Shedding Some Light

A group of VFPX developers/users held a bonus session during the Southwest Fox conference in October to discuss future direction of VFPX and what is needed to get the word out to other developers in the Fox Community. There were a number of good ideas shared, but there are three key details I believe need to be highlighted.

The first is to tell people all the tools and components on VFPX are FREE! Developers, especially Visual FoxPro developers love free stuff. Free code, free tools, free components, free forums, free tips and tricks, and even free documentation. During my series of articles in FoxRockX I believe I have not mention the price to use the tools and components enough. They are FREE. No money is needed to get any project from VFPX. All you have to do is download the files, install them and take the time to learn how they can be useful to you and your development. Yes, this takes time, but if you are a FoxRockX subscriber you have access to every article in my VFPX series. That would be 11 articles dedicated to detailing how to use and extend the various VFPX tools and components. So spread the word about FREE, FREE, FREE stuff at http://VFPX.CodePlex.com.

Another suggestion is to get more user stories posted on the VFPX wiki pages. These user stories show developers (who are intrigued by the things they see on VFPX) how other developers are putting them to use. I know I learn much faster and gain momentum quicker when I see how something is done rather than reading how it is done. Both ways help me learn, but the hands-on method is a lot faster for me. These stories can be told via text or could be a short screencast on demonstrating how a control was implemented in a production application. A brief discussion how one of the tools saves you an hour a month might shed some light to help someone else get it. These stories can be told on the various project pages.

The third important idea is one I actually have been pushing for in the VFPX articles and sessions I have been giving for the last three years: we need to get project managers to promote their projects to released status. It is true that some of the projects are in the alpha, beta, and release candidate status. But the fact remains many could be considered released. Project managers are suffering from the common “but just one more thing syndrome” like all of us have faced in our careers. What we all need is a little reminder that we can have a 1.1 or 2.0 release in the future. I know I use several VFPX projects in my production applications as if they were released. On the user side I believe there are developers who don’t want to risk something as important as a production customer application with something not considered released. If the status of the project was elevated to “released” it might stimulate adoption in the community.

There are other good ideas discussed during the meeting and things the administrators need to get prioritized and find others to help implement. You can watch most of the VFPX User Meeting on SWFox TV. There was a glitch in the Internet connection during the recording so it is in two parts. Part 1 and Part 2 are available at SWFox TV.

So jump on the VFPX Bandwagon and get using these FREE tools and components. Provide feedback to the project teams, and if so inclined, get involved in development or testing. VFPX is a significant part of the future for Visual FoxPro, be a part of it!

Doug Hennig mentioned at the closing session that this was the most fun he has had at any conference. I have to agree. I think there was a lot of anticipation for this year’s conference because of the buzz on Twitter and the behind the scenes planning by non-organizers for more of the social aspects surrounding the Feltman Party Suite and Grotto (hot tub area). I think the Fox Community is growing stronger because of events like this and the way people get to interact via Twitter and the forums.

I saw more sessions than any year as an organizer thanks to Therese and Marshal handling the registration desk area throughout the conference. I really enjoyed going to sessions and feel blessed to have learned as much as I did before the conference during rehearsals and at the conference. We have the best bunch of speakers on the planet. We host the conference, but when the rubber meets the road, the speakers make the conference and give people the biggest reasons to come to Mesa.

Speaking of the hard work our speakers did to prepare sessions, I am looking forward to reading each and every white paper written by our talented presenters. We have over 1000 pages of pure goodness to read. If you were at the conference, make sure to check for a few updates by our speakers. We have updated materials from Menachem Bazian, Mike Feltman, Toni Feltman (pre-con), Tamar Granor, Paul Mrozowski, Alan Stevens, and Christof Wollenhaupt.

I really enjoyed meeting Emerson Santon Reed, and seeing him at Southwest Fox. Emerson was the first of hopefully many ambassadors we get to bring to Southwest Fox. The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund is a magnificent idea and the response from the community was overwhelming. I think this worked out well and seeing how excited Emerson was before and at the conference made my day. I also want to thank all those who talked to Emerson, shared in his experience at the conference in any way, and showed him how the Fox Community here works the same as it does in Brazil. One big community helping people learn about Visual FoxPro and software development through the broad sharing of knowledge. What a great experience for me to participate in.

There was one thing I noticed at the conference that was a little strange. It was the first year both Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins were not at the Southwest Fox. I know both have decided to retire from the speaking circuit, but it still was weird not seeing them this year in Mesa.

If you want to catch up on what other people are posting/blogging see the Southwest Fox blog: http://swfox.net/blog/2009/10/southwest-fox-2009-on-web.html

A huge thanks:

1. To everyone who came to Mesa and attended the sessions, participated and contributed their knowledge in every way, and supported Southwest Fox so we can continue putting them on in the future!
2. To all the speakers, you guys are the very best!
3. To everyone who contributed to the Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund. It was terrific meeting Emerson and getting his perspective on Southwest Fox, and making this entire concept work. I cannot wait until we do it again next year. What a terrific tradition.
4. To Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center and their true partnering to make this conference as successful as ever!
5. To Mike and Toni Feltman for opening up their room and enhancing the social side of the conference for everyone!
6. To Doug and Tamar, my partners in crime, for helping me retain some sanity through this process again!
7. To Frank Perez, for holding down the fort and keeping the customers happy at White Light Computing while I go missing in action for periods around the conference!
8. To my wife Therese, also known as the Best.Wife.Ever (BWE), for her support during the planning, the support at the conference, and helping me unwind after the conference. None of my contributions are possible without her.

I am already looking forward to 2010. I hope you will meet us in Mesa from October 14-17, 2010 at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center. I am sure there will be many more memories made next year.

The last day of the conference starts with my traditional first slot session. This year my topic “VFP and MySQL: Case Study for Remote Data.” I really like the first session of the last day because the real conference diehards show up for the presentation. I am most appreciative of this group and this year they did not disappoint. Great session from my perspective.

The last session I attended was Jim Nelson’s “PEMEditor: Swiss Army Knife for the Forms Designer — the What and How.” I needed to see part of this session in preparation of my VFPX session in Germany. Since Jim was covering his PEM Editor in a full session here at Southwest Fox I only covered a little bit of it in my VFPX session. In Germany I do not have this luxury. I anticipated Jim would cover some of the 5.0 features he just released and I did not have much experience with. Good session on one of the most powerful tools on VFPX.

I skipped the last session to prepare for the closing session, take care of some business with the conference facility, and say goodbye to some friends who had to catch an early flight.

After the closing session we clean up, and then head over for a meeting with the conference staff. Year after year they amaze me with the positive approach they take with the people who come to their resort, and how well they deal with any issues that come up during the conference. Unfortunately the discussion always seems to gravitate to the small problems or snags we hit, but in reality the conference was very smooth and the issues small. Next year I want to tell them how great it was and tell them I will send the small issues to work on for the next year in an email after the conference. They want to constantly improve just as much as we want to improve the conference experience.

After the meeting I headed back to the room and started helping Therese as she prepared for the speaker dinner. She had been working most of the day on getting food, and working preparing the meal. She excels at this and wanted everything to be perfect. I also got a bit of time to read a few of the evals. The speaker dinner came together nicely and the dinner was much more relaxed for the rest of us than the traditional speaker dinner. We had a BBQ with steaks and chicken, lots of roasted vegetables, sweet potato fries, and a peach crisp for dessert. Very tasty.

The speaker dinner sort of blended into the normal Feltman hosted party as other conference people still hanging around the conference center joined in. The grotto was packed and the party went late into the night. I called it a night sometime around 2 or 2:30. It was a great way to wrap up the most fun conference ever.

Saturday starts out with session surfing between Jody Meyer’s “Developing and Extending the Visual FoxPro Grid Object” (one of the most popular sessions of the conference) and Doug Hennig’s “Practical Uses for GDIPlusX.” Normally I skip all of Doug’s sessions because I can see them in Germany in a couple of weeks, but this year I am getting to Frankfurt a day late and will miss most of the sessions on the first day. This means I cannot rely on the scheduling gods working in my favor since I have to cram my sessions into the last couple of days. Both of these sessions had terrific content. Fortunately they both have good white papers for me to catch the stuff I did not see presented. I saw Jody’s session a couple of times during the rehearsals in Michigan. I wanted to see how she performed in Mesa. I was not disappointed.

Next up was Rick Borup’s “The Show Must Go On: Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning.” This is a really important topic in the computer services industry and often overlooked. You also don’t know it is overlooked until something bad happens, and then you are miserable. I have worked on a couple of disaster recovery plans in my career, but I have not worked on one in a while. I wanted to get a refresher course so to speak with this session. Always enjoy Rick’s sessions because I feel like I am back in college and Rick is the professor sitting at the front of the room. I liked how the other audience members participated and shared some of their disaster recovery experiences. Really enhanced the whole session.

Up next I presented the second occurrence of my “Enhancing the Visual FoxPro IDE with VFPX Tools.”

After my session I jumped over to the Moxie Report Objects vendor session. A couple of years ago I almost had a project with the need for Bo’s tools, but it did not materialize. I wanted to get a feel for what was new and where this important product was headed. Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately the last couple of session slots were taken over by a customer problem I needed to solve. I was planning on seeing Alaska Software’s: “Fox and the Polar Bear”, and Craig Boyd’s “FLLs and the Visual FoxPro API.” I did get a chance to record the “Nerf Attack” as Craig assulted Doug Hennig during his VirtualPC session. You can watch all the action, including the attack planning here: Strategy Session and Attack of Doug Hennig SWFox2009. As you can see, we like to have fun at Southwest Fox 2009.

Normally the speaker dinner is Saturday night, but based on speaker feedback in 2008, they wanted more free time during the conference evenings and a less formal dinner. So we moved the dinner to Sunday night after the conference. That freed up Saturday night dinner. Several of us had a hankering for sushi so we headed out for dinner. We ended up at a different sushi place than another car, but Christof Wollenhaupt, Doug Hennig, Emerson Reed, Therese and I found a terrific place recommended by Bill Anderson. Dinner was awesome.

After dinner a group of us headed over to the F1 racing track for some go-carting. Jody Meyer, Toni Feltman, Cathy Pountney came in dressed as the “Pink Ladies” and Frank Perez and the greaser guy. Smooth move as they had Doug and I thinking there was some conspiracy against us on the race track. The racing was fun for sure and the competition for bragging rights for another year was fierce. As usual I had the best average lap time in the second race which is my goal.

After the race we went back to the conference center. I spent a little time in the bar talking with people and a little more time at the Feltman Party Suite and hot tub. Since I had an 8:30 session Sunday I had to make sure I made it to bed at a “reasonable” time.

I was up early on Friday to run through my “Enhancing the VFP IDE with VFPX Tools” session. I always like to go through the session slides once and make sure the examples all run. I found one of my demos was broken and baffled at how it happened. Fortunately I was able to devise a strategy if it failed in the session.

Each day at the conference I make sure the conference session rooms are set up correctly and work with the conference center staff to reset some power and test out all the projectors. I also swap out the room schedules boards. Once I know everything is humming along I head over to breakfast. Nothing better than starting out the day with eggs. I appreciated it even more knowing we did not expect to have breakfast this year based on budgeting issues. I also like to sit down and eat with folks who are supported the conference and see how things are going and what sessions they are hoping to see during the day.

I surfed the first slot and caught part of Jim Nelson’s “FoxCharts – Great Looking, Modern Charts in Pure VFP Code”, and Rick Borup’s “Quibbles, Quirks, and Quickies.” I saw Jim’s session rehearsed at DAFUG in August and was curious to see how he was going to do in front of the Southwest Fox crowd. Really, there was no change. Completely smooth delivery. Rick Borup is a seasoned professional and delivered a quick set of interesting VFP behaviors to consider and watch out for in development. I enjoyed both sessions, but with my VFPX session up next I was more compelled to understand why one of my demo was flaking out.

I really enjoyed giving my session on the VFPX tools. I also was happy with the turn out as I was up against three awesome sessions by Toni Feltman (“Data Driving Applications”), Jody Meyer (“Speak to Me: Applying MS Office Automation to Real Business Needs”), and Craig Boyd (“Virtual Earth for Visual FoxPro”). There is nothing more enjoyable than watching people have an “aha moment” when I show them something they will be using as soon as they can download and install it. The entire session is filled with possibilities. The only thing I don’t like about it is the fact that 40 other developers are constantly updating the things I could be showing during the session. 40 to 1 means I typically deliver an obsolete session in some capacity. At Southwest Fox I knew the PEM Editor section was already behind as Jim and Matt released a new version just before the conference.

Next up was Doug Hennig’s “Microsoft Virtual PC for VFP Developers” session. I had already seen the other three sessions in the rehearsals done before the conference. Doug never disappoints. I have been using VirtualPC and VMWare for years, yet I still learned something new with respect to how VirtualPC works. Doug showed us “Differencing Disk”, which is like subclassing a base virtual machine into a second virtual machine and only the differences added to the second are stored on the second disk. VMWare has this functionality, but I did not know VirtualPC had it. Great session.

The lunch was make your own deli sandwiches. More importantly I got the chance to sit down and relax a bit, and have some really good discussions about Visual FoxPro and things happening in the Fox Community.

The afternoon started out with Christof Wollenhaupt’s Excelporting session. Christof always comes up with excellent session topics and outputing to Excel is something many VFP developers deal with on a regular basis. Christof’s session was superb, and his ideas always stretch my thinking on new approaches. His dry sense of humor also was shining again this year.

Next up was my favorite session to give at the conference: “VFP and MySQL: Case Study for Remote Data.” It is my favorite because it is different from the productivity sessions I typically give. I also completely applied something I am working on and bring my experience directly through to the session. I started working on this session in October 2008, just after returning from Southwest Fox. So it took almost a year to bring to fruition. Remote data (non-DBF data stores) is something I believe is important for my customers and other developers. The idea I can connect a VFP desktop app and a Web site to the same database is powerful. I got a chance to start using MySQL which is something I have wanted to do for quite a while. The fact that there were excellent questions also showed people were interested in the material and interactive sessions really get my presentation energy going. I really enjoyed giving this session and received a number of kind remarks from the people who came to see it.

Another thing we tried this year is moving some of the bonus sessions into a regular session slot. In the past we received feedback that bonus sessions are too late and people are already tired by the end of the day. We offered the first half of the “Show Us Your App” (SUYA) and the VFPX Users Meeting. I wanted to attend the SUYA because it was a huge hit last year, but my duties as a VFPX Administrator gravitated me toward the VFPX session. You can watch the VFPX meeting as we broadcasted it live on SWFox TV (check out part 1 and 2). There are a lot of good ideas that were presented including creating an applet to consume XML to notify people of new releases, adding stories, a roadmap, and a launch point to VFPX.com, and pushing more project managers to get to a released status. One of the key take-aways from this session is to promote the fact the tools and components are FREE! All developers love free stuff, so why not take advantage of this.

The dinner party followed the first set of bonus sessions. I think the best part of the dinner party is that people get to wind down and do more networking.

After dinner I wanted to get to the second half of the SUYA. I got to see Mike Feltman show off his form to reporting builder, which is kind of cool. You can read more about it on the F1 Tech blog.

My wife came into the SUYA session to let me know the people in the “Future of the VFP Developer” bonus session were waiting for me to lead the discussion. The session is an open spaces session, which means developers discuss the topic and share ideas among themselves. The session is not really lead by one person. I thought someone else was covering the moderating part, but no problem, it sounded like it was going to be a good session to attend as well. Turns out the session was exactly how I hoped it would be. Lots of people indicating what they saw in their future. Most VFP developers have long adopted other technologies to integrate into their solutions. Listening to what others had to say shows some people sticking with VFP for the primary development and integrating other best of breed technologies as needed. Others discussed migrating to other technologies. I think in a way it showed a good cross-section of the Fox Community. Some people got validation of the approach they are taking, while others got ideas for them to consider. That was the entire goal of the session so it worked out perfectly. You can listen in on the conversations on SWFox TV.

Thursday morning we get the early rush at the registration desk. I spend the morning setting up the two pre-conference session rooms, and ensure the speakers’ computers are working with the projectors. I really liked how the registration area was set up this year. It worked way better than the setup of the last couple of years. We did learn we need to get a banner so people know where the registration desk is as I was constantly answering the question about where people go to get their registration processed.

One thing we forgot to mention to the conference center people during the walk through on Wednesday is how we wanted coffee and tea out for the entire day. It took a full 15 minutes before the coffee station was up and running. I joked with Marc who runs the day shift that the staff was a little slow in getting it turned around. He joked he had to fire a couple of people for the slow performance. Fortunately everyone has a good sense of humor.

I did get a chance to check out part of Walt Krzystek’s “Integrating VFP with SourceGear Vault” morning session. I was interested in the Vault session from a personal perspective since I am considering moving to SourceGear Vault. I did get to see an abbreviated rehearsal of Walt’s session in Atlanta, so I wanted to see some of the parts I did not see. I did sneak into seeing part of Alan Steven’s “Break It Down: Dealing With Legacy Code” session. I deal with a lot of legacy code at White Light Computing so I probably could have benefited from seeing the entire session.

The Mexican lunch was really good and I was starving by time lunch rolled around.

The afternoon I helped at the registration desk and worked with Craig Boyd to see if we could reproduce some download problems from the Southwest Fox FTP site and the CD image. I was able to reproduce the problem, but we could not figure out the exact condition or the settings to resolve the problem. We will get this ironed out before the 2010 files are ready. We did not make this a priority at the conference since every person got a CD with all the materials, and the individual sessions could be downloaded.

Right after the pre-conference sessions we have the speaker meeting. Not sure why, but the energy level at the speaker meeting was off the charts. Lots of jokes and friendly barbs. We had the speakers sign a couple of SWFox T-Shirts for auction for the 2010 Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund.

To change things up this year I actually had dinner between the speaker meeting and the Keynote. Therese had already taken Sara Ford to dinner so I joined them. All I had was some soup. For some reason I cannot eat before the keynote. It definitely is not nerves.

The Southwest Fox Conference Keynote is the official kickoff of the conference. We did announce Cesar Chalom as this year’s recipient of the “VFPX Administrators Award” for all of his hard work on FoxCharts and GDIPlusX. We also introduced Emerson Santon Reed as the Ceil Silver Ambassador for 2009.

This year we changed things up by bringing in an outside speaker. When I say “outside”, I mean someone who is not going to talk about Visual FoxPro in particular. In past years the Southwest Fox Keynote has something about Visual FoxPro on the agenda right after we deal with some of the “administrivia.” Sara’s talk was titled “Towards a Stronger Open Source Ecosystem on CodePlex.com.” Based on feedback some people really enjoyed it and others, not so much. I get a sense from some of the people who did not like it that they did not understand that VFPX is hosted on CodePlex, and Sara was talking about the underlying Web site where the VFPX project and all its goodness is hosted. We also had some sound problems. You can watch the entire Keynote on SWFox TV.

The Trade Show reception followed where people checked out what vendors had to offer and others caught up with old friends, or had a chance to make new ones. I eventually made it over to the bar and then to the Feltman Party Suite before calling it a night much later than I wanted.

The preparation to make the trip to Phoenix is always jammed packed with last minute details. The 2009 conference was our third time putting on the show so one would think things would become some what automatic. In some cases it is and in some cases it is not as we try to change things up a little based on feedback and our own ideas. This year my check list seemed longer than normal, but I realized I was just busier than normal with the White Light Computing workload.

Northwest changed our booked flight just before the conference and the flight time really put a crimp into the planned schedule based on a tight schedule once we hit Phoenix. I called Northwest and got Therese and I on an earlier flight, but this meant getting up a few of hours early (1:30am Arizona Time). We carry a lot of the conference materials in our carry-ons because we want to ensure all the really important things make it to Mesa. This means lots of luggage. The flight to Phoenix started out with a 75 minute delay in Detroit. The air conditioning on the plane was not working because one of the problems was getting power working at the gate. I believe Northwest was just preparing us for the Arizona weather by heating up the plane to 85F. The delay forced us to figure out a new schedule once we hit the ground.

Once in Phoenix we got our luggage, picked up the rental car, found Doug searching for his luggage, and rushed to pick up the conference t-shirts, speaker shirts, and conference bags. Direct to the conference hotel to check in, drop everything off and head back to the airport to pick up Tamar and Marshal. Believe it or not, we were only a little behind considering the delays in Detroit. Last stop before heading back to the conference center is to pick up the room schedule posters we get printed out.

Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory Tuesday night was a nice reward at the end of a long day. Tuesday night only has two scheduled tasks. The first was to take delivery of all the shipped materials, inventory the items, and check to see nothing got broken. The second task was to get a full night of sleep because it is the only night in Mesa that happens.

Wednesday morning I was up bright and early. This works well for me as I can get some email and work handled before we jump into official conference mode. I also took a quick walk around the golf course to enjoy the warm weather. After breakfast we have a meeting with the conference center staff. We literally walk though the schedule of each day we are on site so everyone understands what is going to happen and when it is going to happen. The staff at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center are terrific.

After the meeting we begin the assembly of the conference bags. New idea this year was to literally build the bags for each individual. The last two years we built generic bags and customized them as people checked in. This was a brilliant idea as it really simplified the registration process and reduced the number of people we needed to have at the registration desk.

Several other things happen on Wednesday. The conference center transforms the ballroom into the four session rooms by assembling the four 12 foot screens. This year there was a mix-up with the screens and we had to have them swapped out between the pre-conference sessions and the Keynote. The projectors arrive and need to be set up and tested. The conference bags get moved over to the registration desk. Many of the speakers arrive on Wednesday so Therese was making continuous runs to the airport to pick each of them up. She also picked up the Ceil Silver Ambassador Emerson Santon Reed early in the day. It really is a busy day. We ended it by going out to dinner at PF Changs. Dinner was awesome, but paled in comparison to the excellent discussions with everyone and getting to know Emerson a little bit before the conference.

White Light Computing is stoked about partnering with F1 Technologies (Toni and Mike Feltman) to sponsor the Southwest Fox 2009 Keynote. Microsoft’s Sara Ford is going to present:

Sara Ford is the Program Manager for CodePlex (host of the VFPX project), Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. Prior to CodePlex, she worked on the Visual Studio team for six years and ran the popular Visual Studio Tip of the Day series. In 2008, she authored her first book Microsoft Visual Studio Tips by Microsoft Press and donated all her royalties to start a scholarship fund for Hurricane Katrina survivors of her hometown. Her life-long dream is to become a 97 year old weightlifter, so she can be featured on the local news.

I think you will enjoy seeing Sara at Southwest Fox 2009. She is all about building community and open source software. She is an energetic speaker and probably will show you her rebellious side. How many Microsoft people do you know who are willing to walk around the Redmond campus wearing a FireFox t-shirt? After the keynote you will at least know one.

You can read more about this on the Southwest Fox blog.

I really hope you will join us in Mesa in 41 days, but if you cannot, you might be able to catch it on SWFox TV because we are going to attempt to stream the keynote on the Internet like last year.