeting to listen to the speaker (I hear the topic is going to be interesting). Doug, Tamar, and I might do 20 minute mini-sessions back-to-back after he is done. A VFP smorgasbord.
I do want to clarify something I have read about on ProFox where it was discussed that there are 35 attendees here. Actually there are 35 VFP attendees, but there is not a 1-to-1 ratio of speaker to attendee. The VFP track has 5 speakers so the ratio is 7:1. It should be noted on a slightly positive note the VFP track has the most registrations of all the tracks according to what I have heard through someone who talked to Advisor.
So far it has been a great conference.
