For what it’s worth, I thought Advisor did a nice job with the FoxPro track. They provided an excellent set of topics and speakers (well, at least 4 out of the 5 were excellent, I didn’t feel excellent about my sessions).

Without a doubt, the best part of the conference was spending time with Doug, Rick, Tamar, and the few attendees I met in person.

I saw a few mentions on the internet that the FoxPro track had only 35 people. While this is true, it should be noted that the FoxPro track had the most attendance of all the tracks.

Why was the overall attendance so low? Location? Maybe. I hear that any conference in Vegas outsells Anaheim. Time of year? Could be. Why go to DisneyLand if the kids are still in school? Cost? Well —- the cost of Advisor DevCon always kept me away, and let’s face it — travel/training budgets do seem to be lower than they used to be.

I was very surprised during the keynote at the number of people who were hearing THE ANNOUNCEMENT for the first time. Also, the very few number of hands that were raised when asked if you read blogs. And even more surprised that most attendees had never heard of the Southwest Fox and FoxForward conferences.

My overall impression is there are a ton of Visual FoxPro developers out there that do not experience much of the wealth of online information that is available to us.

Now for the hard part:

How do we reach the no-so-much-online community?

Any thoughts?

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.

The crackers and Sprite I had for “dinner” Tuesday night didn’t do much for my stomach. I was worried about my 1:30PM session, and was feeling a bit rough, so I skipped the first two sessions of the day.

Rick started the day (as he always does on the last day of any conference) with Learn How to Use VFPX Tools and Components for Visual FoxPro. I hated to miss this one, but Rick will be presenting another VFPX-related session at Southwest Fox in October, and I’m not going to miss that one! One thing that surprised me at DevCon was the number of people who had never heard of VFPX before. I’ll go into a bit more detail about that in my “post-conference wrap-up” post.

Doug was up next with Integrate RSS and Visual FoxPro. Again, I missed this one, though I hated to miss it. Doug always presents informative, fun, and fast-paced sessions.

I did catch some of Tamar’s next session, Solve Common Problems with Visual FoxPro SQL, though I had to leave for a little while. Watching Tamar present a session is like watching all of the best teachers I’ve ever had. The last part of the session was quite interactive, and very impressive.

I had planned to skip lunch, because my session was coming up next. I thought maybe some bread and water would suffice, but I was really, really, hungry. I had some pasta and bread (and water), then headed into the conference room to setup.

As soon as I stepped up to the stage, I felt dizzy. The floor underneath me felt like I was standing on a boat. The floor was bobbing up and down! “OK,” I thought, “just 75 more minutes. Please, let me get through the 75 minutes.”

I chatted a bit with Jeanine, an attendee in the front row, while I was setting up, and another guy came in and sat at the front row. He said something about really looking forward to this session. I said something like I hope it doesn’t disappoint you. He said it was a really cool title for a session.

When I finally looked up to start the session, I was surprised by the number of people in the room. There were a lot of people in there, including some I had not seen in the previous three days. Maybe they liked the title, too: The COM Cookbook: Five Tasty Recipes for COM Automation with Visual FoxPro. Certainly a l-o-n-g title, don’t you think?

I started off talking a little about COM, then kicked into Desktop Alerts. I quickly found that during my setup I had forgotten to set my fonts to a readable size, so I had to pause a moment to do that. A couple of other examples were wrapping Craig Boyd’s encryption and compression FLL’s. Not the best of examples, but the compression FLL did provide my best “joke” during the conference. I said something about creating my own version of WinZip using the FLL and a UI, selling it as shareware, and having a splash screen that says, “You’ve used this software 15,000 times during the trial period. Please register.”

I mentioned (briefly) using BLAT.DLL as an email engine, and demoed a small app I had done with a COM “auto-updater”. Unfortunately, I discovered during the time I had created a session description and the time of the conference that there was a much better way to do “auto-updates”. I’ll be working on the new stuff soon, and posting about it here. In short, I ended up with only four “tasty recipes” instead of the advertised five.

Well, I made it through the session without passing out, and I made it through all three of my sessions without having to “excuse myself“. I wasn’t particularly happy with any of them, though, and I hope to do a much better job at FoxForward this September.

The conference “ended” after my session. But, the FoxPro track went on! We ended up with two “bonus” sessions. And, I actually made it through both of them. Maybe my stomach was beginning to calm down a bit.

Rick started “overtime” with Expand Your SQL Server Toolkit for the Microsoft Visual FoxPro Developer. As always, Rick presented a very well prepared and informative session. I have not used SQL Server very much, and when I do I always use the Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer that comes with SQL Server. Rick showed a variety of products that address a variety of needs (some of the “needs” I had never even thought of). An excellent session!

Doug closed out the conference with Get Best Practices for Vertical Application Development in Microsoft Visual FoxPro. I had no doubt that this would be a great session, and I was not disappointed at all.

We met in the lobby later to go to dinner. Jeanine (the attendee I mentioned earlier) joined Rick, Doug, Tamar and myself for dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

I was feeling better. Much better than I had been feeling, though I was a bit worried about my stomach. I had actually planned to skip dinner again, but figured “what the heck, it’s my last night here”, so I went.

Boy, was I glad I went! Another opportunity to spend time with Rick, Doug, Tamar and Jeanine. A wonderful dinner, a couple of Sam Adams beers, and then we found out that we were the 1000th table served and dinner was on the house!

We found out later that Jeanine had taken care of the bill, and had worked out the “1,000th table” ruse with the waiter. Jeanine, if you’re reading this, “Thank you again for a wonderful dinner and conversations!”

Back to the hotel. It was my last night in Anaheim, so I had another couple of beers while we chatted. It was truly an amazing experience for me, spending time with Rick, Doug, and Tamar. Truly, great people.

Another attendee came to our table, just as I finished my 4th beer of the night. So, I had another one. 🙂

Sorry for the long post. I’ll do a wrap-up post later.

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.

Day two started off just like day one for me: with very little sleep the night before. Not a good thing, since the 8:00AM session was my Best Practices for Deploying Visual FoxPro Applications. I was kind of surprised by the number of people that came to the session. I did not expect that many people to be up that early.

This was one of those “get up on the pulpit and preach” topics, and I enjoyed it overall. I made sure to give credit to Rick Borup (most of the material was based on the session he presented at GLGDW last year), and Rick Schummer, who co-authored (with Rick Borup) theDeploying Visual FoxPro Solutions book. This book (like all of the Hentzenwerke books I own) is a must read.

This time, though, I was careful to not “push” the credit quite as much as I did in the InfoPath session. I think this one was pretty well received and, as usual, I found a way to mention Dr. Evil during the session. I wrapped it up a few minutes early, so everyone (including myself) could head out to the main area for some Starbucks.

Sidenote: During the conference, I must have consumed about five gallons of Starbucks coffee. I’m a coffee-holic, and when I saw that Advisor was providing Starbucks, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Next up was Claudio Lassala with Compare Design Patterns in Microsoft Visual FoxPro and .NET. I needed to decompress from my session, so I missed this one. By “decompress”, I mean I needed more coffee. 🙂

And, I noticed, my stomach was starting to feel a little “gurgly”…

Tamar presented Practical Tips for Working with Existing Visual FoxPro Code. Another great session, with many tips I can begin to use right away. My first reaction to *every* existing app I’ve ever been asked to look at is “re-write”, and the tips Tamar presented will make me a much better (and realistic) developer/consultant. Excellent session.

About halfway through it though, my stomach started getting real “gurgly”. And it started making noises — loud noises — sounded like a wounded animal, begging to die…

Tuesday’s lunch was better than Monday’s lunch, though I was starting to feel a bit nervous about my stomach.

After lunch, Doug presented Make Microsoft Visual FoxPro Application a Snap with InnoSetup. I’ve been using InnoSetup for awhile, and I have really enjoyed (and learned a lot from) Doug’s recent series of articles about InnoSetup in the Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro. A great, great session. I’d be surprised if anyone who attended will ever use another setup authoring tool after seeing this session.

After Doug’s session, Rick presented Microsoft Visual FoxPro Debugging Essentials. Debugging. Ugh. If there’s anything I like less than debugging, I don’t know what it is. I’ve got Nancy Folsom’s Debugging Visual FoxPro Applications book, and still I’m “Mr. STRTOFILE()” when it comes to debugging. Rick showed me a few things during this session that were completely new to me, and I’m not going to share them with you because, frankly, I’d be embarrassed to admit just how weak I am when it comes to debugging. Oh, wait, I think I just did.

Unfortunately, my stomach was still giving me fits, so I headed upstairs to rest awhile. Doug, Rick and Tamar were heading out to the LAFOX users group meeting, and I really wanted to go and meet some new people. I thought a bit of rest might help settle my stomach.

I missed Tamar’s The Why and How of Test Data session while I rested. I heard many nice comments on it, and hated that I missed it, but guess what? She’s presenting it again at Southwest Fox in October!

Doug, Rick and Tamar were meeting out front later for a ride to the LAFOX meeting. I headed down to let them know I was staying at the hotel. My stomach was not any better at all. I decided to skip dinner, too.

I did go to Claudio’s 7:00PM session, Compare Data Access Programming Between Microsoft Visual FoxPro and .NET. Claudio showed several methods of accessing data in .NET, and did a really nice job of showing the comparable feature in VFP that we use to do the same type of thing. Very well presented.

I headed back upstairs for some crackers and Sprite, then I crashed for the best night’s sleep I had all week.

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.