Shedding Some Light

Sessions, Speakers, Sponsor, Registration is open, and Scholarship news!

It is my extreme pleasure to announce the sessions and speakers for Southwest Fox 2007 are posted on the conference Web site. Check it out. See how blessed we are to have a great speaker lineup offering great topics during the conference. I am very geeked by the knowledge these individuals are bringing to Southwest Fox in October. The line up is very strong and packed with expertise.

The sessions are top-notch material you will be able to us immediately in your VFP development. The presenters know we require each session to have a white paper you will be able to reference when you return home.

You can review the sessions by speaker, by track or alphabetically. Sliced and diced. We have color coded the tracks so you can see what sessions belong to what track.

I also get to announce our first sponsor – West Wind Technologies. Rick Strahl has been one of the brightest stars in our community and has really stepped up to support our conference as a sponsor, and is hosting a Web Connection 5.0 training session a couple of days before Southwest Fox at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center. You can make it a two-for-one trip with some Web Connection training as the opening act and Southwest Fox as the second act.

Registration is now open. We have a bank of operators waiting in our call center ready to take your call. OK, we have one operator waiting in my office ready to take your call. But seriously, if you are trying to be the first to register, the opportunity might be available. I know you are all a very competitive bunch {g}.

White Light Computing Scholarship – this is not on the Southwest Fox Web site yet (because I forgot to tell Doug to add it)… White Light Computing will be offering a $300 scholarship again this year to one attendee. The name will be drawn from all the attendees who register during the early-bird period (ends July 1, 2007). More details to be posted soon.

So get in early, save US$75 on the registration fees, get one free pre-conference session, and a chance to get more than half of the registration cost covered by my company. Hope to see you in Mesa in October. Only 170 days to go!

(updated to link to the SWF 2007 Web site)

Today we posted the open call for speakers for Southwest Fox…

Southwest Fox 2007 (October 18-21 in Mesa, AZ, www.swfox.net) is looking for speakers. The conference is focused on Visual FoxPro and sessions should fit into one of the following tracks:

• Working with Sedna and SP2: This track will cover the new features and changes introduced in Sedna and in VFP 9 Service Pack 2.
• Extending VFP (including VFPX, COM, etc.): The sessions in this track will cover technologies that extend VFP’s capabilities, such as those in VFPX.
  
• Reviewing VFP Fundamentals: This track will appeal to those newer to VFP, whether they are just moving up from earlier versions of FoxPro, or coming from other languages.
• Integrating VFP (with SQL Server, .NET, etc.): This track will look at using VFP together with other products, including back-end servers, Automation servers, and .NET.
• Managing the Software Business: This track will offer business advice to VFP developers, including managing clients, the software development process, and so forth.

If you’re interested, click on the Call for Speakers link at http://www.swfox.net/speakers.html. Please read the entire document before submitting session proposals. All proposals are due by March 26; speakers and topics will be announced May 1, 2007. Send any questions to speakers@swfox.net.

I received an email this evening from Christa at Advisor letting me know I will be speaking at the Advisor Summit from May 6 – 10, 2007 in Anaheim, California at the Anaheim Marriott Hotel. Looks like my schedule will be a busy one with four different sessions:

• Professional Developer’s Toolkit
• Visual FoxPro Debugging Essentials
• VFPX Tools and Components – Live
• SQL Server Toolkit for the VFP Developer

I am not sure who else is speaking, but I am sure the line up will include some great sessions.

As Craig Bailey notes in his blog, this is a good news and bad new announcement.

Unfortunately Craig Boyd has to withdrawl from OzFox 2007 because of a family emergency. I really wish there were better circumstances, but after talking to Craig Boyd last week I was happy to hear while things are a little stressful, things are okay. Still, Therese and I will be keeping the Boyd’s in our prayers.

So when Craig Bailey asked me if I could help out and be a speaker at OzFox I did not hesitate and said yes! It is the least I can do and I am honored by the request. I know I am no Craig Boyd, but I will do my best to provide the OzFox attendees with some cool VFP sessions, and hopefully some inspiration in similar fashion to Craig.

One thing is for sure, I am really excited. I was hoping to go to OzFox 2007 as an attendee late last year. I heard OzFox is a great conference, but I decided to hire my son and had to buy him a laptop instead. It was a tough decision at the time, but the best decision I could make for my business. So now I get the best of both worlds.

I have always wanted to make a trip to Australia. What could be better than heading to Sydney in February (Summer) to hang out with VFP developers?

Doug and I will be doing the opening keynote, and I am presenting three regular sessions. Craig is finalizing the details over the next couple of days. If things go well I am hoping to blog live from the conference too.

Now is the time to get registered and save AUD$100 with the early bird registration through January 31st. I look forward to meeting everyone in a few weeks.

You may be wondering why my blog has been silent of late. There are numerous reasons and this is the week many of the reasons will be announced. The first is the CoDe Focus issue from the publishers of CoDe Magazine called “Sendna: Beyond VFP 9.0″.

I was asked to write two articles for this special issue of CoDe Magazine centered on the release of Sedna from Microsoft. Just in case you do not know what Sedna is: it is the next release of VFP currently available as a Community Technical Preview (CTP). I wrote the articles on the changes to the Data Explorer and the new Upsizing Wizard. There are a couple things to note about this issue:

• It is the inside story about the new and updated components in VFP
• It provides details about interoperability with the latest wave of Windows components and .NET
• …and much more

While the articles were fun to write, they time consuming and a lot of work. I am also excited because this is the first time White Light Computing is advertising in a magazine.

The exact schedule of the release has not been revealed yet, but it should be available soon. The issue is free after you sign up for it here. User groups can sign up to get a bulk delivery of issues too.

This morning I received some great news from Microsoft that I have been named an MVP for the 2006-2007 season (renewed on October 1st each year). This is the sixth consecutive time I have been honored with this award.

The MVP award is the way Microsoft recognizes individuals for their contribution in supporting Visual FoxPro developers by answering questions on forums, presenting sessions at conferences, and writing articles, blogs and books. More information about the MVP program can be found at the MVP site.

This is an absolutely an honor. It is my intention to continue helping other VFP developers on FoxForum.com, the MSDN forum, other forums, at conferences, through this blog, and via some articles I am putting together.

I am pleased to announce the official release of White Light Computing’s ViewEditor Professional v3.6 Service Pack 1! This release is free for registered developers.

List of the new/updated features in this release:

• Include comments in view script (like the date/time it was generated and the view Comment property).
• Added more documentation on setting up macro substitution view parameters with VFP 9 based on feedback from developers in the “Macro expansion and view clauses topic” in this Help file.

Bug Fixes:

• The Inherit Table Properties feature triggered the error message “Not a character expression” when running the ViewEditor from the Stonefield Database Toolkit.
• The Inherit Table Properties feature stopped inheriting field properties if one field has a bad UpdateName.
• The Copy View Code feature was missing the Comment property for fields (it has been in the view properties).
• The Copy View Code feature was using brackets for quoting character strings on DBSETPROP() values. This was a problem if you had bracketed strings for view and field properties such as Caption, RuleText, etc. The code now has brackets ([]) if you have single or double quotes, and double quotes if you have brackets in the strings. Single quotes are used if there are no brackets or single quotes in the string. If you are mixing and matching you may get unexpected results in the code.
• Cleaned up view code with respect to DBSETPROP() in the generated code.

The current ViewEditor Help file is available for you to review if you want to learn more about this popular tool.