Shedding Some Light

I seen Igor Vit has the sessions posted and registration opened for the Prague VFP DevCon 2008.

July 1-3, 2008
Czech Technical University

Looks like he has set up a terrific line up of sessions and speakers! Mike and Toni Feltman, and Christof Wollenhaupt have English sessions. Martin Haluza (XFRX fame), Ivan Arnold, Štěpán Bechynský, Michal Bláha, Pavel Celba, Srdjan Djordjevic, Jan Dudek, Petr Hojný, Michael Juřek, Milan Kosina, Norbert Kustra, and Milan Štoček will present in Czech.

Check out this great conference, which leads in attendance every year as far as Fox conferences.

As I noted last night, a new version of the VFP 9 SP2 Help file is available for download.

I have reviewed the new Help file and it does have a couple cosmetic issues, which in my opinion are minor compared to the advantage of including the 600+ missing index items. There is one unexpected minor improvement too, and I found a more serious problem, but it is not a show stopper in my opinion.

Cosmetic issues:

1. Blue header section is white.
2. Header section is rearranged a bit.
3. Parameters are no longer bold.
4. Microsoft copyright missing at the bottom (maybe this could be to our advantage. {evil grin}
5. See Also sections with different References and Other Resources subsections are all merged under Concepts.
6. Help title would be better as Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2 instead of dv_foxhelp91.

Cosmetic improvements:

1. Code is more readable without extra white space.

Real problems:

1. The only serious problem I have found in my limited testing the Favorites are missing. I am not talking about my favorite topics (those always seem to get lost when updating CHM files), but the entire tab and feature is missing. I use this a lot and it will be a big hit my productivity. It won’t stop me from using this version of the Help file.
2. Internal links are broken on a number of pages (thanks to Andrzej for pointing this out to me and posting an image on the Foxite Upload site), also not a show stopper.
3. PEM links are broken on pages for all objects I have looked at. This is definitely a serious problem so you have a choice, missing PEMs (used all the time by some people), or missing index entries in original SP2 Help. Both have a common workaround, use the Search page.

[RAS (26-Apr-2008 @ 10:30AM) - Updated to reflect internal links broken]
[RAS (28-Apr-2008 @ 2:26PM) - Updated to reflect PEM comment I posted yesterday, but not read by some readers based on posted feedback I have read]

Need Help? Specifically, need a more complete index in the VFP 9 SP2 Help?

As promised at the MVP Summit, Microsoft has made available the corrected VFP 9 SP2 Help file, which includes the missing index entries. Get the file at the Microsoft Download site.

One small step for VFP 9 SP2, one huge Help for VFP 9 developers…

The MVP Summit completely exceeded my expectations for many reasons, but mostly because of my interaction with the other VFP MVPs and the Fox Team. Microsoft did not schedule a single session for the VFP MVPs so we decide to make our own. I learned several things and felt the trip was well worth the time and cost. I had to work at night to keep up with the project schedules so it really was an exhausting week.

There is one thing I want to address publicly that I feel is important. I have been reading many comments in the community on how the Fox Team has been disbanded and how they have gone their own separate ways. How they have abandoned our favorite developer tool and our community. Yes, this is partly true. Each of the developers, the testers, the management, the Help file folks, and the marketing team (no jokes please {g}) have all gone on to do great things in some other part of Microsoft and the entire team is not working full time on Visual FoxPro. This is part of growing as individuals and making moves in one’s career.

But one thing I realized and something that should have been very apparent to me all along is this small group is still the Fox Team no matter where they go and no matter what other projects they work on. The group as a whole and individually have been smacked with a virtual baseball bat over the last year, yet they still managed to correct the Help file’s missing index items and correct an annoying bug in the reporting system. I think this says a lot about the individuals involved. They listened intently with an open mind to the bugs/issues in SP2, and have left open the door to improve the SP2 experience and its adoptability by FoxPro developers. They all showed up for the product team dinner including Fox Team members from the past who long ago moved on to something new. Even someone who was on vacation and may have wanted to celebrate a birthday with the family came to spend time with us. Any one of them could have spent the time with their product groups, but choose to come to ours.

My hat goes off to the entire Fox Team and their dedication to Visual FoxPro and the Fox Community. Thanks for your efforts.

Alan Griver spilled the beans today that Microsoft has some fixes for VFP 9 SP2. Alan announced the missing index items in the VFP 9 SP2 Help file are fixed and being reviewed, and will be available online sometime soon. The “Fox Team” has already fixed one report bug when the preview toolbar becomes unusable in the “new style” report preview. The fix is done and is going through the packaging process before being released to the Fox Community.

This is absolutely great news and a step in the right direction to help with the adoption rate of VFP 9 SP2.

There is more good news as the “Fox Team” is open to possibly fixing more SP2 regression bugs. No promises were made, but it is encouraging news that the serious bugs are being considered. It was a positive meeting and a good day.

Last Thursday Mike Feltman of F1 Technologies presented his new session on Collections to the Detroit Area Fox User Group. Mike is putting this session together for the 2008 conference season and wanted to rehearse it to get some feedback before presenting it at conferences this year.

This session was excellent! Mike talked about collections, some advantages and disadvantages, how they work, how they compare to arrays, and then went in and demonstrated some code. Mike has put together a really cool set of utilities using collections based on his work with JavaScript over the last year. These utilities show the power of collections and are worth the price of admission to his session alone.

I rarely use the Collection class in Visual FoxPro, primarily because they are more difficult to debug than arrays. I use arrays for the same thing I can use a Collection. After seeing Mike’s session I likely will use the Collection class more. Another thing Mike showed is how you can return an array property from a method in class code. This is something I either knew and forgot, or learned last Thursday.

Great session Mike! I know Mike is showing this session in Grand Rapids on May 10th, and anticipate this session will be selected by conference organizers too.

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!

Back in November I posted how you can get to VFP specific content on the massive Advisor site in a post titled: FoxPro Content on Advisor

Last week I got an email from Jeff Hibbs noting this link was broken so I contacted Advisor to see what happened. Looks like they moved some servers around. The new link is:

http://my.advisor.com/whome.nsf/w/MSVisualFoxProAdvisor

This is way better than trudging though pages of material on Lotus Notes, FileMaker and SharePoint when all I want to read is what Mike Lewis has to offer for tips this month, and the rest of the content the VFP authors have to share with me before my subscription expires.

Thanks Jeff for pointing out the broken link!