Author / Kevin Ragsdale

by Kevin Ragsdale

Advisor DevCon Day One Sessions

Before the Keynote, I had an opportunity to meet yag (Alan Griver), Doug Hennig, and Tamar Granor in person for the first time, and I got to see Rick Schummer again (I met Rick at Southwest Fox 2005).

What a great group of people. All of them were exactly as I expected, based on their many years of service to the FoxPro community.

After the 8:00AM keynote, it was time to get the sessions going. First up, Rick Schummerpresented Get the Microsoft Visual FoxPro Professional Developer’s Toolkit. Sadly, I missed this session, because I needed some more “tweak” and “practice” time on my InfoPath session.

Later, Tamar Granor presented Best Practices for Better User Interfaces. I’ve never seen Tamar present, and I am pretty passionate about user interfaces, so I was excited to see this one. It was a great session, and I immediately picked up on a few ideas for improving the ways my apps interact with users.

After a bland lunch, Claudio Lassala was presenting LINQ for Visual FoxPro Developers. I haven’t had my LINQ “a-ha!” moment yet, so my interest in it still isn’t very high. And I still had some more practicing to do for my session, so I headed up to my room for another walkthrough.

Next up, Doug Hennig with Develop Microsoft Visual FoxPro Applications for Windows Vista. If you’ve been following Doug’s blog (and if you’re not, you should), you know he has been working to make sure his apps work well with Vista. This was a great session, with many eye-opening tips. Very enjoyable and informative.

I got to close out the day with Using InfoPath with Visual FoxPro. Definitely not my best subject, and I tried to make sure I gave Toni Feltman her due (her articles were my best research material while preparing the session). She has done articles and presentations on this very topic, and it was very difficult for me to develop any material that felt like it was “mine”.

According to some of the evaluations from the session, it looks like I might have been a little too gracious, mentioning Toni’s influence a bit too much. Some of the comments were along the line of, “If Toni is going to be mentioned so many times, why wasnt she here instead of this guy?” Of course, the answer to that question is easy: Toni had a baby three months ago, and I did not. 🙂

By the time my session was over, it was 6:00PM and the “Welcome Reception” was beginning. “So,” I thought, “this is what that little drink coupon is for.” I had myself a Sam Adams beer, probably not the best thing to do since the day before was one of those long travel days with little food and rest. Plus, I had been unable to sleep Sunday night. I went to sleep around 4:30AM Monday morning. Made for a l-o-n-g day. 🙂

I met the other speakers and Chick Bornheim of Micromega Systems in the lobby, and we went to a really nice Italian restaurant. I had the spicy sausage penne which, as it turned out, would haunt me the rest of the night.

What an amazing experience sitting with these great folks! I have got to be one of the luckiest people in the world!

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.

by Kevin Ragsdale

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 CodePlex – 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 withMSBuild.

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.

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.

by Kevin Ragsdale

Holy Cow! Have You Seen the Southwest Fox Lineup?

Bob Kocher did a heckuva job with the Southwest Fox Conference, as it has become the absolute *premier* Visual FoxPro conference (at least in the United States — I’ve never been to one overseas). He left some big shoes to fill, but honestly, I can’t think of anyone more capable than Doug, Rick & Tamar.

A few days ago, Rick blogged about the speaker list (say, who’s that guy wearing a baseball cap? {g}), and today they launched registration with a complete session list.

WOW! What a lineup of speakers! And the sessions: something for everyone — frombeginners to experts, this is an absolutely amazing lineup.

With all the hoopla over FoxPro, no VFP 10, the petition, the signers, the non-signers, the reasons, the Roadmap and the need for “answers”, there’s one thing you can do to showMicrosoft that VISUAL FOXPRO MATTERS: Go to a conference this year. Pick one, two, or even more. But most importantly, GO!!!

Take it from someone who waited over ten years to attend his first conference — You’ll be glad you went!

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.

by Kevin Ragsdale

Catastrophic Failure and Desktop Alerts

Yesterday, I posted a screenshot of my scariest error message. It was a message I had gotten while playing with the Desktop Alerts. Randy Jean commented that he saw the same error with the Desktop Alerts.

In the Alert class nResult_Assign() method, I had the Alert calling its Release() method. So, if you had code like this:

oMgr = CreateObject("VFPAlert.AlertManager")
oAlert = oMgr.NewAlert()
oAlert.Alert("Howdy")
oAlert.Alert("Howdy Again")

The first Alert() works just as expected.

The second Alert() causes the “Catastrophic Failure” message. Why? Because oAlert had RELEASEd itself. And here I am, sitting with an object reference (oAlert) for which theVARTYPE() function returns an “O”.

One way to see if the Alert still exists is to check the Alerts collection Count property. In the above example, this would be something like:

lnAlerts = oMgr.Alerts.Count

If you look at the Alert class Release() method and comment out the RELEASE THIS line, you can then “reuse” the alert as many times as you want.

This post originally appeared on the Foxite Weblogs site.