Shedding Some Light

You heard it here first: I have changed my mind about speaking at Southwest Fox. Why? Providing better content and value to the people who pay good money to attend this terrific conference.

Oh, you might be thinking I am replacing myself with another speaker. Hmmm, trust me, it did cross my mind during the selection process because there were some terrific session ideas we had to turn away, but Doug and Tamar refused to let me “relax” during the conference while they are speaking {g}.

No, I am swapping out one session for another. I submitted a proposal to the other organizers to replace the Upsizing Wizard session with a new session I am developing called: “Using VFPX Components in Production Applications”. I have been having an absolutely great time working with some of the terrific components people like Emerson Stanton Reed, Carlos Alloatti, Kevin Ragsdale, Bo Durban, Cesar Chalom, and others have been creating. I have been presenting some of my implementation ideas I have at various user group meetings and the feedback has been exhilarating. I cannot wait to share this session with you at Southwest Fox. You will see live demonstrations of the VFPX components in real VFP production applications, and then I will show you all the nitty-gritty details to implement them.

More details here: Using VFPX Components in Production Applications

Hopefully those who were looking for the insight into the Upsizing Wizard are not too disappointed. Depending on the timing, I might include the white paper for this session on the conference CD as a bonus session.

ONLY 105 days until we meet in Mesa!

On May 1, we announced the speaker and session lineup for Southwest Fox 2008.

Menachem Bazian, Rick Borup, Craig Boyd, Bo Durban, Mike Feltman, Toni Feltman, Tamar E. Granor, Doug Hennig, Andy Kramek, Andrew R. MacNeill, Barbara Peisch, Cathy Pountney, Rick Schummer, Alan Stevens, Rick Strahl, and Christof Wollenhaupt.

It was even harder selecting from the outstanding list of proposals this year than it was last year, and Doug, Tamar, and I are very excited about the sessions being presented this year. There are some killer topics such as taking advantage of GDI+ in your VFP applications, creating custom report controls, profiling and refactoring code using the VFPX Code Analyst tool, using WMI, taking advantage of the Sedna Upsizing Wizard, using Ajax and jQuery in Web applications … the list is long and exciting!

More details can be found on the Southwest Fox Web site and our blog.

Registration is now open, so be sure to sign up today for a fun three days in Phoenix in October. Even better, if you register before July 1, you save $75 on the registration and get a free pre-conference session, a $99 value.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in October! Only 165 days until we meet in Mesa…

I know Doug Hennig has already blogged how the call for speakers deadline is coming up on Monday March 17th. You may have seen the post over on the Southwest Fox Conference Blog when we announced it.

I thought I would take this opportunity to point potential speakers to Craig Bailey’s blog “TIP: The Top Mistake of public speaking“, which has some very solid advice. Maybe Craig will submit some sessions {g}.

I am looking forward to reading the submissions from the Fox Community. I was talking with some Fox friends recently about how the selection process for last year’s Southwest Fox was for me the most difficult part of putting the conference together. I expect this year to be no different.

Please note there are details on the Southwest Fox site and we expect to select some seasoned veterans, as well as some new presenters too. Please consider topics you are passionate about, and topics you think will fit both the tracks we are looking to offer as well as the spirit of the conference – Fox Rocks!

Only 224 days until we meet in Mesa!

Christof Wollenhaupt presented a marathon session this evening at the Detroit Area Fox User Group, and what a session it was. For those who saw Christof present this session at Southwest Fox and/or German DevCon, you saw a terrific session. But DAFUG listened to Christof discuss some really interesting observations he has made with respect to the behavior of VFP for more than three hours – a true director’s cut.

Christof started the session and told us (maybe warned us {g}) we are in a democracy he will talk until 50% of the people in the room left. He ended by running out of material to cover. Only one person left. I think he would have gone on to a second session, but the group was getting hungry for dinner and it was 9:30.

I personally learned numerous things and I saw part of his session in Mesa. One particular aspect was the discussion on memory, variables, and garbage collection. Christof discussed how VFP uses the idle loop to take time to purge unused memory variables. This loop is entered when VFP is waiting (READ EVENTS, INKEY(), a WAIT WINDOW, or even while tracing code in the debugger). Christof also noted something important to me in particular when he pointed out the SYS(1104) function (documented since VFP 7.0 and in the product since FoxPro 2.6) gives the developer a way to initiate garbage collection. I think this is perfect for a project I am working on where I am converting data and one of the routines is taking 11-12 hours scanning through records. The loop gets slower the more records it processes. Using the SYS(1104) function may improve performance.

Thanks Christof for taking time out of your vacation to stop in Detroit and give us a real treat! This was a terrific session! I can’t wait to hear your session proposals for Southwest Fox 2008.

The Business of Software Conference was held October 29th and 30th, 2007. It was a conference I really was interested in attending, but because it fell right between Southwest Fox and German DevCon I could not squeeze it in. The speaker list has some of my favorite bloggers.

The cool thing is there is the Business of Software Blog. This blog has interesting posts and some of the posts have videos from the conference. I just finished listening to Eric Sink from SourceGear talk about Marketing for Geeks. Great talk, even if he did disrespect Detroit {g}. It was something I could listen to while working on some code. This would make a great session for the business track at Southwest Fox.

They are planning a conference this year. I am hoping they move it to a different date so I have a better chance of going.

While in Germany someone made a comment to me how they are looking forward to my blog returning to a FoxPro theme, instead of it being hijacked by Southwest Fox announcements. This is a really good point. So yesterday I created a Southwest Fox Blog so the three organizers can blog about our experiences organizing the conference, and things we are considering doing for the next Southwest Fox to open up a discussion on some new ideas. I hope you take time to subscribe.

Hopefully I will be blogging soon about the whole Southwest Fox Conference 2007 experience. I have so many great memories even though the conference was truly a blur.

Only 332 days until we all return to Mesa! {g}

I can hardly believe after a year in the planning, and months of getting the details ironed out that we are only days away from Southwest Fox 2007!

Last Friday we took in three more registrations for a total of 144 people so far. There are a couple more people who have told me they want to register so there might be more. Yes, there is still time to register if you want, but do not wait much longer. With speakers and vendors we are close to 175 people. WOW!

Last night Therese and I assembled all the badges for the attendees, speakers, vendors, staff and volunteers. It took most of the afternoon to print out the badge names for the top, the SWF nameplate for the bottom, and the schedule for the back. Lots of cutting and assembling. It was not too bad except for the fact my laser printer and card stock apparently don’t get along well. Babysitting a printer is not my idea of fun, but you already know my love of hardware. Going through the list of people coming was fun. Therese kept saying “I know this person, they have been to Southwest Fox before”, or “I have heard you talk about {name here}, where do you know them from?” Several of them are White Light Computing customers {s}.

The conference booklet with all the specifics about the conference, maps, local restaurants, schedules, session abstracts, download details, and the like are off to the printer and with any luck will be ready for us when we get to Mesa on Tuesday afternoon. Kinko’s confirmed everything as I was typing this blog entry up.

We have lots to do in Mesa. I was documenting all the stops Therese and I have on Tuesday to pick up printed material from Kinko’s, items I mailed to Bob Kocher, door prizes, pick up a couple of speakers from the airport, get some food, and get some sleep. We have to leave our house at 2:30AM Arizona time to take two of our kids back to college before our flight out. So I might be a bit of a zombie if you see me walking around the conference center on Wednesday.

Oh, there are a few surprises we have not even revealed yet. {bg}

One thing that will not be a surprise is the weather: 85-90F during the day (30-32C for our metric friends) and around 60F at night (16C which sounds a whole lot colder {g}).

We will have one more email to everyone registered with some final details including the ability to download the session materials, white papers, and examples in advance of your arrival in Mesa. This way you can do some homework on the sessions before you arrive in Mesa, and print out some notes to bring to the conference.

I am hoping to blog during the conference, but we will see if there is any time. I know several other bloggers are coming to the conference and hope they have a chance to let you know how it is going as the conference proceeds. If you are coming and plan on blogging let me know so we can get the word out.

I am really psyched we are in the home stretch. The nightmares are increasing in frequency and intensity so it is definitely getting close. Last night’s was the fact that every speaker, plus Doug and Tamar called me while I was in the airport to say they were delayed for a few days. I started to figure out how I could give all the sessions myself without any preparation. Ugh. I am also looking forward to taking in some R&R; after the conference during our annual company retreat in Sedona next week to let go of the stress.

See everyone soon. Only 3.25 days until Southwest Fox begins!

Today was another busy day here at the three offices of Southwest Fox. A flurry of activity is going on behind the scenes as we are preparing the Conference CD with all the whitepapers and examples, the conference booklet, session signs, and badge holder schedules. But hold the presses, we have to make things interesting and perform a speaker switcheroo.

So from our news page (and RSS feed):

Unfortunately, Kevin Goff will not be able to speak at Southwest Fox. Fortunately, Mike Feltman has agreed to step in and give a session on error handling in Kevin’s time slots. Attendees who were registered for Kevin’s preconference session on Crystal Reports will be given the opportunity to choose another precon or get a refund (assuming it wasn’t the free precon from registering early).

So as the saying goes: make lemonade out of lemons.

I am really glad we have Mike stepping in and pinch hitting this late in the game (heh, it is baseball playoff time here in the USA). Mike is a true geek, and an experienced VFP professional, and probably one of the smartest people I know. He is also half the reason each and every Southwest Fox attendee is going to walk away with the opportunity to get a new license to Visual Fox Express, or an extension on their VFE subscription.

So if you are a K.O.K.O.P.E.L.L.I. fan, head out and get the latest version. The schedule is already current too.

Thanks Mike! OK, please return back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Only 15 days until Southwest Fox starts in Mesa!