Kevin Ragsdale: Visual FoxPro 9.0

Advisor DevCon: Day One (Keynote Address)

This year's Advisor Summit (DevCon) was starting at 8:00AM yesterday (Monday) with a Keynote Address from yag (Alan Griver).  I'd never met him before, and he's one of my VFP heroes, so I just had to walk into the room early and meet him in person.

I talked with him for a couple of minutes, and told him if it hadn't been for the Visual FoxPro 3 Codebook I would have never been able to successfully dive into the OOP-world of Visual FoxPro - which means that my career today would probably consist of me using the phrase "would you like fries with that?"" instead of talking about Visual FoxPro.

There were about 35-40 people in the room when he started at 8:00AM with the "announcement." I was really surprised to see how many people were hearing the announcement for the first time.

He went on to show many enhancements coming along with SP2, Sedna, and the Vista Toolkit. He demoed a FoxPro form hosting a .NET menu strip control, a FoxPro form with XAML, and talked about upcoming white papers to help Fox developers integrate their apps with the new XML file formats of Office 2007. Some very cool stuff.

He also talked about community, and FoxPro's extensibility model, and how the community (via VFPx) will continue to extend Visual FoxPro. He even demoed a few of the things that are already available on the site: Emerson's Outlook Navigation Bar, Goran's Tab Menu (Office 2007-style Ribbon), GDIPlusX, and some cool stuff Alan Stevens has done with MSBuild.

It was an amazing string of demos, and I left the keynote feeling rejuvenated at the prospects of how the community will continue to help VFP evolve.