Shedding Some Light

…the envelope please…

When I talked to Bob about taking over Southwest Fox he told me a number of things that I should be worried about, and all the work that would was ahead of me. He did not warn me how difficult it would be to pick the sessions and the speakers for our event.

I knew it was not going to be easy since we determined the budget would allow for 14 speakers and last year there were 19 speakers. I also know we wanted to invite some “rookie” speakers to grow the speaker community. This is something we admired about Whil’s approach in the past with GLGDW and something I know Kevin did by default with his approach for FoxForward. This meant we could not invite a handful of speakers back from past Southwest Fox conferences, and I knew this would make the speaker selection the hardest part of being an organizer this year.

The submissions surpassed my high expectations. The quality of the abstracts and the ideas presented blew me away. I could have easily invited everyone if we were charging US$1200 per attendee, but we are not so we had to get picky. I remember my first email after seeing the list from Tamar: “Holy….” (ripping off the Volkswagen commercials {g}).

I spent one morning evaluating and rating the choices. Sorting the table, dumping it to Excel and seeing how the sessions rated. Then the hard work started. I had to begin the elimination process. Every session had some merit, but we only had room for 28 sessions because we are committed to giving most sessions twice (there will be some sessions in the Fundamentals track given only once). I think I had something like 38 highly rated sessions. Some people submitted 3 or 4 sessions I wanted, but as a speaker I know preparing and giving four new sessions is completely unreasonable even though we are giving the speakers nearly five months to prepare them. Each of us (Doug, Tamar, and myself) whittled the list down to speakers we absolutely wanted to invite with some alternates. At this point we did some virtual wrestling and debating during a 1.5 hour conference call. Amazingly the three of us had picked 85% of the same sessions and the other 15% were not brutal since the session submissions were so good.

All of this was accomplished on Friday April 13th as we had posted on the Southwest Fox Web site. Some people interpreted this as the deadline to announce – I apologize for that, we should have added another set of dates (notes for doing better next year). We made the picks and then Tamar (who is ultimately the person in charge of speakers) wrote individual invitations to the speakers we selected. We had to wait to hear their acceptances before we started to send out the “sorry – not accepted” emails. All of this takes time and we waited patiently for the speakers to accept. I am happy to say that all the speakers we initially invited did accept. Those who did not get invited this year could easily be invited next year. It is sort of like going to the fruit market and picking the best apples from the stack. Returning a couple of days later and the stack will still have great apples to select from. Most of the people we could not invite still expect to come to Southwest Fox because they really like the conference.

This was a tough process that I am glad is complete.

I am really geeked about our session tracks, the offerings for sessions in the tracks, and the great people you will hear present the sessions. Here is the line up of speakers for Southwest Fox 2007 (sound of envelop ripping…):

Marcia Akins
Rick Borup
Toni Feltman
Tamar Granor
Kevin Goff
Doug Hennig
Whil Hentzen
Michael Hogan
Andy Kramek
Cathy Pountney
Steve Sawyer
Rick Schummer
Alan Stevens
Rick Strahl
Christof Wollenhaupt

Definitely a couple of surprises, eh?

I am not going to spoil the rollout of the session topics yet. We also have started to frame out the keynote, which will be kept under wraps until the night it is given, but you can trust me, it is not to be missed. So many surprises and so many things in the works, and probably more that we have not thought up yet.

Doug is hard at work on the Web site and we are hoping to roll this out Monday or Tuesday in time for the opening of registration on Tuesday. You will see all the sessions, the abstracts, and more of the compelling reasons we hope will entice you to join us in Mesa in October.

A couple of days ago I got an email from Jim Duffy about his VFP training classes. It got me thinking: why would a .NET guy and VB.NET MVP still be doing some Visual FoxPro training? So I called him.

Jim and I talked for an hour. We caught up on a few things in the VFP world, some projects we are working on, and most of all why Jim is still teaching VFP. After all, has he not heard about VFP being dead? (tongue firmly planted in cheek)

This might surprise you, but Jim is dedicated to teaching people Visual FoxPro (and integration with SQL Server) as long as there are people who need to learn it. Contrary to some people in our community, Jim and I feel there will be new people learning VFP for years to come. Why? One word, turnover. It is the same reason people are learning a lesser used language like COBOL or an orphaned language like Visual Basic v6.0: there are projects that use it and people leave these projects. Companies will need to replaced the developers with someone new. The new person might know Visual FoxPro, or might not know Visual FoxPro. Either way, their experience might need some enhanced training. Then there are companies like mine who will use VFP for new projects because it meets the client’s needs. If VFP developers become harder to find, I will create new ones as I need them. This is why Jim will be teaching VFP for years to come.

I think this is great. If I look back over the last 12 years, I can count on one hand the number of companies I know about that regularly taught VFP here in the USA, and another hand to count the companies outside of the USA. It is nice to know at least a few companies see this niche opportunity, and are planning on continuing this service to the Fox Community. I see this as a smart business decision.

So if you want to get some hands-on-training from a long time VFP’er, give Jim a call (takenote.com). He has some classes coming up May 21-25, 2007. I used his training material to help a developer get up to speed seven years ago. I was talking to this developer a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned how great it was to learn from me while we worked together on a project. He also mentioned how my mentoring, the App Dev videos by Jim Booth, and the TakeNote training materials really helped him quickly come up to speed on VFP. It was nice to know years later how this impacted his career.

Jim has updated his training materials for VFP 9, so now is the time to get in on his latest round of classes.

Last week Rainer Becker contacted me to let me know the German DevCon 2007 preparations are under way. This will be the 14th time this conference is put on by Rainer and his team. The conference will be November 8-10, 2007. In fact, Rainer announced the next eight German DevCons at the end of the conference last year. This schedule (through the year 2014) is posted on the Fox Wiki’s Upcoming Events page.

Speakers and sessions will be announced at a later date. I have attended the last two and you can read my thoughts on the conference by looking at the numerous blog posts I made during the conferences (see posts in November 2005 and November 2006 in the links to the right on my blog page). Top gun conference, top gun facility, and over the top food make this one of the best conferences around.

I see the Web site for the often heralded Praha DevCon held Jun 19-21, 2007 in the Czech Republic has been updated while I was not paying attention. This will be the tenth Praha DevCon. I still recall the conference shirts for the 2000 conference that played on the Y2K theme and noted it was the 1900 conference.

Speakers and sessions look real good. North American speakers include long-time VFP gurus Marcia Akins, Steven Black, Alan Griver, and Andy Kramek. European speakers include Ivan Arnold, Uwe Habermann, Martin Haluza, Rudolf Jalovecký, Venelina Jordanova, Michael Juřek, Milan Kosina, Norbert Kustra, Jaromír Stacha, and Jan Vit.

It looks like a fantastic gathering for Fox developers. Everyone I have talked to who has attended this conference in the past have nothing but great things to say about it and the city of Prague. I talked to Igor Vit (the conference organizer) about the conference while we were doing some site seeing before the MVP summit and can hardly believe they can put this on for the price they are charging. 85 Euro for early-bird and 105 Euro for regular registration. At the current exchange rates you are paying US$115. Simply amazing.

If you look at the attendee counts for the different fox conferences, you will see the Prague DevCon is the best attended conference year after year. This not only shows how great the conference is, but how popular Visual FoxPro is in the Czech Republic.

One day I am hoping to get to Prague, but the timing of this year’s offering conflicts with my daughter’s graduation from high school.

It is almost spring here in our wonderful state so that must mean it is safe enough to travel out of the suburbs of Detroit and visit my other favorite Michigan FUGs. {g}

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Grand Rapids Area Fox User Group
Saturday, April 14th

“Learn How To Use VFPX Tools and Components for Microsoft Visual FoxPro“
Or as I like to call it: “VFPX Tools and Components – Live”
This is a dress rehearsal for a session I am giving at the Advisor Summit next month.

10:00am – 12:00 noon or so
At the offices of Optimal Solutions, Inc.
http://grafug.com/

This session will introduce VFP developers to VFPX on CodePlex, and will demonstrate and show real world implementations of the various components and tools developed and under construction in VFPX.
At the end of the session you can learn how you can get involved in the future of Visual FoxPro and why it is important to you as a VFP developer.

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Mid-Michigan Fox Users and Developers Group
Tuesday, April 17th
“What is new in the Sedna Data Explorer”

Not a dress rehearsal for anything.

6:30pm to 8:30pm
At the offices of Melange Computer Services, Inc.
http://mmfudg.org/indexframes.htm

This session will cover all the new things in the Data Explorer expected to ship this summer with the release of Sedna. There are a number of bug fixes and lots if enhancements to the Data Explorer first released with VFP 9. Rick will also be asking you to download the Sedna CTP release from February so you can help test out the new changes you will see during the session.

Based on some feedback from some folks who want to promote Southwest Fox on their Web sites we had some new banners created that are narrower than the original one.

Original:

New slightly narrower:

New portrait format:

Thanks again to Dave Aring for his excellent effort and rapid turnaround.

If you are interested in helping us promote Southwest Fox, head over to the SWFox conference Web site and click on the Promote Conference link on the left side menu. And thanks to everyone who is helping spread the word!

I think most of you know that sticking images in VFP General fields is considered a bad practice. I also know many VFP developers were lulled into the cool idea of storing images and other files into General fields, myself included back in the mid-90′s. Then you quickly realize you cannot get the images out of the memo files without some great pain.

I have been lucky over the years because I have not run into any requirements or projects needing to work with General fields. That is until recently. A new project I am working on has some BMPs stored in VFP DBFs and the developer I am working with knows he made a mistake and is ready to correct it as we rewrite his vertical market application in a short 5-6 week period. I have outsourced the conversion part of the app to one of my subcontractors. I know I had read somewhere how you can extract the image data, but could not recall where. Since I did not have time to look it up I delegated it to the person doing the conversion and the answer came quickly.

How to export pictures from General fields by using the ReportListener base class in Visual FoxPro 9

In this Microsoft KnowledgeBase (KB) article Trevor Hancock (a wizard in support for VFP) details and provides code to extract the images using the HTML Report Listener. Pure “Freaking Magic”!

This one KB article saved our project days of development. Thanks Trevor. I know you work in a role on the Fox Team that is probably one of the more difficult (always being handed something allegedly broken) and probably one of the more thankless roles. I have observed Trevor in action and he is one of the best problem solvers I have had the pleasure of working with in my years of beta testing. Thanks to the architects of the powerful ReportListener that makes mince meat of the long time problem of extracting images from the General fields. Very nice piece of work!

Marketing, marketing, marketing.

The organizers of Southwest Fox are gradually cranking up the marketing machine and are asking for your help to spread the word. We are looking for past attendee testimonials to post on the Southwest Fox site, and for those with a Fox related Web site to link to our site. Help spread the word!

Check out our banner developed for us by fellow Fox’er Dave Aring…

More details on how you can help, along with directions to create a link using our new banner graphic are available on the Southwest Conference Promote Conference page.

Speaker submissions look great and registration starts May 1st.

Thanks in advance for helping us out!